Books

I was a late reader, only really mastering the basics as I approached 8, by that time having been designated a dullard by most of my teachers (reasonably enough given that I also couldn’t tie my shoelaces or put on my clothes, and spent a lot of time staring aimlessly into space). So I missed most of Enid Blyton’s books for little kids (you know, the racist ones (but also scroll down this page)). But I read almost every single one of her books for older kids (you know, the sexist and class-ridden ones) – the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Adventurous Four, the Adventure Books, the Mystery books, the R books, even, oddly, Mallory Towers (for some reason I spurned the St. Clare’s books, even though they must have been almost exactly the same as the Mallory Towers books).

And I never once, in my whole childhood, read a word by Malcolm Saville.

[click to continue…]

My book, “Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs”:http://www.lastbestgifts.com, is “reviewed this weekend”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Postrel.t.html?ex=157680000&en=f390b3396e0ec28a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink by “Virginia Postrel”:http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/ in the _New York Times_. Obviously, I’m delighted: Virginia’s review is generous and perceptive, and in many ways it’s hard to think of a better choice of reviewer. For one thing, as many readers will probably know, Virginia is herself an organ donor — she “gave one of her kidneys”:http://www.american.com/archive/2006/november/organs-for-sale to her friend “Sally Satel”:http://www.sallysatelmd.com/ — and now regularly writes about the organ shortage and market incentives. For another, she has also followed the growth of economic sociology as a subfield, writing “a very good piece about it for the Boston Globe”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/07/24/market_share/ a while ago. And last, she has a generally libertarian point of view, and the stereotype is that libertarians and academic sociologists should be flinging abuse at each other on the topic of altruism, self-interest and the market — especially when it comes to markets in things like human organs. I wrote the book partly in the hope that it would advance the debate beyond some of the entrenched clichés that both sides cling to. Virginia’s review encourages me that I might have been in some way successful in this respect.

I was going to do a review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road last year, but then got stuck into an email dialogue with China Mieville about it. I then started to write a revised review, but abandoned it; my views on the book had changed as a result of what China said, and it didn’t feel honest to write without some reference to the conversation. So here, in lieu of a review, is a lightly edited version of the conversation (I’ve lost the first email in which I said, as best as I remember, that I thought The Road was great, but since that was the only critical judgement that the email had on the book, I don’t think that posterity is missing out on much). CM denotes China’s bits, and HF mine. NB that this is a personal email conversation (albeit one that’s posted with China’s permission) so the tone is more conversational than it would be in a book review. NB also that spoilers abound. The rest below the fold. [click to continue…]

I’ve just finished reading Philip Kitcher’s new book Living With Darwin (UK). It is fantastic. He provides a careful but completely accessible defense of Darwin’s ideas about evolution, against the defenders of Intelligent Design theory. He also agrees with religious opponents of evolutionary theory that it is a genuine threat to a certain kind of religious belief. He calls this “providentialist” belief, on which “the universe was created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and is especially concerned for humanity”. Darwin really is a threat to their beliefs and, in a nice observation that he attributes to Christopher Peacock, Darwin is probably singled out because he is the only threat whose views get encountered in a systematic way by anyone who does not get an elite college education in the humanities (in the US especially). Voltaire, Hume, Kant, all might be seen as worse threats if anyone knew who they were.

[click to continue…]

I just finished reading ,The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (UK) and want to recommend it to everyone else who is several years behind the curve. (My next review will be of a book that has today as its publication date, honest). Before Daniel rolls his eyes about “bloody Marvel comics” I should say that initially I had no intention of reading it. Chabon is compared on the sleeve with Cheever and Nabokov, neither of whom I have read; there is no indication of any murders in it, or English detectives solving them; and even I find the idea of a novel about people writing comics slightly silly. What prompted me to read it was the enthusiasm of my wife, a person who holds comics in the kind of contempt that people with a sense of humour reserve for the “humour” pages of Reader’s Digest. (My daughter and I finally made her read some Tintin and Asterix a year or so ago, at which point she relented slightly, but only with regard to French and Belgian comics). And she was right, Kavalier and Clay is a wonderful novel. The central characters (surprisingly enough called Kavalier and Clay) are both realistically drawn – Kavalier is a brilliant obsessive who lives mostly in his head, escapes pre-war Czechoslovakia in a coffin and, once in New York is drawn into the comic business by his cousin, Clay, right in the middle of the golden age. He is determined to bring his family to join him, and, like Clay (who idolizes him) determined somehow to bring America into the war. Their great creation, The Escapist, seems to be loosely modeled on the radio serial character Chandu the Magician. Its hard to say much more without giving too much away, but there are really five central characters, all of them lovingly drawn – Kavalier, Clay, the bohemian girl Rosa Saks with whom both of them become involved, a long-dead New York City, and the world of the comic book production team. Though long, its moves at a fast pace, and I think what I liked best about the novel was the good-heartedness of the author – all the central characters and most of the supporters are flawed but decent people, and none the less interesting for that. I guess I’ll have to read his novel with the word “mysteries” in the title, even though it doesn’t seem to involve any murders, unfortunately…

I finished Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860467768/junius-20 a few weeks ago. It took me a very long time to read. Usually this is a sign that I’m not getting on with a book, but not in this case. Rather, Laxness’s prose is so rich, his descriptions are so compelling and his observations so unsettling, that I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time without taking a break. Certainly it is the best book I’ve read all year, and maybe over the last five or so.

[click to continue…]

Our Scott has unleashed impressive versificational forces (here and here). In comments, Adam Roberts suggests we try to get The Crooked Timber Littel Booke of Political, Philosophical and Scientifik Limerics out by X-Mas. I am duty-bound to report that I have already written A Philosophical Abecedarium, if somehow you managed to miss it back in 2002. I invite new contributions. (I’ve got two ‘k’s, so I might as well have dupes for the others.)

And let me take this opportunity to continue my occasional series of comics recommendations. In this thread, everyone piped up with faves, but no one mentioned Powers, by Bendis and Oeming. It’s more or less a cop procedural, with the protagonists as ordinary human officers responsible for investigating ‘Powers’-related crimes. You can imagine how that might get amusing. The hard-boiled dialogue is just great. And, in fact, you can read the entire first story arc – Who Killed Retro Girl? – here. (The navigation is a bit confusing. Most of the apparent links are just for jokey decoration. Click on the little ‘click here’ button in the Retro Girl box at the top. That takes you here. Then click the small, ochre ‘full daily page archive’ button on the left. Then pull down the little pull-down thingy to start at the beginning, rather than with today’s offering – which is p. 110. Whew! Now you just keep clicking ‘next’ through all 110 pages. You probably would have figured that out yourself.) Some of the pages are more full-featured, with links to pages of the original script, sketches and such. For fanboys.

The first year of the series – a whopping 450 pages worth – is available very cheaply: Powers, vol. 1 [amazon]. Good deal.

Aha, via “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/12/the_averaged_am.html I see that a book I’ve been waiting for has just been published. Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public is a study of the history of quantitative social research in America, documenting how Americans came to think of themselves as the subjects of social science, and how the categories of survey research got embedded in our culture. From the publisher:

bq. Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as “the average American” and as intimate as the sexual self. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society–and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

I knew Sarah in grad school and heard her present parts of the project once or twice. It seemed to me then that she was going to write an absolutely first-class book. Apparently it’s just won the Social Science History Association’s President’s book award, so it looks like I was right.

Belle and I are preparing to fly home to the old country. A while back some of you asked about good comics for kids. It so happens I have a couple fine choices I am preparing to dispense on the long plane flight: Owly comics, by Andy Runton. At the author’s site you can preview lots of stuff. It’s very charming and suitable for anyone over the age of 2. No words. Just pictures of worms and birds and the occasional squirrel. So, for example, over a 10 page spread, Owly rescues Wormy from drowning in a puddle and nurses him back to health. Then the two set off to find Wormy’s parents. (That from The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer. You can preview it.) Here’s an amazon link.

Thanks, Chris. And thanks to the people who contributed to the excellent comment thread. Let me try to continue the discussion by attempting to clarify what I had in mind in the passage that Chris quotes.

[click to continue…]

Via Legal Theory Bookworm I see that Samuel Freeman’s book Justice and the Social Contract is now out (the opportunity for immodesty is irresistible — my own book, On Education is, incredibly, on the same list as Freeman’s). A collection of his papers including at least 2 that are previously unpublished, this might qualify for Chris’s list of important books in political philosophy. (My only doubt is that, as a collection of papers, it might not meet his criteria, but I have a strong suspicion that reading them straight through will be a different experience from reading them one at a time). Looking forward, soon, to Freeman’s next book, Rawls which everyone will have to read.

Following up on my earlier post about the difference in the marketing and subsequent sales of two similar books, here is a bit of an update. The current (Nov 30, 2006) issue of Nature has a review* of my father István Hargittai’s book The Martians of Science. Likely as a result, the book is now ranked #87,665 on Amazon.com and #33,109 on Amazon UK. Earlier today it was even higher (#56,649 in the US, #16,279 in the UK), but I didn’t have time to blog until now. This is a much better figure than over one million, which it was at some point recently. Of course, the change could well be due to no more than one or two purchases. I’m not sure why it is always higher on Amazon UK, perhaps Amazon lists fewer books on that site.

[*] Nature requires subscription. Here is a screenshot of the review.

Just to piggyback on “Henry’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/30/starship-stormtroopers-how-are-ya/ about Orson Scott Card’s “new novel”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/11/today-in-aesthetic-stalinism.html, I was pleased to learn from the excerpt Scott Lemiuex “posted”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/11/today-in-aesthetic-stalinism.html that, like me, the hero spent his grad student years at “Princeton”:http://www.princeton.edu.

bq. Princeton University was just what Reuben expected it to be — hostile to everything he valued, smug and superior and utterly closed-minded. … Yes, a doctorate in history would be useful. But he was really getting a doctorate in self-doubt and skepticism, a Ph.D. in the rhetoric and beliefs of the insane Left. … In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.

Fantastic! Princeton’s a great university, though in the past I’ve said myself that it can be a bit closed minded and smug. _I_ had thought this might grow out of its role as the “Southernmost Ivy”, its culture of selective Eating Clubs, its astonishingly loyal, cranky and tradition-worshipping undergraduate alumni, its “historically”:http://www.cia-on-campus.org/princeton.edu/consult.html “close”:http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/00/0110/p/espionage.shtml connections with the CIA, stuff like that. But now I know better. “All together now”:http://tigernet.princeton.edu/~ptoniana/oldnassau.asp, “Tune every heart and every voice …”

I’m writing this post in part to recommend Charles Stross’s _The Jennifer Morgue_ (publisher, Powells, Amazon, As Brad DeLong says, if you’re into Cthulhu mythos, operating system humour, spy novels and parodies of bureaucracy, this is the novel for you. But mostly, I’m writing it to perpetrate the pun in the title, which in addition to being atrocious is also almost certainly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t read the book already. But it could have been worse … [worser]Goldfingerling? Branzino Royale? Flounderball?[/worser] _Much_ worse.