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.

Comic Book Glut

May14 by Rebecca

Rurouni Kenshin: Restoration
By Nobuhiro Watsuki
2013

This was one of the free comic books that I picked up at Free Comic Book Day. It is a teaser for an AU (alternate universe) version of Rurouni Kenshin by the original author. It was fun, but mostly I enjoyed it because it reminded me how much I love this series. The actual teaser itself wasn’t all that great. It reintroduced the characters and held their first meeting at an arranged illegal fighting/gambling event, which just seemed like a bit of over-the-top, idiotic, self-indulgence.

While the reboot wasn’t so great, I definitely recommend the whole original series of Rurouni Kenshin, following Himura Kenshin, an amazing swordsman who, after a bloody past during the civil war, made an oath to never kill again but still manages to find and be found by a whole lot of trouble. The anime series based on the manga is also really good, and the recent live-action movie was excellent! (The animated movies, branded “Samurai X”, however, should be avoided.)

Anyway, seeing more of these characters written and drawn by the original author made me bounce around grinning with excitement. But the actual thing wasn’t all that good. It was a it of self-indulgent fluff, and while there’s nothing wrong with self-indulgent fluff, if you actually want to read a good AU take on this series, fandom (in the person of Vathara) has provided several better options, including the urban fantasy Blades of Blood and it’s sequel Witchy Woman, the Star Wars-crossover Shadows in Starlight, or the historical fantasy Gargoyles-crossover All I Need is a Miracle (which is a direct response to the awfulness of the animated movies).

So this series is awesome, and I highly recommend it, but this particular comic book is not the best example of it.

Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon
By Matt Fraction, David Aja, and Javier Pulido
2013

I’ve never really followed any of the Hawkeye comic books, but I enjoyed The Avengers movie a lot and the characters cameo in the Thor movie made me grin. So a new stand-alone comic book about Hawkeye at my library caught my eye. It was a whole lot of fun.

It’s a look at what Hawkeye, aka Clint Barton, is doing when he’s not out being a superhero Avenger… which is mostly getting into other types of trouble and going out being a secret agent for SHIELD. But it also involves hanging out with his neighbors at a rooftop barbeque/potluck.

Anna pointed out that the stories in this collection are all a bit grim, which I was going to argue with, except, okay, yes, they are a bit grim. But it left me happy. I liked it. Even though it does kind of imply that one of the main requirements of being a superhero is the ability to take a beating.

The Book of Five Rings
By Miyamoto Musashi, Sean Michael Wilson, Chie Kutsuwada, and William Scott Wilson
2012

I picked this book up because I have struggled to read The Book of Five Rings for a while now. It was highly recommended by a seventh-don black belt that I was training with. And yet, I found it super uninteresting and unhelpful. In some ways it read (to me) like The Art of War, except without the value. The graphic novel version makes up for some of that lack by being really well illustrated. And from everything I’ve read, Musashi himself was a fascinating character and I wouldn’t mind reading more about him, despite not caring for his writing.

Anyway, I actually highly recommend the graphic novel as a precursor to the plain unabridged text of The Book of Five Rings. It will give you a taste of the text while making subject more accessible. It’s readable in about an hour. Then, if you find the graphic novel appealing, maybe you should try reading the original text in its entirety.

Although, really, I mostly recommend Sun Tzu’s The Art of War instead.

Elektra Lives Again
By Frank Miller
2002

I read a couple of Daredevil series before and really enjoyed them (Frank Miller’s Daredevil: The Man Without Fear is excellent, as is David Mack’s Daredevil: Vision Quest although it largely focuses on a different character), but over all the quality of Daredevil comics varies wildly, so I also read a couple of Daredevil series before that I didn’t enjoy at all. Elektra is Daredevil (aka Matt Murdock)’s tragic girlfriend, a zombie-ninja-assassin who has her own spin-off series, but I had never read any of her comics that were any good at all… until now. This collection really brought her to life (haha!) as a character, despite her being a zombie ninja assassin. I liked the writing and the illustrations and just the whole feel for it. Well done.

Plus, there are two more Elektra graphic novels by Frank Miller for me to look forward to.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Apr14 by Rebecca

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
by Paul Hoffman
1998

This is a wonderful book, but it also took me four tries over nearly a decade to get all the way through. It presents itself as a biography of the mathematician Paul Erdös (1913-1996). In reality, the book goes off on a lot of tangents, and there are a lot of natural breaks where it’s easy to set down. It talks about world history and about mathematics and is pretty obviously based on an oral history project. However many tangents it goes on, though, it does always return to Erdös.

Erdös, for those who don’t immediately recognize the name, is the zero point of Erdös numbers—where actors have degrees of Kevin Bacon, mathematicians have Erdös numbers, showing how close they are to having collaborated with Erdös.

Erdös is also one of the few mathematicians who made serious contributions to the field of mathematics after the age of 30, Mathematics generally being a young person’s field. Erdös remained a productive and innovative thinker until his death in his 80s. He was also a very peculiar man, thus a great focus for a biography.

He also seems like a good example of how there are people who are delightful to hear about and make the world a more wonderful place but I’m still glad I don’t have to deal with them personally. (Having read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! several times and enjoyed it immensely, the physicist Richard Feynman is likely another of these individuals.) Among other things, Erdös spent most of his life couch surfing at his colleagues’ houses, demanding that they talk mathematics 18 hours a day. He made it work, though, and there was always someplace for him to stay.

Anyway, the problem with the book is that while it is excellent text about a fascinating character, it is also really dense, and not particularly well organized. In addition to Erdös himself, the book describes some of the more accessible and yet unusual mathematical proofs, the lives of various other mathematicians, and a good amount of political history–both that Erdös dealt with and that other mathematicians, both contemporary and historical, dealt with. The history and the mathematics are all related to Erdös’ life and experience, but it’s still a bit like reading multiple books, each of which requires a fair bit of concentration to properly appreciate. The book clearly shows its basis in oral history, and Hoffman doesn’t manage to give it any strong, overarching structure.

It is still well worth reading, but it does take effort.

Codex Seraphinianus

Apr1 by Rebecca

Codex Seraphinianus
By Franco Maria Ricci
1981

In honor of April Fool’s Day, I am reviewing the Codex Seraphinianus. No, this is not a prank or a lie, at least not on my part. The book exists. Just, well… it’s more like it’s a prank or a lie on the author’s part.

The Codex is an incredibly beautiful and extremely peculiar biology/sociology text in a foreign language. Yeah. Think on that for a bit.

Also, I recommend it.

Regardless of what languages you may be fluent in, this book is in a language foreign to you. It’s actually an alien language constructed as either a code or simply a very detailed doodle by the author, such that the written text is just as much an illustration as any of the actual color illustrations.

The color illustrations, of which there are many, are beautifully done, likely with oil pastels or some such.

The subject of the book is the biology and sociology of an alien world… an extremely peculiar alien world, with a very complex biology. In some ways it reminds me of a steam-punk universe with cyborgs/implants/etc., except that such mechanical additions are intrinsic to the biology of the plants and animals rather than intentional additions later. (Sort of like WTF-Evolution’s even crazier, acid-tripping brother.)

In other ways it reminds me of the biology from Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep or Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Except more so than either Vinge or Card went.

It also reminds me a great deal of the Voynich Manuscript, a document that I have yet to actually see a good copy of, but which is another biology text written in an unknown language. But the Voynich Manuscript has had professional and amateur codebreakers trying to break it for nearly a century at this point and variously manage to “prove” is (a) a complex code that we just don’t have the key to yet, (b) a brand new language that would need to be translated rather than uncoded, or (c) complete gibberish that contains no meaning and can thus be neither uncoded nor translated. Its provenance is also deeply questionable. It has the potential to be (a) a secret alchemical manuscript from the 1200s, (b) a forgery created in the late 1500s and sold to Emperor Rudolf II as a secret alchemical manuscript from the 1200s, or (c) a forgery created in the early 1900s perpetrated either by or on the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich.

But back to the Codex Seraphinianus, it is vibrant and gorgeous and inspiring and confusing.

If you can get your hands on a copy, it’s a lot of fun.

Or, for a more easily accessible book, check out Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, and try to figure out what the plots are of those stories.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah Sifry

Oct26 by Rebecca

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
By Micah L. Sifry
2011

This is a fascinating read which is correctly introduced as being a presentation on information transparency from a guy with a highly pro-transparency bias. It’s not a manifesto, per se, but there’s no real attempt to present a balanced discussion of the issues or present even a straw target of the counter arguments. Instead, there are a lot of examples of both successful and failed attempts to achieve transparency in government and reporting. Examples come from the United Kingdom, the United States, various countries in Africa and in Europe.

Sifry is describing the world of information and of government responsibility as he sees it and I think it’s a very useful perspective to understand. I even agree with him to a large extent. Not completely though.

The title is also a bit misleading. I had originally intended to read it to gain an understanding of WikiLeaks specifically. I’d only vaguely followed the WikiLeaks situation in the news and want to know more. In this eight-chapter book, however, only the first and last chapters are actually about WikiLeaks. The majority of the book provides a much broader presentation on information transparency in general.

It was an engaging and informative read. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in politics, or journalism, or just information issues in general. It is, however, very subject specific so if you aren’t interested in the subject, it’s unlikely to transcend that disinterest. Since I find the subject fascinating, it was a good book and well worth reading.

Required Reading

Sep3 by Kinsey

In the comment section of Rebecca’s post on 40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, she and Anna and I got into a discussion about the list of books she was reviewing. I said that I thought the list was dull. Most of the books on it are self-help or management books, which may be informative but aren’t particularly interesting or inspiring. (To me at least–maybe you find The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People riveting!) Of course, the guy who wrote that list didn’t call it the Most Exciting Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, but I like to think that if I were giving people a list of books they should read, those books would be entertaining as well as useful. I made a couple of suggestions along those lines in the comments, and was then challenged to write a post on it.

So I made a list of the eight books I think everyone should read–the eight that immediately jumped to mind as the ones that have most powerfully influenced how I live my life. As I said to Anna and Rebecca in the comments, these aren’t necessarily books that are going to help anyone get a job or buy a house or whatever, but they are the books that I find myself going back to again and again for advice on how to function in the world.

1) The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
This is the book that has had the greatest impact on my day-to-day life. It’s half general ideas and research about happiness and half practical advice. The book is based on Rubin’s super-popular blog and in some ways the daily reinforcement of the blog is probably more powerful, but the book is very good. I have given stacks of these as gifts.

2) This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Wallace’s commencement speech at, I think, Kenyon College, used to be available out there on the internet, but then someone decided to publish it in book form and make people take down the free versions. But it’s well worth buying (and hard to begrudge his family the money). It presents a very kind, thoughtful, gentle way of moving through the world. Good advice for new graduates, good advice for those of us who graduated long, long ago.

3) Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
I first heard Sarah Vowel on This American Life and of late she’s published a great string of books on American history, but my favorite work of hers is still these essays. There’s one, in particular, where she talks about how she doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe in all these other things, that I really love.

4) Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
A newcomer to the list! This collection of Strayed’s Dear Sugar advice column for the Rumpus just came out, but it’s a powerful one. These aren’t your standard requests for advice and they’re not your standard responses. I read this in a restaurant, while I was out of town on a business trip, and it made me cry in public.

5) Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle
The only fiction on the list, even though I wasn’t really thinking about that when I made the list. This is an odd sort of stream of consciousness story about an Irish woman who is, well, living her life. It’s about how she makes it through the day and tries to relate to her kids and tries to improve her lot. The style, and the Irish vocabulary, can be a bit challenging, but for me this reads like a handbook on how to find joy and satisfaction in everyday life.

6) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
The amazingly detailed, thoughtful story of a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and the challenges that meshing traditional Hmong beliefs with modern medicine created for the girl’s family and her doctors. This one story was the best explanation I have ever read of cross-cultural communication issues, and just in general shows how well-meaning people with the same goal can still have to work terribly hard to understand each other.

7) Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Lamott can be a little Jesus-y for me sometimes, but this journal of the first year of her son’s life, where she tells the story of being a scared single mom barely hanging on to sobriety and sanity, is a wonderful example of faith.

8) In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
The politics of food and eating are so fraught and political I hate to even include this, but I did find it really useful, so it goes on the list. Michael Pollan can be awfully preachy and kind of oblivious to some of the baggage that food carries for many people, but this book presents an extremely straightforward, simple, actionable philosophy of how to eat. If you want something similar but with more of a narrative story and a call to action, you could also read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

And an honorable mention, although I know I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This is such a powerful, heart-breaking book that I think everyone should read it as a personal version of the psychopath test–if you can read this without crying, you should probably do something to address your lack of a soul.

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Aug29 by Rebecca

The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence
by Josh Waitzkin
2007

I’m still working my way through some of the books on that list of 40 suggestions and at the moment I’m feeling a bit like Goldilocks, because I recently started three, dropped two and absolutely loved one.

I read the first eight pages of Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and stopped because it made me think the author was an asshole. The introduction was essentially: here’s how I inserted myself into rich people’s lives and made good off of their connections while mocking anyone who took those connections for granted.

Then I read the first twelve pages of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki and stopped because it made me think that I was an asshole. The text is very traditional zen discussion and I’m wondering how much is real and how much is playing to a stereotype, concentrating less on the actual concepts as I am on the meta relationship of author to publisher to readership.

Then I started The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence by Josh Waitzkin and continued to the end because it was just right. No really. It really was just right and I actually plan on purchasing a copy so that I have it on hand to reread at times, focusing on learning the methods discussed in certain chapters.

First, about the author: Waitzkin was a chess prodigy and national champion as a child and he has since gone on to become a Tai Chi world champion as an adult. Plus he’s a good writer and appears to be a nice guy, too, which is actually kind of irritating because surely people that good at multiple things should have a few fatal flaws.

But anyway, the book is essentially an autobiography but it shows his life by means of his training and development from a highly theoretical perspective. He picks apart how he learned and and improved his various skills, looking at both successes and failures, evaluating the advice and assistance from academic studies and training centers, and discussing his role models, as well.

Keep in mind that I like strategy games, I like martial arts, and I like theoretical discussions, so this book fits my tastes perfectly. I am willing to acknowledge that other people may not like it as much, but I still strongly recommend it to basically everyone ever. It’s a fun read and it has some really important lessons about how to think about learning.

Biblio-therapy

Category Archives: Nonfiction