Big Long Book Rant
Comments: 4
Here’s along post about books. Skip it if you can’t read.
Been meaning to tell you about some of the better books I’ve had the pleasure of reading recently, so here’s an over-long coverage of a few of them.
I’m reading The Corrections now and enjoying it although I hope it bites a little harder. I even get a mention:
There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have the money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?
Why, that would be me, of course. And don’t thank me, really, it’s nothing. Anyway…
Emergence
The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
by Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson is a co-founder of Feed (now defunct but the corpse is still on display) and author of the excellent Interface Culture. I can also highly recommend this new book.
From the Publisher’s Note at powells.com:
Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It’s a bottom-up model, rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner; emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different — ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems — all turn out to follow the rules of emergence. In each of these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies a scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites create neighborhoods.
Kottke.org has additional links to reviews and articles (although the college2.nytimes.com links are busted).
Close to the Machine
Technophilia & Its Discontents
by Ellen Ullman
Wonderful. A good, honest, questioning look at what it means to get too caught up in it all. I first found out about this book from a salon.com article Ullman wrote and was captivated (I read it ages ago, but it deserves a mention). She’s written more for salon, too, and it’s all worth reading.
From the Publisher’s Note:
Here is a candid account of the life of a software engineer who runs her own computer consulting business out of a live-work loft in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch. Immersed in the abstract world of information, algorithms, and networks, she would like to give in to the seductions of the programmer’s world, where “weird logic dreamers” like herself live “close to the machine”. Still, she is keenly aware that body and soul are not mechanical: desire, love, and the need to communicate face to face don’t easily fit into lines of code or clicks in a Web browser. At every turn, she finds she cannot ignore the social and philosophical repercussions of her work. As Ullman sees it, the cool world of cyberculture is neither the death of civilization nor its salvation - it is the vulnerable creation of people who are not so sure of just where they’re taking us all.
A Romance of Many Dimensions
by Edwin A. Abbott
What a scream this turned out to be. Wickedly funny and a real pleasure.
From the Publisher’s Note:
A deft mixture of social satire and science fiction that continues to pose provocative questions about perception and reality “Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it…and you will have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen”.
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
This is a book that got a lot of well-deserved attention. Gladwell has an effortless style and a straightforward way of presenting complex ideas. His site has copies of his magazine articles which are just as pleasurable to read. There’s also more information about The Tipping Point of course.
From the Publisher’s Note:
The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a sick individual in a crowded store can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend or the popularity of a new restaurant to take off overnight–or crime or drug use to taper off. Gladwell has explored this theory to great acclaim in several articles in The New Yorker. Here, he shows how very minor adjustments in products and ideas can make them more likely to become hugely popular. He reveals how easy it is to cause group behavior to tip in a desirable direction by making small changes in our immediate environment.
The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry
by Bryan Sykes
This was riveting, despite the hokiness of naming the women and launching off into Clan of the Cave Bears style stories about each of them. Forget those bits and the rest of the book is not to be missed. Sykes and his team traced mitochondrial DNA (which we get only from our mothers) and discovered that every native European is descended from one of just seven women.
This conclusion was staggering: almost everyone of native European descent, wherever they may live throughout the world, can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women, the Seven Daughters of Eve. Naming them Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine, and Jasmine, Sykes has created portraits of their disparate worlds by mapping the migratory patterns followed by millions of their ancestors.
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Posted to Books • 2001.11.23 (Fri) • 01:26
Comments
Posted by Jonas C. Voss 2005.05.16, 08:10
Wow, looks like polina will be coming back again (:
Posted by jh 2005.05.17, 04:17
Sorry about all the spam — I’m not exactly as wired (or wireless) as I need to be out there in the Bronx.
Will try to stay on it.
Posted by Jonas C. Voss 2005.07.29, 20:54
I apologize for my late return to this comment.
Aye, comment-spam is the modern ailness of the interweb. It’s tough to stay on top of it, I think you are doing a pretty good job though (:
Posted by Wozza 2006.12.01, 20:34
Hey,
I’ve just been given this book as a birthday present and it’s one of the best I have ever read. I do like my crime thrillas, which is why my mum bought me this book … its called Perfect Suspect by Dr Vincent Varjavandi. It really is a great read and I can thoroughly recommend it - a real page turner.
Wozza
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