Non-Fiction - What We Have Read Lately

Jul 14 20:19 UTC 1994

Item 3 has been overwhelmingly devoted to recent readings of fiction.
Non-fiction attracts a sufficiently different clientele that a separate
item might encourage more non-fiction readers to tell us about what they
found interesting.

response 2 of 176:

Jul 14 23:08 UTC 1994

Finished "Silence Will Speak", a biography of the life of Denys Finch Hatton.
Excellent reading...Finch Hatton was a hunter and a nobleman in British East
Africa the first part of this century.  The movie "Out Of Africa" dealt
with his life peripherally, but the biography offered some insight.  Try is
..it if you're interested.  Good stuff.

response 4 of 176:

Jul 19 15:32 UTC 1994

I was just about to give up the search for my 1994 Big Summer 
Book when I came across a biography of Mary McCarthy at Borders, 
_Writing Dangerously_, by Carol Brightman.  It's perfect: 700 
pages long and filled with excellent gossip.  Fat and juicy, in 
other words, and ideal for browsing in the hammock or by the 
pool.  

Did you know that McCarthy's second husband, the legendary critic 
Edmund Wilson, used to beat her up?  One of his favorite tricks 
was to hit her hard and then run into his office and lock the 
door.  This made McCarthy so furious that she lit a bunch of 
Wilson's papers on fire and stuffed them under his office door.  
Wilson, using this episode as evidence that *she* was insane, 
first tried to have her committed and then, when they were 
getting divorced, tried to get sole custody of their son.  
Meanwhile, the Great Man would chase her in a drunken rage around 
the house, at one point literally hurling himself through a 
closed window and badly cutting himself in the process.  
McCarthy's poofy third husband (Wilson was her second) would 
later refer to Wilson as "le monstre."

response 6 of 176:

Jul 20 01:28 UTC 1994

That is really shocking to hear about Wilson.  I've always respected his 
work, but it's hard to respect a critical great also known as "le monstre."
Goodness.  I think I'll read the book.  Thanks for the review.

response 8 of 176:

Jul 24 01:54 UTC 1994

I just finished reading _Insanely Great_ by Steven Levy, which is a history
of the Macintosh.  It traces the history of the Macintosh all the way
back to the article by Vannevar Bush in a 1940s Atlantic through the
work of Douglas Englebart and the Stanford Research Institute and, of
course, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

One thing I found interesting is how Steve Jobs latched onto the
Macintosh project.  Despite what many think, he was not the father of
the Macintosh.  The Mac was originally championed by a guy named Jeff
Raskin, who was its first project manager.  Jobs saw that it was going
to be much more economically viable than the Lisa computer and
basically wrested it out of Raskin's hands. The story of the political
infighting was quite intriguing.  In some ways, i now have more
respespect for Jobs than I did before, but in many ways I respect him
less.

For all you Mac-heads out there, it's definitely worth reading.

response 10 of 176:

Aug 23 22:51 UTC 1994

<moving it from another item>
I'm currently reading "The Trickster, MAgician, and Grieving Man"
by Mazis.  While labelled as a men's spirituality book, it does not 
espouse a particular religion (Mazis, according to the "About the Author"
is allegedly a Zen Buddhist, but that's not all that relevant).  The 
book is written in response to Robert Bly's Iron John school of manhood.
Bly suggests that what's wrong with men today stems from a disconnection
from their fathes.  Mazis' feeling on this is that this is too easy a 
solution:  it's just another excuse for men not to heal themselves,
because they can blame someone else.  Mazis' feeling, rather, is
that men need to reconnect themselves with their emotions -- regardless
of why we disconnected ourselves from them in the first place.  Another
issue that Mazis disputes is Bly's treatment of pain.  But Mazis and 
Bly recognize pain as a potential for learning and as a necessary 
occurrence of life, but Bly portrays pain as a test so men can show 
how they can overcome, while Mazis portrays pain as a simple fact of 
life that men must learn to deal with.
One interesting aspect of Mazis' book is his treatment of the hero image
in modern movies.  So far he has discussed The Unforgiven, Regarding
Henry, Dances with Wolves, and The FIsher King, and how the image of 
the hero varies in each.  He criticizes the American view of the hero
in The Unforgiven as being stoic and laconic.  His discussion can easily
be applied to other movies as well; Fearless leapt to mind as I read the 
book, and Wolf meshed well too (I saw that last night).
There, Rane, does that seem like fiction. :-)

response 12 of 176:

Aug 27 07:14 UTC 1994

Agreed, but that's how the publishers classed it.  Since the author 
is not a professional psychologist, and since it isn't meant as a
descriptive treatise, but is rather an opinion position book, 
"psychology" isn't a fair title, and "self-help" is so broad as too be 
useless.  

response 14 of 176:

Sep 2 18:13 UTC 1994

I just finished Gray's "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus."  Luann
is reading it now.  We both agree that while it is filled with generalities,
we find ourselves nodding along with it.  A fun read, and helpful, too.

response 16 of 176:

Feb 2 17:13 UTC 1995

I bought _Wouldn't It Be Nice:  My Own Story_ by Brian Wilson with Todd Gold
for STeve for Christmas.  I finished it 2 days later.  About how the Beach
Boys got their start and how it effected Brian.  It was really interesting
to see how things went in the back ground, how the songs were written and
recorded.

response 18 of 176:

Jun 3 19:45 UTC 1995

I just finished _The Bat in my Pocket_, by Amana Lollar. She is a Texas
woman who picked up a bat one day, nursed it back to health, and
established a "relation" with it. She exhibits a rather sentimental
attitude toward her bat, much like other pet owners. If her account is
literally true, though, the bat was responding to her. They are known to
be quite intelligent, long-lived mammals, so it is possible, if one tries.
Unfortunately, bat care is still a somewhat inexact science, and her bat
died, apparently of vitamin D poisoning (which she was adding to its food
on another "expert's" recommendation). That was in 1990. Ms. Lollar now is
a licensed bat rehabilitator in Mineral Wells, Texas. 

response 20 of 176:

Jun 20 20:32 UTC 1995

I have managed to finish _History of Cave Science - The Exploration and
Study of Limestone Caves, to 1900_, by Trevor R. Shaw (Sydney
Speleological Society, 1992). This is a doctoral dissertation converted to
a book. Unfortunately, it was not much rewritten in the conversion. In
addition, most earth sciences had their main flowering after 1900, after
catastrophic geology, and the Bible's influence, had been laid to rest.
Therefore a large portion of this work is devoted to a foot-noted
expositiion of *failed* theories of the origins of caves, cave features,
and cave contents. This is still all interesting historically, and the
author is a historian, but the book has a serious organizational flaw - it
is organized by scientific topics. 

The "Parts" are "Cave Exploration", "Karst Hydrology", "Speleogenesis",
"Speleothems", and "The Overall Development of Speleology". Each Part has
a dozen or so chapters on specific subtopics. This organization is OK when
one is presenting "recent developments" in subtopics, but this book covers
a period when scientists were generalists, and *very few* concerned
themselves with caves. These few generally ranged over the subject
broadly, with *opinions* on almost everything. Therefore each of the
dozens of subtopics present mostly the opinions of pretty much the same
groups of observers on each topic in turn, without ever giving an overview
of individual contributions. 

Finally, almost a third of the contents is devoted to *failed theories*,
such as caves being formed by the gases produced by the rotting of
carcasses after the "flood", and speleothems being vegetative. These are
all somewhat interesting historical mistakes, but it may now be time to
let them gather dust and fade into oblivion. The one aspect of this
omit-nothing historical treatment that would have been valuable, but which
is ommitted, is the place of cave studies in the enormous scientific
ferment that was occurring during the period covered, concerning the age
of the earth, geological processes, and the origin of species (and man).
Cave studies played a small but extremely critical role in this, as cave
preserved the bones of pleistocene mammals and of early humans, and their
artifacts. Those data in the end overturned among scientists the biblical
story of creation, and ushered in the modern era of observation and
deduction. You will have to find a different book to get that story. 

response 22 of 176:

Aug 14 06:12 UTC 1995

_SARNOFF - An American Success_, by Carl Dreher (NYT Book Co, 1977).  A
biography of David Sarnoff, a Russian Jew child, who emigrated at age 9 to
the US with his parents; who started a NY newstand at age 11, learned
telegraphy at age 16, and became the operating manager of American Marconi
just before GE bought it from British Marconi to create RCA. Under
Sarnoff's management RCA mainly sold radios, but also began the first
commerical radio broadcasting in the US with station WJZ, the first
commercial television broadcasting and created RCA-Victor, Raytheon, NBC,
ABC, RKO Studios, etc, and Sarnoff rose to be president and CEO. The
author, Carl Dreher, five years younger than Sarnoff, was there and worked
in several RCA companies, but stayed in engineering (where the money "goes
out" - Sarnoff chose to go into the business end of Marconi, where the
money "comes in"). Dreher provides a "balanced" portrait of Sarnoff - both
the good and the bad, as they say. He devotes a chapter to the bad side of
television - the low cultural level and the violence - as he saw it in
1975! A lot of the biography is quite readable, but I bogged down in
keeping track of the corporate wheeling-and-dealing, with the buying and
selling of companies and the shenanigans of the boards and officers (it
would have helped to have been given a chart of when each company was
founded, and who owned whom, when, and who were the officers and CEOs, and
when.) The primary RCA debacle - its abortive entry into computers - is
also recounted, though the story is very abbreviated. 

response 24 of 176:

Oct 9 17:29 UTC 1995

I'm reading two books at once, which I like to do: _The End
of Racism_ by Dinesh D'Souza, and _It's All the Rage_, by
Wendy Kaminer.  Interesting set.  The former is by a right-
wing apologist who sometimes sounds like a liberal, and the
latter is by an old-fashioned liberal who sounds to some people
like a right-winger.  _The End of Racism_ blames black culture for
black failures; _All the Rage_ is essentially an anti-capital 
punishment tract.