Simplexity

Aug30 by Rebecca

Simplexity:
Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)
By Jeffrey Klugger
2009
Read by Holter Graham

This was a fascinating book, although it wasn’t quite what I had expected. The subtitle is a bit of a misnomer as the book doesn’t really address why things become complex or how they can be made simple. Instead, it shows that many simple things actually are quite complex and many apparently complex things actually are quite simple. So I suppose it does tell you how, if only by showing you how to shift your perspective.

The book is essentially composed of a series of case studies. The studies range from the evacuation of the Twin Towers on 9/11 to regular New York traffic patterns, from stock market fluctuations to cholera outbreaks to Jackson Pollok paintings. All of these are used as examples of the simplicity-complexity continuum, in which both extreme regimentation and extreme chaos are conceptually simple, while in between these two extremes is the place where some extremely complex patterns form.

As is, perhaps, appropriate for a book on this topic, I’m not quite sure what else to say about it. It would be easy to recount some of the interesting details, of which there were many, but the premise itself was quite simple: some things are simple, other things are complex, but it is not always obvious which is which.

Kluger presents a different way to examining the world, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuellson

Aug24 by Rebecca

Yes, Chef
By Marcus Samuellson
2012
read by Marcus Samuellson

Now, Marcus Samuellson is a successful celebrity chef. Way back when, he was a toddler in Ethiopia dying of tuberculosis, and then a kid in Sweden determined to become a professional soccer player, and then a young man in Europe and America trying to get a job and work his way up the career path. This is the story of how he got from there to here, and it’s an excellent story.

One thing that really impresses me with this book is how he manages to not only tell about his actions and experiences in the past, but also to portray his perspective and thought process in the past. When he was writing about his childhood, he wrote as an adult recounting his childhood, but as he was writing about his experiences as a young adult growing into a mature adult, his writing also changed to reflect the change from being driven young man with an overriding ambition to being a much more socially aware adult who didn’t take family for granted.

I was really glad that I experienced this as an audiobook, not because it would have been at all bad as a standard book, but because the audio version is read by Samuellson himself. He doesn’t have the perfect elocution of a professional audiobook reader, but he does have real emotional connection to the story he’s telling. As an autobiography, it gains even more power by being told, literally, in his own voice.

Also, his descriptions of food make me wish that I was more of a foodie. I like food, but I also like simple flavors. Samuellson’s descriptions of the rich and complex flavors that he loves are tantalizing.

The one problem I had with the book is that some of the transitions are pretty abrupt, and a couple of times abrupt enough to be confusing, where I wasn’t quite sure what happened. Also, I got the distinct impression that he was living by the same parental advice I got, that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Not that all of his experiences were good by any means, or even that all the people were nice (not at all!) but no one and nothing is presented as unmitigated badness, and that is something I appreciate. Sometimes that might mean skipping over a period of his life, maybe, but for the most part Samuellson seems to genuinely like and respect people. Even the most difficult people (and there are apparently a lot of difficult people in the cooking community, good grief – I’m extremely glad that I don’t have to put up with that) have something good about them and Samuellson sees that.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book a great deal and I definitely recommend it so that you can enjoy it, too.

Books and Food: Two of My Favorite Things

Aug15 by Kinsey

Although I’m currently in the middle of about five different books, my reading for the last month hasn’t been particularly blog friendly, as it’s been heavy on sequels, things Anna or Rebecca have already reviewed, and books that I didn’t like enough to spend any time writing about. But was thinking about cookbooks recently when I gave a couple of new ones as birthday presents (It’s All Good by Gwyneth Paltrow and the Joy the Baker Cookbook by Joy Wilson–I’m hoping Anna or Cara might pop into the comments to report on how they like those). Considering that I don’t actually cook all that much, it’s possible that I have a small cookbook problem, since I have two shelves full of them and another box in storage. I love getting them as gifts, I love browsing through them, and on occasion I even cook things. Despite my small cookbook library, there are few key ones I come back to again and again.*

More-With-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre
My family calls this “the Mennonite cookbook” since it’s really a collection of recipes from Mennonites around the world. These are very basic, hearty, healthy recipes that focus on economy, using what you have, and feeding the world. (The Mennonite were into sustainability and unprocessed foods before those things were cool.) And because Mennonites so often work as missionaries, there are a surprising number of recipes with Indian, Asian, or South American origins. This was the first real cookbook I ever used as an adult, and the easy curry, golden eggplant casserole, and eggplant Parmesan recipes were standbys in my early 20s.

Chocolate from the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the Mennonites. Byrn has a whole series of books on how to use modern convenience foods as shortcuts in recipes. I know that sounds a lot like Sandra Lee (and not in a good way) but her cake mix books are quite smart. All the recipes start with a cake mix, but then add things like sour cream, yogurt, fruit, flavorings, puddings, etc. The processed cake mix makes the recipes practically foolproof, but all the additions make them taste fabulous. I’m quite a good baker and I don’t have problems making cakes from scratch, but I will admit here and now that this book contains the recipe for the single greatest cake I have ever baked or eaten–a white chocolate lemon cake with lemon curd filling.

The Homesick Texan Cookbook by Lisa Fain
I’m from Texas, so I can tell you with authority that the things you cook from this book taste right. I am a particular fan of the cheese enchiladas with chili con carne, the Ranch oyster crackers, and the Texas sheet cake.

How to Eat by Nigella Lawson
The pictures in How to Be a Domestic Goddess or Forever Summer might be better, but Lawson’s first book is packed with not just recipes, but ideas for how to put food together. This is the book that helped me figure out how to roast vegetables, and her sticky toffee pudding is so, so good. I am big Nigella fan and have lots of her books, but this is my favorite.If you have a cookbook that you love, tell me about it in the comments!

*My actual favorite cookbooks are those Kinkos-produced, spiral-bound ones that churches sell, where each recipe lists the name of the nice church lady who contributed it. I have a collection of those dating back to the 50s, and I use them more than you might think.

One Click

Aug8 by Rebecca

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
By Richard L. Brandt
2012
read by Neil Shah

Curiously, this kind of reminded me of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s about a rather eccentric bookseller who isn’t actually interested in selling books so much as making a major impact on society. The fact that Amazon.com started by selling books is mostly a side effect of the fact that Bezos wanted to start a transformative online retail business.

Bezos seems like an interesting character. He’s presented as very analytical in his thoughts and emotions, as well as a visionary. I can’t help but compare him to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as presented in The Social Network (i.e., I haven’t actually read any nonfiction about Zuckerberg, but I’m still going to make this comparison.) They’re both very smart with a vision of using the Internet to revolutionize the world and somewhat out of step with other people socially. But where Zuckerberg comes across as trying a bit too hard to both fit in and to make other people fit to him and generally being an ass, Bezos comes across as being very comfortable with himself and honest about who he is and what he wants. He seems like a decent guy. Oddly, the author of the book strikes me as falling in between the two, trying rather desperately to model himself after Bezos (good for him) but still uncomfortable and nervous and trying too hard to casually use “nerd” as a descriptor rather than an insult.

In fact, Brandt come across in awkward in several says. First, he slants all the descriptions to show Bezos as being ultimately in the right, and all of Bezos’ questionable activities (standard CEO stuff: too demanding, too micro-micromanaging, too distant, too whatever) are presented in a lump in one of the later chapters rather than interspersed through the story.

Another oddity in Brandt’s writing is some of the rather lurid prose that occasionally pop up in a rather jarring fashion. I enjoy a certain level of purple prose: the grammar alone can add a pleasing complexity and richness to a description even beyond the subject itself. That said, “the stock prices fell like spit off a bridge,” “the stock was as sickly as a CEO with swine flu” and similar phrases gave me pause. The writing is generally fairly straightforward and even a bit pedantic, but it’d dotted with these WTF metaphors and similes that make me blink and go “huh.”

I’m really glad that I was listening to the audiobook version of this rather than trying to read it. There are long sections that strike me more like elaborated lists than any real narrative, and I’m fairly sure I would have bogged down in them if I’d been trying to read them. But with it read and simply playing out during my commute, I go at a steady pace and the information is fairly interesting.

Despite the rather lukewarm review, I enjoyed the book. I also found it a particularly timely read.

On Monday, I learned that Bezos is buying The Washington Post. He’s not even buying it as an Amazon.com acquisition, but rather through his personal wealth.

A while back, I watched Page One: Inside the New York Times, and despite it’s apparent intent to convince me that newspapers were still important, it mostly succeeded in convincing me of the opposite. Bezos has demonstrated a deep understanding of how online capabilities change retail. I very much look forward to seeing if he will demonstrate a similar understanding and sense of innovation regarding online capabilities in the information business.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Aug2 by Rebecca

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
By Mary Roach
2013
Read by Emily Woo Zeller

This was excellent, but…

That’s pretty much my review of this book. It was excellent—funny and informative—and yet, there are so many warnings necessary before I could possibly recommend this to anyone else.

I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers some years back and enjoyed it a lot. It was funny and educational and oddball and also kind of gross but mostly that just made me get all picky about what I want to have done with my body after I die. I had not expected adventures in the alimentary canal to be significantly grosser than a recounting of the things that can and do happen to bodies after death. Oh, how wrong I was! Gulp got incredibly gross, and I am now hyper conscious of my bowels. I can only hope that awareness disperses after I move on to another book.

Second: I have to warn about animal harm. So. Much. Animal. Harm! You know how people have learned about the digestive track over the centuries? Largely by doing really unpleasant things to animals. Do you know what vivisection is? If you don’t, then count your blessings and don’t ask.* If you do, well, if you read this book, you’ll know a lot more about it. The people at the dog food factory loved their dog taste-testers and treated them extremely well. I cling to the fact that there are people here who love their animals. Because all the other animals mentioned in this book came to gruesome ends.

Moving on, I was surprised about how Roach didn’t spend much time on the intestines. She started at scent and taste and swallowing, moved on to the stomach, and then dealt with digestive juices, but then moved on to the colon (and stayed there for a really long time) but I didn’t really think the small and large intestines got their fair share of time. On the other hand, this isn’t exactly intended as a textbook. Maybe she just couldn’t find the same number of stories—horrifying and hilarious—for that particular section of anatomy as she could for the rest.

Finally, while I listened to this in audiobook format, I think it probably works better read in a traditional book format. There were a fair number of footnotes that discussed tangential issues and it was occasionally difficult to track the divergence and subsequent return to the regular text.

So, if my various warnings haven’t put you off too much, then I do recommend this book. It is hilarious and I have learned things that I never would have expected.

* I first learned of vivisection from a book in which the bad guys did it and the good guy was Jack the Ripper. Let that give you some perspective.

The Art of the Steal by Frank Abagnale

Jul27 by Rebecca

The Art of the Steal
How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America’s #1 Crime
By Frank W. Abagnale
2001
Read by Barrett Whitener

This book is enthralling and funny and useful. I definitely recommend it.

I just started a new job (yay!) which comes with an hour-long commute (hmm), so I’m starting to look at audiobook options. I started listening to this one when my hour-long commute (which would be half an hour if it weren’t for rush-hour traffic) turned into a two-hour-long commute due to construction. I give this audiobook full credit for saving my sanity. It’s not only well-read, but the reader is well-matched to the author. I have no idea what Abagnale actually sounds like, but in my head, he sounds just like Whitener and not much at all like Leonardo DiCaprio.

The DiCaprio reference is not as random as it might at first appear. The character of Frank Abagnale was played by DiCaprio in the movie based on Abignale’s autobiographical book, Catch Me If You Can. He was a con-artist for five years, from age 16 to 21, and then managed to grow up and started to understand consequences. Since being released from prison, he has made a career out of helping businesses avoid being conned in one way or another. Interestingly, this book is apparently his first effort to reach an audience of small-businesses and private individuals. The Art of the Steal goes over a lot of the major methods of fraud, how they are perpetrated and how they can be avoided or at least dealt with.

I think the part that I found funniest was Abagnale’s suggestion on what to do to embezzler’s. Since embezzlement is really difficult to prosecute, and often has more major consequences for the victim than the perpetrator, most companies just cut their losses and let the perpetrator go with no reprisal. Abagnale suggests filing an IRS form letting the IRS know that the company “paid” the perpetrator the amount that was embezzled. The criminal and civil court systems might not do much to embezzlers, but the IRS is not at all nice to tax dodgers. The thought of using the IRS as your personal attack dog just cracks me up.

There were also a lot of descriptions of awesome and interesting science projects and social science experiments that I would love to try out if only they weren’t both illegal and malicious. (Is it really that easy to set up an entirely new identity? I kind of want to try it and see! But I won’t. Because I am moral, I am lazy, and I don’t want to deal with potential consequences.) But there are all sorts of interesting ways to forge different types of documents and it’s fascinating to hear what they are and what their various strengths and weaknesses are.

The book contains eleven chapters, nine of which were excellent. The chapter on online and digital fraud was necessarily severely dated: this book was published twelve years ago and the digital/online landscape has changed a lot in the interim. The chapter on counterfeit objects too clearly highlighted the fact that Abagnale’s normal clients are big business: he conflates the issues of (a) getting high-quality goods without the expensive middleman with (b) getting low-quality goods with counterfeit expensive branding. These are different issues and should be treated differently.

Anyway, with those caveats, this was a fascinating book and kept me well entertained on my daily commutes. I definitely recommend it as being well-done, interesting and useful.

Parecomic and That Lovely Horrible Stuff

Jul18 by Rebecca

Parecomic: The story of Michael Albert and Participatory Economics
Written by Sean Michael Wilson
Drawn by Carl Thompson
2013

Not liking the current economy very much, a book about an alternate way for an economy to run seemed like an excellent opportunity for me. Especially since it’s a graphic novel and thus likely to be at least slightly livelier than other books about the economy.

However, while it wasn’t a terrible book, it wasn’t a particularly good one either and I was really not impressed with participatory economics as it was described.

The first two-thirds of the book were more a biography/personal history of the civil rights era. I found this portion extremely interesting, even if it wasn’t saying much about participatory economics. The people and the times were interesting enough that it was okay that I didn’t find the main character (or any of the other characters) very sympathetic.

The later third of the book did discuss participatory economics, but did so very poorly. This is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I might understand why Ayn Rand was so down on liberals and socialists. Given that this book was written in Albert’s words, defending his ideals, presumably to the best of his ability, I have to admit that maybe Rand wasn’t entirely making up her annoying “liberal” characters as I’d assumed.

Albert wants to save the working class and the poor, but he sure doesn’t respect them. He argues that white-collar workers aren’t any better than blue-collar workers but assumes that it’s obvious that white-collar work is better and more empowering than blue-collar work. He assumes that everyone will like the same things and dislike the same things and generally have the same opinions if only they really understood. Thus, in his view, business meetings can reach consensus quickly and easily, and if you don’t agree with him, then you just don’t understand the situation.

It started out interesting, but ended up mostly irritating. On the other hand, it was well-illustrated, the first part was interesting, and the book as a whole wasn’t that long. So, faint praise, but still praise.

That Lovely Horrible Stuff
By Eddie Campbell
2012

This was in the nonfiction new-release section at my library and it seemed to be a graphic novel about currency, which I thought would be interesting. Instead it was mostly some biographical ramblings of the author about his money troubles. It did have a section about the stone money of the island Yap, which was really interesting. I wish the whole book had been like that. Instead I mostly got annoyed at Campbell for being whiny. Like Parecomic, it was interesting and well-illustrated (and really quite short), but the main character was even more off-putting.

A Book About Design by Mark Gonyea

Jun11 by Rebecca

A Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Good
by Mark Gonyea
2005

Another Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Bad
by Mark Gonyea
2007

These are awesome! I love them both.

In theory, these are picture books about design, written and illustrated for young children. As such, they are about as long and have about as much text as you might expect from a picture book intended for to be read either by or to very young beginning readers.

In practice, they are design books that show some of the foundational concepts of design, and are a great introduction for adults as well. There is very little text, but it is all exactly on point and the illustrations do an excellent job of actually illustrating the concepts presented.

Plus, there’s a certain humor in the presentation of the concepts that I really enjoyed. I thought the books were useful, but I was also grinning the whole time I read them. I highly recommend them.

Stephen Hawking

Jun3 by Rebecca

I was reading a Cracked article the other day: 14 Photographs That Shatter Your Image of Famous People, and #13 was “A Young, Cool Stephen Hawking, Standing With His Bride.”

It actually looks quite a bit like the new Q from the most recent James Bond movie, Skyfall.

It made me want to watch a Stephen Hawking biopic starring Ben Whishaw. (There’s already a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch that is apparently pretty good, but after watching Cumberbatch in both BBC’s Sherlock and Star Trek Into Darkness, I have trouble seeing him as young Stephen Hawking.)

Instead, I checked out a couple of biographies from my library:

Stephen Hawking: Revolutionary Physicist
By Melissa McDaniel
1994

I got this book from the library because it was short and looked like a quick overview. Something like an Encyclopedia article: less detailed, less accurate, but somewhat more reliable than Wikipedia. I wasn’t even entirely sure if this book was supposed to be in the adult section rather than the young reader section. But, no, it was properly catalogued. It’s just that it’s kind of a book for people who don’t like reading. Although it was frequently vague and/or confusing about the order of events, it was a useful overview in preparation for a more detailed biography.

Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind
By Kitty Ferguson
2012

Alas, this book was a severe disappointment. I managed to force my way all the way through it, but I suggest avoiding it. Only in retrospect did I notice that of the five reviews on the back of the book, only one of them was for the book “Stephen Hawking”—the other four for person Stephen Hawking.

Ferguson has a serious case of hero worship for Hawking and it hamstrings this book. I imagine that one doesn’t write a biography of someone without feeling strongly for or against that person, but most biographers attempt to showcase their subjects in all their humanity. Ferguson, on the other hand, does more to obscure Hawking’s existence as a human being than she does to reveal it, presenting Hawking as a godly figure, without failing or flaw.

Ferguson’s own presence is also extremely present, as she highlights her connection to Stephen Hawking, talking about how her children went to the same school as the Hawking children did, how Hawking himself reviewed the manuscript for her first biography of him, and how she met with him at his office! I can see the stars in her eyes and little hearts floating around her head. In keeping with an overblown crush, Ferguson uses the passive voice in a pattern that I believe intentionally denies Hawking culpability in anything that Ferguson didn’t approve of and attributed to him actions and decisions that Ferguson did approve of. Hawking is presented as having perfect intuition for physics such that he requires no proof and his word should be accepted as gospel. Questionable events are either denied, skimmed over, or not mentioned at all. She presents Hawking as a messiah figure—awesome, majestic, unknowable and yet all-knowing—and Ferguson as his faithful disciple—a devoted lesser being who is brought greatness by proximity.

In addition, Ferguson attempts to explain a few actual physics issues that Hawking had worked on over the years, but learning new physics concepts requires a certain amount of trust in the teacher. After, 1, obscuring and contradicting biographical events, 2, describing students as working on incomprehensible and mysterious equations, and, 3, explaining that the Pythagorean Theorem changes when used in space-time*, Ferguson lost her credibility with me for any of her physics explanations.

By the end, this book was a pure slog to get through. I definitely do not recommend it to anyone.

In comparison, I was increasingly impressed by the earlier book which was short, to the point, and presented a factual and nuanced view of the actual person, Stephen Hawking.

* The Pythagorean Theorem is a relationship between the sides of a right triangle and the hypotenuse. It is most often summarized as A² + B² = C². It would take a thorough explanation from someone I trusted to know what they were talking about before I was willing to believe that when time is a dimension, the equation suddenly becomes A² = B² + C².

Hedy’s Folly by Richard Rhodes

May26 by Rebecca

Hedy’s Folly: The life and breakthrough inventions of Hedy Lamarr the most beautiful woman in the world
by Richard Rhodes
2011

Hedy Lamarr is best known for being “the most beautiful woman in the world.” She was a film actress from 1930 through 1958, and once said, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Hedy was anything but stupid, although it’s amazing (and depressing) how many people discounted her intelligence. She broke into the film industry in Austria when she was 16, married at 19, escaped her controlling husband at 22, moved to Hollywood ahead of WWII, broke into the film industry in Hollywood to become a movie star, married (and divorced) five more times, raised three children, and died in January 2000. She also maintained a significant hobby of invention.

However, while I learned a great deal about Hedy Lamarr from reading this book, the title is somewhat misleading. It’s not so much the story of Hedy Lamarr as it is the story of one of her inventions: the frequency-hopping secret communication system.

Frequency-hopping is now known as spread-spectrum and is the technology that allows wireless communications to happen without interference or jamming. It’s one of the foundational technologies for cell phones, Bluetooth, military drones. And it was developed by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil, the composer of Ballet Mecanique, in Hollywood during WWII as a bit of civilian support of the war effort.

This book tells the story of how this technology came about, starting with background on these two famous artists. While it is an interesting perspective on the two characters, it is not a comprehensive biography of either, and it was a bit disingenuous of the author to title and illustrate the book as if it were a biography of Hedy Lamarr alone.

For what it is, though, the book is well written (with the only a few wrong notes, where the author inserts a few generic homilies), quite interesting, and not that long. I recommend it.

Biblio-therapy

Category Archives: Nonfiction