The Seekers
Daniel J. Boorstin

Very good - Boorstin is brilliant - but not as good as his two earlier books in this unofficial trilogy: The Discoverers and The Creators.

Read my full review here on my blog.

 - Originally reviewed: 01/05/2012, 1:21 pm

Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant
Paul Clemens

This story - about the closing/taking apart of a large Detroit stamping press had such potential.

It could have looked - more deeply - at the people affected; it could have been a metaphor for the demise of industrial America; it could have woven the tale of, to some extent, the decline/end of unions and middle class existence.

Instead, is was just the story of the tearing apart of presses, told in a very non-linear fashion, all the while layers on top of a somewhat chronological progression.

Some good insights, but, dude, get an editor!

To be fair, this book would probably have meant more if I was from the Detroit area or was from a manufacturing background.

Still, I read the intro a couple of months ago and was intrigued: Very disappointing.

 - Originally reviewed: 06/16/2011, 5:16 pm

Just Kids
Patti Smith

Basically, an autobiographical account of Smith's time with Robert Mapplethorpe. They were lovers in the 1960s. In New York City.

But it's a book, primarily, about art - and the love of art shared by both Smith and Mapplethorpe.

This book won the National Book Award for non-fiction; I don't know what it was up against, but it's not that good a book. It's not what one expects for a prize-winning non-fiction book: No scholarship, let's say. Smith is a poet, and sometimes turns a good phrase.

Yet it speaks volumes to me.

Art and the pursuit of same.

 - Originally reviewed: 12/28/2010, 10:57 pm

A Man Without a Country
Kurt Vonnegut

A loose collection of writings (many previously published) that is as close to a memoir as we'll get from Vonnegut.

Light, funny, dark, deep and breezy all at the same time. Vonnegut has been through a lot, and he brings it all to the table here.

If you like Vonnegut, read it!

Never read Vonnegut? Read it (and you'll want to read more...)!

Vonnegut - like Twain - has one of my favorite literary voices. But we're all from the Midwest, so maybe it's a regional thing.

Nah...

Bottom Line: Vonnegut is a self-professed atheist (so no final judgment), but he is also a humanist.

And he can't believe what we're doing to the environment, other countries and so on.

How we're hooked on oil, how we love the Ten Commandments - and want to put them carved in granite in government buildings - but seem to ignore the Sermon on the Mount ("blessed are the peacemakers, for they..." - No one's pushing for an engraving of that on a plaque in the Pentagon). That's Vonnegut.

(Longer review of this book on my blog).

 - Originally reviewed: 06/20/2010, 12:57 am

Control of Nature, The
John McPhee

I purchased this book - in hardcover - around the time it was released (1990), but just now getting around to reading it.

McPhee is one of my favorite essayists, and this book - thus far (I'm not done) - does not disappoint.

The book is a collection of longish essays about how man attempts (in vain...) to control nature. The first essay, for example, describes how the Army Corps of Engineers has attempted/is attempting to control the Mississippi River.

In the aftermath of Katrina, more poignant and frightening than it was at the time of publication, I'd venture to guess.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/17/2007, 11:34 pm

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich's Thoreau-like adventure, with the world of manual, minimum-wage jobs as her Walden.

The basic conclusion of the book is simple: A job and hard work does not translate to a ticket out of poverty.

 - Originally reviewed: 04/04/2004, 5:34 pm

The Writing Life
Annie Dillard

A short (~100 pgs) book about the craft of writing.

Written in Dillard's signature style - introspective, non-linear, metaphysical - it's an interesting take on the life of a writer: Why we do what we do; how it happens; what are the results?

While not as satisifying as her other books (such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), it's still a difficult but rewarding read.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/25/2004, 11:09 am

The DaVinci Code
Dan Brown

Dan Brown's book about murders, codes and Christianity is not great literature, but it is a great read. An excellent beach or weekend read.

While the ending is a little disappointing - but it's really the only way it could end - the facts, theories and conspiracies he weaves within the plot are well done and give one pause. And makes one dig out old art books to re-examine some classic paintings. Mind candy, very nicely done.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/17/2004, 12:02 pm

Plainsong
Kent Haruf

Haruf's book was nominated for a National Book award, but the book - while well done and an interesting read - doesn't do anything special for me. Weaving together the disparate lives of a half-dozen or so inhabitants of a small agrarian Colorado community, the story never meshes enough to make it compelling.

 - Originally reviewed: 01/20/2004, 9:10 am

The Art of Unix Programming
Eric S. Raymond

I'm currently in the midst of reading Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming.

Highly recommended.

The book is not a Unix programming book, and it's not a philosphy book.

It's both...and neither.

Good read; Joel Spolsky has an excellent and insightful review of this book, so I won't clog up the Blogsphere with my own idiotic ramblings and ruminations (wait! why should today be different?).

It's an interest book for what it says about Unix history, the art of programming - in general - and the art of programming in Unix, specifically.

As I'm not a seasoned Unix hacker, it was good to read some of the tenents Raymond puts forth (he did not invent them; he's just documenting them).

One of the more interesting ones - to me - was the concept that a routine/function or whatever should succeed silently. This is the opposite of what most users would expect - users want confirmation.

Programmers want silence, lack of clutter - only display when something goes wrong.

Which made me feel a little better (and smarter): I had just written a bunch of PHP functions and my decision was to return FALSE unless there was an error (then an error message will return). In this way, the program just keeps chugging along if all is well without any success echoes.

This is better for the program, but somewhat counter-intuitive: Return FALSE for a SUCCESS?

This book says that's a good thing.

Wow. I got something right.

 - Originally reviewed: 12/28/2003, 2:07 pm