Books

Michael Dirda has a very good “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090101761.html of Paul Park’s _A Princess of Roumania_ in the Washington Post today (warning: some spoilers); for my earlier review of Park’s novel, see “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/21/a-princess-of-roumania/. It’s really a lovely book – highly recommended. (Powells link here; Amazon (deprecated) here; all commission earnings go to charity).

My friend Karen Bennett blurbs Jaegwon Kim’s new book, Physicalism, or something near enough. The back cover, though, is careful to introduce Karen’s endorsement by saying only, “Advance praise for _Physicalism_.” Presumably some sharp-eyed editor realised it wouldn’t do for people to read “Advance praise for Physicalism, or something near enough.” Round our way, the title is proving to have all kinds of useful applications: “I was on time, or something near enough”, “Childcare, or something near enough”, “A viable constitution for Iraq, or something near enough.” I think it should catch on.

As I was sucking back my daily dose of Starbucks and Ask Amy this morning and feeling amiably distant from all things European, I came across a problem that Amy described as Dickensian. The dilemma – a comfortably-off American couple with no grandchildren who wish to lavish affection and a college fund on their cleaner’s daughter – is in fact more accurately in the mode of Jane Austen. Then, scrolling down the page, I found another letter to Amy from no less a personage than the president of the Jane Austen Society of North America who congratulated Amy for recommending Emma to a previous reader. If Amy had taken her own advice, and read Mansfield Park before she advised the petitioning would-be grandmother to get counseling, she might have answered differently.

[click to continue…]

[This is the first of a few book reviews that have been piling up on my desk – next up is Chris Mooney’s _The Republican War on Science_, and then sometime in the not _too_ distant future, Glyn Morgan’s _The Idea of a European Superstate_].

_Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again_ by Bruce Abramson, (the MIT Press 2005). Available from “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=29956&cgi=product&isbn=0262012170 and from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=henryfarrell-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0262012170/qid=1124806131/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1?v=glance%26s=books (deprecated).*

Bruce Abramson’s’ _Digital Phoenix_ is a smart read – it combines an excellent overview of the recent developments of the digital economy, with some important insights into how it works. The writing style is pacey, the stories (the Microsoft-Netscape battles, the MP3 wars, the birth of open source) are well told, and the quite substantial intellectual content is delivered in a user-friendly format. It’s the best non-technical account I’ve read of how network economies do and do not work in the information age. I’ll be assigning it to my students – as far as I can see, it’s the best and most complete account available. This said, there are two problems. First is its slightly breathy enconium to the new economy. All we need to do, says Abramson, is to renew our faith in the “corporate innovators and entrepreneurs who make growth possible,” and we can achieve the original promise of the information technology revolution. It isn’t that simple; the New Economy was never “everything it was cracked up to be”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/henwood-seminar, and the future, insofar as we can discern it, seems likely to be considerably weirder than Abramson gives it credit for being. Second is the concluding section which feels a bit tacked on, jumping into an argument over the fight for control of the information economy between terror movements and authoritarian governments on the one hand, and democratic liberals on the other. It reads like the conclusions of a very different book, and a substantially inferior one. [click to continue…]

About a month ago, Chris noted a new book that our own Harry Brighouse co-edited. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s more Brighouse that you should read! Specifically, Harry’s new book Justice published by Polity, as part of their “Key Concepts” series. Here’s a US link to it on amazon; here’s a UK link. (Disclosure: I just finished a book for the series that should be out early next year on Global Justice.)

This is simply the best introduction to contemporary philosophical accounts of justice around. So if readers of this blog want to learn about or brush up on their Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum, Nozick, Kymlicka, Jerry Cohen, et. al., you couldn’t do better than to read this. Best of all, it is written in a very accessible style that doesn’t presuppose any philosophical background. Really!
[click to continue…]

The Hugo award for best novel went to “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel” by Susanna Clarke, beating a strong field. Charles Stross, whose Iron Sunrise was also a contender, took out the best novella prize for The Concrete Jungle. And I’ll be surprised if we don’t see Ian McDonald, Iain M. Banks and China Miéville among future winners of the award.

I can’t imagine a person who voluntarily reads political blogs who wouldn’t enjoy The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank. It’s the hilariously self-serving autobiography of a fictional arrogant, oblivious Washington hack pundit with a keen antenna for suspect ethnicities. Here, the narrator recalls learning about the assasination of John F. Kennedy at his office at the weekly journal of opinion, New Terrain.

I wandered the corridor at New Terrain, sharing my grief with Johnny, Lionel, Tobias and Esther. It was, we knew, our duty to make over the magazine, which was scheduled to go to press that evening, and we met in Tobias’s messy office, stumbling over piles of books.

“It is as if a great athlete has been cut down in his prime,” I said, and they looked at me with astonishment. “As if Ted Williams was stopped in midswing. The game goes on- the demands of history assure that- but joylessly.”

Tobias looked, I thought, strangely impressed, his eyebrows aloft; I saw that Lionel was nodding vigorously, yet seemed unable to stop nodding. Esther’s wide lips parted as if to express a thought. Johnny Stapling, as if overcome by emotion, left the room.

“The shocked crowd does not like the pinch hitter,” I continued. “We cannot boo, because we know that he did not enter the game on his own volition, yet we resent him. Just minutes before we were watching someone else and the world was right.”

It became clear from their approving silence that these thoughts would be included in the memorial edition of New Terrain, and I took notes even as I uttered them.

Now that blogs have removed arrogance, narcissism and hackery from political punditry, we can look back at this and laugh.

(recommended by McSweeney’s)

I noted a few days ago that Senator Rick Santorum made a claim in an online interview about federal taxation. Senator Santorum said that the federal tax rate for the average family has gone up from 2% (in 1950) to 27% today. Furthermore, he claimed that income from a second worker simply replaces the money that the family pays in increased federal taxes. They would enjoy the same net income if taxes went back to 1950 levels and the second worker stayed at home.

I’m really rather sure that this isn’t true. I’m relying on the Tax Policy Center: They say that federal taxes on a family of four at the median income have gone up from about 7.4% to about 14.4%, and that the family would have saved $4436 if we could roll back tax rates. That doesn’t correspond to the Senator’s story.

I checked last night, and Santorum repeats this point in his book, It Takes a Family. It’s on page 123 and 124, and there’s no source. (There’s a bibliography of sorts, but it just lists a series of sources used in each section. There’s no way to connect any specific point to any source.) When I called his press office again to ask for a source, they referred me to the publisher, who couldn’t help me. Nonetheless, he’s repeated this claim at least two more times, on Hardball with Chris Matthews and on Fox News.

Shouldn’t the Senator care whether what he’s saying is right or wrong? Wouldn’t it be nice if a journalist asked him about it?

(Incidentally, is there anything more depressing than the “Current Events” section of a modern-day bookstore? There are so many rows of hastily-written, 200-250 page books with giant print, huge margins, and a cover featuring a smug bastard under a title like “THEY’RE ALL AGAINST YOU: How Hollywood, the French, and the CIA Have Conspired to Pollute Your Precious Bodily Fluids and What You Can Do To Stop Them.” Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah looks like Winston Churchill in all that dreck.)

Here’s the first draft of my Hugos preview. Comments much appreciated.

Thanks to all who contributed. Australian readers can see the final product in Friday’s Financial Review

[click to continue…]

I’ve decided to do a pre-announcement review of the candidates for the 2005 Hugo Award for best novel. I’ll post a draft before too long, I hope.

But one vision of the future disturbs me. I was reading Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise (a strong contender, but I liked his Singularity Sky better), set in the 24th century, and he introduces a character who had inherited the masthead of The Times and announced his profession as “warblogger”.

I don’t really suppose our little virtual community is going to last a thousand years, or even 300, but just in case, can’t we find some way to agree on a better name than “blogger”?

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/07/a_better_class_.html has a go at the anthropologists at “Savage Minds” for “two”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/25/whats-wrong-with-yalis-question/ “posts”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropology%u2019s-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/ which in turn attack Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=29956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=Jared%20Diamond%20Guns%20Germs%20Steel. I’m mostly in agreement with Brad, but think that there’s a more interesting question lurking in the background; the Savage Minds critiques seem to me to be less motivated by professional jealousy than by a wrongheaded understanding of levels of causation. Ozma, one of the Savage Minds bloggers suggests “in comments”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropology%e2%80%99s-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/#comment-824 that while she thinks that Diamond is wrong on the facts, her more fundamental objection to his work is that it’s _the wrong kind of anti-racism._ [click to continue…]

I’ve just finished reading Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=29956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=Paul%20Park%20Princess%20Roumania (warning: mild spoilers ahead). The book deserves to become a modern classic; it’s as good and as serious as the first two books of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” I’ve been an admirer of Park’s novels for a long time. His previous books are wonderful, but there’s a clear progression from the gorgeous, baroque, but slightly undisciplined prose of his first book, _Soldiers of Paradise_ and its somewhat inferior sequels, through _Celestis_ to _Three Marys_ which is written in language as plain and lovely as a stone. “A Princess of Roumania” is better again – strange images rendered more striking by the very matter-of-factness with which they are described. His first novel for young adults, it takes a standard plot – a girl and her companions catapulted into a strange new world of magic and enchantment – and does unexpected things with it. John Holbo has just written a “post”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/if_we_must_have_fish/ on the Valve about novels in which the characters come to realize that they are inhabiting a fictional world, in which “the laws of the universe are the laws of genre.” Much of the power of _A Princess_ comes from its _refusal_ of the cosiness that this all too often implies.

bq. “We’re not going home,” she said. The flatness, the sureness in her own voice surprised her. And it wasn’t true – she’d read a lot of books like this, where the girl wakes up and she’s a beautiful princess in another world. But she always goes back again. She always goes home. “We’re not going home,” she heard herself repeat.

I’ve a theory, which I suspect is hardly original to me, that the magic in really good children’s fantasy draws its resonance from a child’s perception of what it must be like to be grown up. When you’re a child or a pre-adolescent, the adult world seems an attractive and terrifying place. Adults have power, but are driven by forces and desires that a child can only dimly understand; wild magic. Thus, for example, when Susan rides with the daughters of the moon and the Wild Hunt in Alan Garner’s _The Moon of Gomrath_, she’s glimpsing for a moment what it will be like to be a woman. In contrast, the magic in mediocre children’s fantasy is all too often domesticated, rationalized, and stripped of its real force. _A Princess of Roumania_ seems to me to be an oblique rejoinder to the kind of children’s fantasy in which magic is under control, in which the child goes home. There’s no returning for Miranda Popescu; her entire world (our world) turns out to be an elaborate fiction, a shelter from reality that quite literally disappears in a puff of smoke. She and her friends are propelled, only half grown-up into the world of adulthood, of complex responsibilities and obligations. A world where magic exists, but isn’t really understood, where adults lay complicated plans, but don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. In most fantasy, the hero or heroine is fulfilling a plot, a prophecy, a pre-ordained destiny – at the pivotal moment in _A Princess_, Miranda refuses the path that has been laid out for her, and the power of adults to decide what to do with her life, instead deciding herself. All this, and the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, perhaps the most wonderfully described, and _sympathetic_ villainess that I’ve ever seen in a YA book. I can’t say more than to reiterate that the book is a delight.

Everyone else read Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm months ago. But better late than never. OK, I just read about Ike’s famous military-industrial complex speech and Kennedy’s inauguration. And here’s a thing.

On January 19 [1961], the American nuclear program suffered its thirteenth “broken arrow” when a B-52 exploded in midair in Utah, luckily without any of the missiles armed; the fourteenth was ten days later when a B-52 flying a routine Strategic Air Command training mission out of Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base crashed near a North Carolina farm. The aircraft’s two nuclear bombs jettisoned and five of their six safety mechanisms were unlatched by the fall. (p. 101)

Is that as bad as it sounds? That is, did North Carolina almost blow up? Or would it just have been a (comparatively) minor matter of a serious radiation leak making some farmland uninhabitable for a period of centuries?

UPDATE: I had the date as 1960 but comments corrected me. It was my mistake, not Perlstein’s.

I gave up on _Cryptonomicon_ shortly after my “despairing post about it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/29/cryptonomicon/ and decided I needed something a bit funnier. So I picked up “Cold Comfort Farm”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141182652/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ and “Scoop”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316926108/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. The latter was OK, but the former was terrific, right down to the helpful marking of “the finer passages with one, two or three stars.” An ancestor of “a well-known blogger”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/ shows up early on, too. This should really find its way into Dr. B’s sidebar:

bq. Mrs Smiling’s second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for a perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the word. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation. She was an authority on the cut, fit, colour, construction and proper functioning of brassieres; and her friends had learned that her interest, even in moments of extreme emotional or physical distress, could be aroused and her composure restored by the hasty utterance of the phrase: “I saw a brassiere to-day, Mary, that would have interested you…”

The urge to quote more is hard to resist. Here a particular religious psychology is accurately diagnosed:

bq. Flora was surprised to find him so astute, but reflected that religious maniacs derived considerable comfort from digging into their motives for their actions and discovering discreditable reasons which covered them with good, satisfying sinfulness in which they could wallow to their heart’s content.

And a persistent vice of academics:

bq. She knew intellectuals always made a great fuss about the titles of their books. The titles of biographies were especially important. Had not _Victorian Vista_, the scathing life of Thomas Carlyle, dropped stone cold last year from the presses because everyone thought it was a boring book of reminiscences, while _Odour of Sanctity_, a rather dull history of drainage reform from 1840 to 1873, had sold like hot cakes because everybody thought it was an attack on Victorian morality.

All this and Aunt Ada Doom (who “saw something narsty in the woodshed”), too.