The Bookshelf Has Moved

I've decided to start putting these book posts in my regular blog, tagged "books." (Clever, no?) You can find the latest one here. You can see just my book posts over there, or of course the whole blog. Thanks!

Harmful by Minors by Judith Levine

Judith Levine wants people to think critically about young people and sex, and that's enough to get lots of people very upset. Even before Harmful to Minors was published, she had Dr. Laura leading a jihad against her as an "apologist for pedophilia" and a Minnesota gubernatorial candidate using her book and the University of Minnesota's press as a campaign issue.

None of the critics had read the book, of course; that's convenient, because the book is nothing it was accused of being; it's a look at how we deal with child sexuality in our culture, the media, the criminal justice system, and the education system. And Levine's point with the book is that we treat the sexuality of young people as if it doesn't exist, it's a pathology if ita does, and if children act on it they will be victimized and damaged.

The sections on the law are particularly horrifying: young people who have consensual sex are labeled as victims or abusers, and if they fail to feel like they were victimized, they are educated to understand that they are damaged goods. (Healthy, no?)

It's a fairly dense book and crammed with citations of what studies there are of child sexuality - it's not an area that is particularly safe for researchers to delve into. As I read it, I wondered if many of the adults Levine talks to or writes about remember being teenagers themselves. You know, the period of life when hormones explode through your body in a big confusing rush? You'd think these people skipped from toddlerhood to adulthood.

But that's the big lie that all of this depends on - that children are utterly asexual and non-sensual beings until one day when they magically are sexual adults. It's a bit reminiscent of times not all that long ago when women were told that if they felt sexual pleasure they were sick and offered surgical correction to make sure it didn't happen anymore.

Levine also takes on the idea that any exposure to sexual images or information will either damage kids or make them run out and have sex, something clearly untrue to anyone who's actually watching what kids do.

The book is nothing that its critics said it was, but it is provocative, so the storm around it is not terribly surprising. There's a foreword by Jocelyn Elders, the surgeon general who got pushed out of her job for suggesting that children be told that masturbation is a normal, harmless thing.

Get it at Amazon

Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes

Peter Barnes, the founder of Working Assets, tackles a big issue in this book: how do you protect the public interest in a capitalist society? Traditionally we've tackled this through government regulation (or just privatized things and hoped for the best, which never seems to be the outcome). Barnes suggests a different approach, which he calls "Capitalism 3.0," an "upgrade" the "operating system" of capitalism (to use his analogy).

He begins by defining a "commons sector" - things like the physical environment and our culture - and makes the case (based on American and British law) that we have recognized that these things are the property of all citizens. He then proposes the creation of institutions to manage them, with explicit property rights.

The idea, put very simply, is that when someone dumps pollution into the environment, uses broadcast spectrum, or cuts down a forest, they are taking something with real value from its owners - all of us. Corporations will always do this, because they are designed to make money, and if you can take property from the public without paying for it, they make more money. Government has tried to control this through regulation but usually failed, because that control involves unpopular choices and because the democratic process is so influenced by wealth. His idea is that a group of trusts, designed to be somewhat isolated from political pressure but legally and financially accountable to the public, could protect the commons.

So, if you want to pollute the air - which belongs to everyone - you have to pay the trust managing the air for the privilege. Proceeds of these trusts would be redistributed back to the owners of the resource being managed - the public.

This becomes a self-regulating market mechanism for managing public resources, which are valuable but which currently have no property rights attached to them. He makes a good case for this as an alternative to failed approaches of the past, and the book is a concise and interesting description of his rationale for this and how it might actually work. The really hard part - how we'd get there - is what's missing, but that's s small criticism - he's clearly focused on the vision of where we might go, and the path there would be complex indeed.

Get it from Amazon.

Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists

The Granta catch up continues with a "best of young American novelists" issue. High quality as always with Granta. It was interesting to note than an enormous number of the best young American novelists are not natives of the US. That doesn't change the quality of the writing, of course, but it is interesting.

The pieces range from interesting excerpts from novels to true short stories and some interesting character sketches. It's unfortunate that they are arranged alphabetically by author; the tone kind of lurches around, and the issue ends of one of the weaker pieces. But still, good reading, what you'd expect from Granta.

Get it at Amazon

Granta 98: The Deep End

I love Granta, the British quarterly of new writing. I have an enormous stack to catch up on, and am working backward. This issue focuses on "people, whose experience of life suggests they have something to tell us about survival." Lots of good stuff, though I particularly enjoyed Jackie Kay's "The Last of the Smokers" and "Agammemnon's Truth" by Javier Cercas.

Get it from Amazon, where they are convinced it's Granta 99 rather than 98.

Leaving Reality Behind by Adam Wishart and Regula Bochser

I don't think this book got much attention when it was published... and it's been sitting on my shelf to be read for a couple of years. I'm glad I finally got to it - it's a fantastic look at the dot com craziness of the late 90s. It tells the story of the rapid rise and fall of eToys, the people who were going to turn toy retailing on its head (paging Amazon... paging Amazon...) and etoy, a group of European artists who were satirizing corporate ideas, and the rather nasty domain fight that broke out between them.

But what's really fascinating about it is the look at the insanity of that whole period, how people got all kinds of money with no hope of ever using it to make more, and battles over how commercial and community interests would coexist online.

Good reading.

Find it at Amazon

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

A fun little book about a world where there are only two dimensions, and how one of its inhabitants discovers that there is another world with three. Filled with little satirical barbs. Appeals to the nerd in me and contained some surprising little pleasures...

Get it at Amazon