Collapse

on Jared Diamond's tome... I have a lot of jumbled thoughts and reactions to this work. I've decided therefore just to list them, instead of forming a coherent narrative review. (Not like my posts are ever particularly coherent.)

Overall: thumbs up. His case histories are interesting, and his last chapter ties past and present together quite well. Despite the differences among each earlier society and between them and our own, it's clear that we have plenty to learn in order to avoid the same fate. Also, man he has a LOT of friends in places and companies all over the world. Similar to my graduate advisor. But onto the thoughts:

*What is it about Easter Island that people find so fascinating? I think it's haunting somehow, but I wonder if "ghosts" of other civilizations are ever jealous.

*I started to think about life cycles of cities, societies, and civilizations. We like to think of history as having "sped up" but I wonder if that's really accurate.

*How big is my footprint? I thought of this quiz while reading. When I think of how much of the world we are unsustainably mining... I sort of think we must be insane. On a happier note, sort of, the quiz says that we'd only need two planets if everyone lived like me (three times fewer than the average American). But then we don't have two planets, that I know of, which brings me to my next point...

*How do societies learn to think sustainably? Although everyone's favorite, Easter Island, has gotten a lot of attention in reviews (mainly I believe b/c it's at the beginning of the book and was all that some readers got to) Diamond provides examples of societies that did learn to think sustainably, by enacting religious laws to save land, or reconceptualizing their identities to line up with environmental realities. I guess one would have to find the "tipping point" for such a shift.

*As far as specific societies, I found the suggestion that the pressures from overpopulation helped precipitate the Rwandan genocide provocative and intriguing. And he has a few pages to devote to his hometown and mine, Los Angeles (pp 499-503). Surprisingly for those who love to bash the Southland, despite our bad environmental rep, Diamond says that our myriad problems still actually have us in pretty good shape comparatively. (So there.)

In closing, this is a big book. I think there is much to be gained from reading the whole thing, digesting all the different societies, applying them to the present. However, he can get a little long-winded, especially about industry stuff. So I would say it's okay to pick and choose chapters, or to skim over the boring stuff. Diamond's pretty good at putting flashing signs around his main points, so you won't miss much.

Sane by Comparison

While I'm finishing Collapse and sorting out my feelings on it, another article on books for amusement:

The LA Times reports on those poor "book people" who collect and collect and collect.

For the bibliophile, what to do with the books is life's central decorating issue, an ongoing discourse, a debate, and often an outright décor war, between aesthetics, the practicalities of storage and the consuming mindlessness of passion.

The roots of that passion are simple. To these readers, books aren't mere objects but possessions that carry intensely personal memories: where they were purchased, who the reader was while reading them, how they changed his or her life. They carry a weight of history.

Exactly. Except, unlike some of the people in this article, I am able to distinguish between the truly weighty and the peewee. The latter, I move on out. Even so, I face the same dilemma discussed in the article: where to put books when you have a lot of them. I'm always wondering "How come other people's homes look so spacious and clean? Oh, because they're missing all the books."

Non-reading post

Regardless of whether you consider the horrors in Darfur to constitute genocide, there is clearly no excuse for them, and the U.S. truly ought to be doing more to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans. If interested, you can sign Africa Action's petition to President Bush here.

Also, the situation in Niger looks really bad. Read LA Times coverage of it here and here. To (misguidedly, I'm sure) connect it to reading, this situation is precisely what Cause Celeb's Rosie is trying to prevent. I mention this in part to again argue how deft Helen Fielding can be at mixing the very serious and the absurd. But more to the point to point out how often famine in Africa has periodically caught the attention of the West, and yet how we ignore the moves that could prevent it in the first place.

In Darfur and in Niger... we say "never again" far too often. It would be nice if we really meant it.

Are we all going nuclear?

Jared Diamond has apparently endorsed exploration into nuclear energy as a potential alternative in the post-Peak Oil world we about about to enter.

"[T]o deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power." Nuclear, he added, should simply be "done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents."

Hmm?

I'm reading Collapse right now - more on that later - and am somewhat surprised to hear this. One of the main stories of Collapse is the law of unintended consequences. Seems like nuclear power has plenty of those.

Admittedly, saying that we should use everything available isn't necessarily a ringing endorsement of nuclear energy per se, but is nonetheless a frightening one.

Contentment

I'm not sure just where I'd be without Helen Fielding. Sure, I think she's a big reason behind the explosion of "chick lit," which I'm not so crazy about. But she's brilliant. And despite the frumpiness of Renee Zellwiger as Bridget Jones - the film's fault, not the author's - she creates sassy (if neurotic) heroines who give voice to both women's insecurities and their kick-ass qualities. Even if Rosie (of Cause Celeb) and Bridget could be a bit daft sometimes, I still kind of wanted to be them.

So imagine my joy at coming across Olivia Joules (of Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination). Utterly ridiculous title - I don't really like it. But pretty clear about the premise of the book - a freelance writer who decides the hot producer she meets on assignment is actually al Qaeda. (My overactive imagination seems so mundane in comparison.) The al Qaeda stuff is a little too much - and man, they have a lot going on in this novel - but I recommend just overlooking that as much as you can, so you can concentrate on the good stuff.

Fielding is so brilliant with her characters' ascerbic observations about both themselves and others. She exaggerates, sure, but there's still a hell of a lot of truth behind most of it. Also, how fun is the British term "snogging," which I guess is equivalent to hooking up short of sex (which would be shagging, obviously). And the banter is sublime. And I like romance. I saved this for a weekend minibreak, and read it at the coffeehouse, the pool, and the beach. Utterly perfect.

Also, Bridget Jones is back in the Independent, but you have to pay for it. Boo.

On ironic titles

I've decided I don't want to skip books on this blog, but I've really had a time trying to figure out what to say about Geraldine Brooks' novel Year of Wonders. It's a very pretty book. Does that even make sense? calling a book pretty? Especially when the subject of the book is the plague, which wipes out the larger part of the heroine's village? And Brooks doesn't spare us much detail in the weeping buboes and the ugly actions of the terrified villagers. It is pretty though - I guess that's part of the wonder.

Anna, the protagonist, is a young pre-plague widow, working for the town's young rector and his wife. Were this book a little different - say, written by Lynne Cheney? - there'd be a love story between Anna and the wife. Instead, they're platonic "lovers" and tireless caregivers to the ravaged people of the town. Anna, already a strong character, matures throughout the novel, and emerges from the plague almost as a butterfly from a cocoon.

Okay, I feel like I sound ridiculous, so I'll skip to the interesting part. Brooks has worked as a Middle East correspondent based out of London. While traveling through England, she came across a plaque in a little village, naming it as "The Plague Town." Turns out that during the plague year of 1666, an unfortunate village over 100 miles away was stricken due to some imported goods. The villagers made a pact to prevent the spread of the disease by all staying within the village - instead of fleeing - and shunning contact with outsiders. Essentially condemning the greater part of them to death in an attempt to save the wider countryside. Year of Wonders is an imagining of what happened within that village during that fateful year. (You could almost see this as a movie, except it would have to be some sort of extraterrestrial disease, and probably more special effects. Definitely more sex.)

Like The Lady and the Unicorn, this book doesn't attempt to be great literature, but it does ground itself in historical fact, and tries to truly envision the past, give shape to it, to imagine the stories and dramas that made up forgotten lives. It's a different sort of "chick lit," one that asks a little more of the reader.

Nurturing the next generation of readers

Check out Barack Obama's speech to the American Library Association from earlier this summer. He's really a lovely and inspiring speaker, and to my mind appeals to the best and most hopeful parts of our nature. A couple examples:

And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we’ve changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

I believe that if we want to give our children the best possible chance in life; if we want to open doors of opportunity while they’re young and teach them the skills they’ll need to succeed later on, then one of our greatest responsibilities as citizens, as educators, and as parents is to ensure that every American child can read and read well.

I was a library junkie from a young age, but too many children aren't, and that has to change - in order to ensure that we raise a generation of Americans that love reading and learning, that can draw on a wide range of knowledge, and make the connections that our increasingly interconnected world demands.

Us YFBers...

I was truly shocked at my desire to read Suze Orman's book of financial advice for twenty-somethings. I usually don't buy this shit, and I find it ironic that she wants to take $25 from the very people she acknowledges are "young, fabulous, and broke" (or YFB, as we were termed for the rest of the book). (Also, the leather jacket she's wearing on the cover was a poor attempt at connecting with her target audience.) But I'm fascinated by money, and freaked out by my enormous school loan debt, and thought there might be something in it for me.

Another reason I love the library. I had to wait over 2 months to get my hands on a copy, but once I did, I had the full benefit of Suze's words of wisdom - both on the page, and on her website - without dropping money I don't really have. There's a lot in here about building good credit, and even more about how to best dig your way out of credit card debt. (Discovery: I don't have credit card debt - apparently I'm less broke than I thought, but also I think a little less fabulous in my spending habits.) It's all pretty sensible, and provides a good set of step-by-step instructions for those who need a very straightforward path to financial responsibility.

For people more like me, she quelled my fears of my looming loan payments by announcing that I've got a great deal, especiallly at my interest rate, so I don't need to freak out or subsist on ramen noodles while pumping my entire income into loan payments. She also provides smart advice on maximizing investments and how to start saving money when you're not a saver. By the end of the book, I was starting to think that maybe it was worth the $24.95 cover price after all...

Serendipity

I've found that there are certain books and stories that touch you incredibly deeply, not just because of what they say, but because of what place you are in life when you read them. For me, the best example is Robert Hellenga's The Fall of a Sparrow, a novel that might have meant less had I read it at any other time, in any other place. Another is this short story by T.C. Boyle, which I read last year, as winter slowly gave way to spring, on a bench just outside the Library of Congress.

On not thinking

Chances are, you've heard about Blink, Malcolm Gladwell's recent book on "the power of thinking without thinking." The man's become famous lately. I feel like I see or hear about him everywhere. And this is in spite of (or more likely because of) the fact that his argument about split-second thinking is pretty controversial. (Check out here, here and here for some of these mixed reviews.)

The book is an intensely fast read, well in keeping with the idea of taking in information quickly. And Gladwell's argument is best put when he explains that certain people are able to make snap judgments accurately b/c they know which pieces to keep and which to ignore among the flood of information and perceptions we are constantly receiving. To do this, though, you have to have a LOT of experience - intuition is built on expertise. So in effect he is saying that "blinking" is great, and you can trust your gut, as long as you have that basis of unconscious information to tap into. Or something. At any rate, he meanders around his argument, providing lots of fascinating anecdotes, but not really convincing me of anything except that he's a good storyteller.

The End of Poverty

Mixing it up a little bit, I decided to raid Michael's bookshelf (well, pile really) and grabbed The End of Poverty, by economist Jeffrey Sachs. I'm just reading excerpts, but it's enough to grasp the core of the book. He explains the root causes of poverty in the third world, exonerating many of the reasons given by liberals - making me a little uncomfortable with his analysis, but willing to buy in, since he isn't justifying the things we did wrong in the past, just arguing that there's more to the problem. Namely lack of access to technological change, and how both growth and stagnation spiral until you have a stratified world.

Then, and this is the part I'm reading now, he does a little tour of the world, with short chapters on his role in saving (or trying to save) the economies of various countries. Unsurprisingly, this reads like a memoir replete with name-dropping and transitions between false humility and utter pride. That's okay though - I want to know about how Poland's economy transitioned from Iron Curtain to free market.

Next, he's going to do something with the millenium and 9/11 - I'm curious to see what - and make the radical argument that not only do we have to solve poverty, but we actually can do it. And in twenty years. It's "our" (meaning his, not my) generation's challenge.

I am heartened by the fact that Sachs sees the impoverished as people, not just numbers. And that he believes in the free market, but sees a role for governments and institutions in breaking the cycle of poverty. And I hope that he is going to do what he says, provide a step-by-step plan to ending poverty. (It will be interesting to see how "liberal" and humanitarian this is, and also how well it meshes with last week's G8 discussions. I know he believes in debt relief.)

Oh, I forgot. Foreword by Bono. He's kind of a funny writer. But he is lavish in his praise for Sachs, and credits him for providing the kinds of insight and knowledge that have made the rock star a credible speaker for third world debt reduction.

The Five Obstructions

Not a book, but going in here nonetheless. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie by Lars von Trier (and Jorgen Leth). It's a little bit documentary, a little bit film theory, a little bit sadism, and a healthy dose of creativity under pressure. von Trier has Leth remake the latter's 1967 film The Perfect Human (which is a fun film in and of itself, and available in its entirety as a special feature on the dvd) four times, each time adding an "obstruction," one or more rules that Leth must follow. The resulting efforts are recognizable as children of the first film, but depart from it in extraordinary ways. Watching von Trier try to trip up Leth is its own drama. von Trier is a leading voice in the
Dogme 95 movement which aims to reestablish the purity of filmmaking through its own obstructions:

The essence of Dogme95 is to challenge the conventional film language – in order to make authentic films, in search of the truth. This implicates cutting out the usual aesthetic means of adding sound, light, make up, “ mise en scene”.

(One could argue that these are their own artificialities, but nevermind that here.) While Leth isn't beholden to these rules, the idea of getting at something true through imposed hardship is certainly a theme recurrent in von Trier's actions.

In short, fascinating to watch and really rather witty.

Guilty Pleasures

I spent a day reading Tracy Chevalier's The Lady and the Unicorn. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, it's a fictional account of the creation of a great work of art - in this case, a series of tapestries. Also like the other book, it's about a time and place most Americans don't know much about, in this case late 15th century France and what would become Belgium. The women are surprisingly sassy and modern - is this anachronistic, or is it more true? Among the nobility, at least, the traditions of courtly love and all the extramarital play involved may have still had traction.

No one will accuse this novel of being great literature. But it's pretty, and I think it plays a useful role in bringing history to an audience that isn't used to digesting it. Chevalier is good at the details of the creation of art. She explains the weaving process and how many artists are behind such a complicated piece of artwork. Little details, like the need to sew together the slits that form when switching from one color to another. So mock me if you must, but there is room in everyone's reading life for something a little lighter, playful, romantic.

The Gate of Angels

I can't remember the name of this author - Penelope something (I am too lazy to look it up now but will do so and correct this later) - but it is our latest book club selection. I finished it yesterday for tonight's reading. Michael is hopefully going to read it during his lunch break. It is super short, but was hard to get into. It started to flow better after the first 50 pages of so and comes together in the end pretty well.

The setting is Cambridge (England), 1912. The main characters are a young physics fellow in one of the colleges, and a nurse-in-training. The author is big on description - especially of flowers, it seems - and creates vivid scenes. I feel like the pre-war years aren't that common in historical fiction, so it's nice to get a picture of that world, on the crux between old and new. However, the plot and characters are kind of sketchy. I felt bemused.

Also, I am coming to the conclusion that the librarian in our book club and I have different tastes in literature. Which is okay, but it does mean that perhaps I should be making more recommendations. Take it over.

David Sedaris ... Naked

I wasn't really into the idea of David Sedaris when I first heard about him. I think it was around the publication of Me Talk Pretty One Day, and apparently the faux bad grammar got to me. I enjoyed his articles in the New Yorker but even so wasn't interested in reading the books. Then I "joined" the Stanford Sunday Salon, and the book for this month was Naked. I definitely can't complain. He is witty, bizarre, self-depricating; his family is crazy but in a sassy way. He's had a lot of wacky adventures, which I found a little unbelievable, but then I'm young and sheltered. All in all a fun read.