Category Archives: Books

What the internet is doing to us

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I am sure you are just dying to know what I read this summer.  Well, there was a lot of brain candy (mystery novels).  But I also read a bunch of books about how the internet is changing us (and not necessarily for the better):

Aboujaoude, Elias. Virtually you: the dangerous powers of the e-personality. New York: Norton, 2011. (Publisher’s description)

  • This one gets awarded The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval.  This book is that good.  Aboujaoude talks about the ways that our online personality seeps into our offline life, and that is a recipe for disaster.  He identifies five main psychological forces in our e-personalities: “grandiosity, or the feeling that the sky is the limit when it comes to what we can accomplish online; narcissism, or how we tend to think of ourselves as the center of gravity of the World Wide Web; darkness, or how the Internet nurtures our morbid side; regression, or the remarkable immaturity we seem capable of once we log on; and impulsivity, or the urge-driven lifestyle many fall into online” (43). Aboujaoude call this the “Net effect”. Aboujaoude is a psychiatrist, and he talks about how the Net effect can ruin our ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘virtual’) lives. This should be required reading for anyone with internet access.  It certainly gave me pause, and led to more than a few days this summer where I took an internet hiatus.

Carr, Nicholas. The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: Norton, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Lanier, Jaron. You are not a gadget: a manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

  • One of Lanier’s major arguments is that our culture now promotes only re-mixing and re-hashing old art.  We don’t make anything new.  (When was the last time you heard about a new movie that was not just a remake of an old movie?)  We remix music,  We cut-and-paste the stuff of the internet into new stuff.  What we fail to do is create anything, and this is a problem for the future.

Pariser, Eli. The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. New York: Penguin, 2011. (Publisher’s description)

  • This book should be required reading for everyone who uses Google and/or Facebook.  This also could have been edited to be a bit shorter, but at least it is an easy read.  I learned a lot about filtering from Pariser.  Here’s one that you probably didn’t know: when you look at your Facebook New Feed, it displays the Top news by default.  But you can click on “Most recent” to see even more posts.  The trick is that most people think that clicking on “Most recent” shows you all of your friends’ posts.  However, that is not the case.  It only shows you posts that are similar to the sorts of posts you’ve clicked on before.  Every click is changing what is displayed to you, both in Facebook and on the internet in general.  Pariser also maintains a blog on this topic: The Filter Bubble.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or be programmed: ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

  • This book is also really good.  It’s a short work that talks about the re-mix culture of the internet.  It also mentions how we are being ‘programmed’ by the internet and by software.  So few people know how to do programming, and that means that we are stuck receiving what is given to us; we can’t make changes ourselves.  This is really unfortunate, because it puts the power of creation into the hands of very few people, and they generally are driven by market forces to create not the best software, but the software that will sell the most.  (This reminds of me of tv.  They don’t make shows that are good; they make shows that attract the largest market audience.  Those are usually two different things.)  Rushkoff doesn’t just talk about software programming, though.  The book is much larger than that.  I highly recommend it.  I’m going to give this one The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval too.

The best book of the year

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My Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval for the best book of the year goes to:

Marlantes, Karl. Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; Berkeley, Calif.: El León Literary Arts, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

I’ve read over 30 works of literature on the Vietnam War, and this one stands out for how tactile it is.  Many books about Vietnam describe the colors of the triple canopy jungle, where even the sunlight appears green.  But none have come this close to expressing the way everything feels – from the ground underfoot to the razor-sharp elephant grass. Even the smells are evoked in a more immediate way than in other works.  The characters are well-developed, especially the main character, Waino Mellas.  He’s just a guy, and the reader can be rather indifferent towards him, since Marlantes doesn’t make him into a hero.  It’s this sort of complexity that makes this novel stand out, too.

I can’t do this book justice, in trying to describe why it is so outstanding.  I’ll just say this: Atlantic Monthly Press published this novel after it already had a small publishing run with El León Literary Arts.  The Atlantic Monthly Press edition is about 40 pages shorter.  This book is so damn good that, when I finished reading it, I got a copy of the El León Literary Arts edition, so when I read it next, I can read those other 40 pages.  Marlantes is an amazing writer, and I hope we don’t have to wait another 30 years for his next book.

Perhaps the other readers who have gotten over being dumbstruck by this book will have more helpful reviews for your consideration; you can read some here or here.

The siege of Kut, 1915-1916

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By coincidence, I am cataloging some older gift books about military history today, which is Veterans Day.  I just added Ronald Millar’s Death of an army: the Siege of Kut, 1915-1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970) to the collection. Even though I spent some time studying World War I as an undergraduate, I don’t remember hearing about the Siege of Kut.  Here’s what it says on the dust jacket:

“In an enthralling story of heroism as well as horror, pathos as well as stupidity, Ronald Millar unfolds the events of a little-known but highly dramatic episode in the Middle East Campaign of World War I: the Turkish siege of an Anglo-Indian Army holed up in the small Mesopotamian (now Iraqi) village of Kut.  The siege, which lasted from early December, 1915, to late April, 1916, caused the loss of some 30,000 British and Indian soldiers and led to a government investigation even before the war was over.

The British, anxious to protect their oil-lines in the area, had dispatched a force led by General Sir Charles Townshend to capture Baghdad.  Notwithstanding river craft totally unsuitable for the fickle Tigris, the force quickly pushed upstream as far as Ctesiphon, the ancient capital of the Parthians.  There it was fought to a standstill by the Turks and retreated to Kut, where Townshend, assured of prompt relief, dug in.  The Turks launched a series of major attacks beginning on December 2, but lost so many men that they decided to concentrate on preventing the relief forces from reaching the British.  Meanwhile the men in the garrison were starving despite the airdrop of food supplies (the first recorded instance of aircraft being used in that way) and the gallant attempt by the steamer Julnar to run the blockade.  Townshend finally surrendered on April 27, 1916.

The author draws colorful portraits of the civilian Arabs trapped in the besieged town, of the ordinary soldiers on both sides, and of the primary antagonists in the death of an army: the Turks Nur-ud-Din and Halil Pasha and the Englishmen Townshend, Aylmer and Nixon – and even T.E. Lawrence who, still early in his career, was brought to the final negotiations to try to bribe the enemy with an offer of two million pounds.

In his first book Ronald Millar has combined a vivid writing style and impeccable research to produce an authentic piece of military history and a fascinating human story.”

Veterans Day is a day to honor those who came home.  We should honor them not only for what they have done, but for what they bring back — the memories of places like Kut and all their brothers-in-arms who died there.

“…Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.”

-From George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”, 1939.

Review: A happy marriage, by Rafael Yglesias

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Yglesias, Rafael. A happy marriage: a novel. New York: Scribner, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Yglesias’s novel is beautifully wrought, with meticulously crafted characters moving through the heartbreaking denouement of a thirty-year romance. Enrique, the protagonist, is saddled with the burden of herding his family through the final days of his wife Margaret’s life. In between the episodes of final goodbyes and medical crises, the reader sees how their romance started and how it unfolded through their years of happy marriage.

Of course, it could hardly be happy in the sense of blissfully moving from one joyous moment to the next. They have their problems, including the near dissolution of their marriage in its early years. What makes the reader cheer from the sidelines, even while it is revealed that Enrique had an affair, is the way he desperately wants to tell his wife, at the end of her life, how much he loves her, how much her very existence has made life worth living. His fear, as he coordinates a social calendar of final goodbyes for her friends and family, is that he won’t have a chance to tell her. This fear is pervasive, and seeing how these final days unfold make the novel engrossing.

Yglesias employs beautiful turns of phrase throughout the novel, putting words to feelings that many have experienced while dealing with the illness and death of a loved one. Enrique reveals how difficult it is to help other people cope emotionally, when he is trying so hard himself to do that as well: they were “demanding he put Band-Aids on their scrapes while he was bleeding to death” (88). Enrique deals with the demands of family, particularly Margaret’s parents concern with funeral arrangements. In passages like this, Yglesias shines in describing Margaret’s mother’s need to control the arrangements, to have them just the way her family has always had them, because the need for something familiar would almost make one feel safe in the midst of the uncertainty of a life without Margaret (184).

There are witty passages as well, like Enrique’s internal debate about selecting pants to wear on his first date with Margaret (129). Enrique and Margaret are great conversational foils, never devolving into the pattern of saying the same things to each other repeatedly, nor remaining silent because, after all these years, there is nothing left to say. Their relationship is alive and vibrant, and they still can surprise each other when they open their mouths. This is something beautiful to see, and it makes the ending of the novel so hard to bear.

The first chapter didn’t draw me in to the novel the way that the second – and each subsequent chapter – did. I do not mention this as a critique, but rather so that readers know that they might not be enthralled on first meeting the characters, but it is worth hanging on for a few more pages to let this story get a running start.

I think the great strength of this novel is the detailed expression of the emotions that swirl around the beginning and end of this marriage. These characters are vibrantly alive, and will remain lodged in my mind for some time now. It is an excellent read, even if it leaves the reader in tears.

Feminists who changed America, 1963-1975

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Love, Barbara J., ed. Feminists who changed America, 1963-1975. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Publisher’s description)

This book gets The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval.  Not only does it have over 2,200 biographical entries on feminists, but there is also a photo essay in the center of the book, between pages 256 and 257.

If you can’t think of entries you’d want to read, look at the photo essay and pick some names from the captions.  Or just randomly flip through the book.  This one is worth browsing.  What these women and men did, and still do, really inspires and impresses me to no end.

(Yes, your cataloger is a feminist.  It’s time to accept the label.)

Review: The poisoner’s handbook

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Blum, Deborah. The poisoner’s handbook: murder and the birth of forensic medicine in Jazz Age New York. New York : Penguin Press, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

I usually shy away from true crime books, simply because I feel like I’m rubber-necking at a car accident when I read them.  While Deborah Blum’s book is filled with true crime stories, it is also filled with science and history, so I felt less troubled by the crime stories than I would in reading a serial killer exposé.  Additionally, it was a real page-turner, written with the edge-of-your-seat, I-am-going-to-stay-up-way-too-late-reading-this-book kind of prose.

Blum’s tale is that of the rise of forensic medicine, particularly under the direction of Dr. Charles Norris, who became the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City in 1918, and his toxicologist, Dr. Alexander Gettler.  To tell their stories, she tells stories of the major poisons of the day, and how forensic medicine and toxicology were used to detect poisons.  With chapters on chloroform, wood alcohol, cyanides, arsenic, mercury, carbon monoxide, methyl alcohol, radium, ethyl alcohol, and thallium, she takes the reader on a tour of the crimes committed and the scientific advances made in detecting those poisons.  (While it’s called a ‘handbook’, you don’t have to keep an eagle eye on your coffee cup while you’re reading; no one can add one of these poisons to your mug and ‘get away with murder’.)

The book certainly is gory.  There are descriptions of autopsies and damaged organs, violent deaths, and experiments on animals done by our hero scientists.  However, I do not think Blum saturated the text with gore in a way that many contemporary crime novelists do.  If she provides a detail about a poisoning death, it is relevant to the medical understanding of death by poisoning.  However, the story is not for the faint of stomach.  (If you watch forensic science television shows, you’ll find Blum’s descriptions to be pretty standard fare.)

One of the more interesting lessons I learned from the book was the way that Prohibition was perceived by the public, the government, and the chief medical examiner.  I had not been aware of the methods used by the government in denaturing industrial alcohol, nor in adding poisons to it, so that it could not be distilled for drinking.  Dr. Norris was an outspoken critic of this practice, since his office saw the results: more people died each year of methyl alcohol poisoning or from drinking poorly distilled illegal liquor than had died from alcohol-related deaths in the years before Prohibition.  Thus, to Norris, the government was morally responsible for killing its citizens, even if it was not legally responsible.  This certainly changed my (admittedly superficial) idea that Prohibition was discontinued merely because the temperance unions lost their influence, or because of the rise in crime related to bootlegging.  Norris’s outrage over the poisoning of drinkers seems justified; no crime should carry an immediate death sentence.

Overall, I though Blum’s book was a great read, and it was informative.  It stirred an interest in reading more about the era and in reading more by Blum. I highly recommend it.