By the Bookshelf

The Bookshelf Has Moved

2007-11-12T03:50:00.001-08:00

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

2007-10-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-29T04:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-25T07:48:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

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

The Giver by Lois Lowry

2007-08-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

It's sort of Brave New World for kids, and is surprisingly heavy for a kids' book. It's set in a future world where society is perfectly ordered through sameness, and the main character is the one person who is chosen to be the holder of memories of things from before: emotion, color, art, music, violence, and so on. A friend who used to be a teacher recommended it; interesting read.

Get it from Amazon

Jim and Casper Go To Church by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper

2007-08-01T15:43:00.001-07:00

A nifty idea for a book - a minister and an atheist go to a bunch of churches and talk about what they think - that just doesn't quite come off as authentic. It's not their observations, it's the way it's written; the conversations sound like they were put together from written notes, and just sound very stilted. But there are some interesting observations about churches, particularly mega-churches, and the chapter in which they visit Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church is funny, devastating, and the one time they get seriously critical about what they're seeing.

Get it from Amazon

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

2007-07-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to include any spoilers, and there is probably nothing for me to say that will make anybody choose to read or not read this book so I'll tell a story instead.

My partner ordered it from Amazon and was out of town when it arrives, so I went to the post office with his little slip telling him he had a package. There were several people in line and they were all picking up their copies, shipped by Amazon.

They probably just should have had a special Harry Potter mail truck driving around the neighborhood passing them out.

So the series is done. I was satisfied.

Get it from Amazon

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

2007-07-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Chabon's new book is part detective story and part character drama. It's set in an alternate reality in which Israel, after World War II, didn't last long before its neighbors wiped it off the map, and the US provided a federal district near Sitka, Alaska as a Jewish homeland. (This was actually a real proposal, but one which was defeated thanks to the efforts of Alaska's delegate to Congress; in Chabon's alternate world, the delegate was killed in a random car accident in DC, and the proposal was passed.)

As "reversion" of the Jewish district back to the US (and subsequent displacement of its residents) approaches in weeks, Chabon follows a detective in Sitka as he tries to solve a murder case that winds up involving intrigue, faith-based politics, and the detective's own personal journey.

It's dense, but readable; I had a hard time at first because the narrative is a bit slow in the first quarter of the novel, as Chabon introduces us to the characters and their many demons. But in the end it all pays off, though not in the way I would have expected.

Get it at Amazon

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

2007-06-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

Al Gore is a smart man. He's right about a lot of what's wrong with the way our democracy functions (or malfunctions) now, and how the Bush administration and a toothless Congress have made things worse.

But somebody get that man an editor. Had this book been half its current length, it would have been a whole lot stronger.

The Assault on Reason at Amazon

The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

2007-06-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent point lurking in this book: that participatory Web 2.0 culture tends to drive out expertise and knowledge by making it financially unsupportable. Unfortunately, Keen argues his case so badly that the truth of this will be lost on many readers.

Keen's main argument is that participatory web culture - things like blogs, YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia - is creating a culture where no value is placed on actual knowledge, talent, training, or skill. And, he argues, a dot-com boom fueled by the creation of as many content platforms as possible that exist simply to allow users to broadcast themselves drives out the financial rewards for that skill and expertise.

Most importantly, Keen says, the idea that this results in worthwhile content, or is the "democratization" that Silicon Valley cultists like to talk about, is a fantasy.

I agree with him, as far as that goes. Unfortunately, the tirade he presents here is so flawed that even a sympathetic reader can see the problems with it. A few examples:

At times the book reads like a plea for sympathy for poor corporations that can't make a big profit off of music, video, and print content. I'm sorry, but pulling our heartstrings for Time Warner is not exactly an effective approach. Moreover, Keen completely glosses over the way these companies have accelerated their own demise. He's very eager to blame the music industry's woes on illegal downloading that's cut out the financial support for developing artists.

But his examples of what investment in artists can do relies on examples from decades ago (he talks about Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon, which - whether you like either album or not - clearly are examples of a record company spending the money to allow an artist to create a carefully crafted, well produced, cohesive album).

Of course, nothing like that has been happening for years. The music industry has been churning out derivative hits and the investment has been in marketing, not giving artists freedom to hone their craft, so they created a situation where their value no longer matched their price.

The same issue comes up with respect to the demise of independent bookstores. Yes, Amazon.com has been a very bad thing for them. Of course, Amazon isn't participatory web culture at all, but that doesn't bother Keen; Amazon is just a cost-cutting strategy.

And before Amazon, bookstore chains were doing the same thing. The problem isn't the internet; the internet is an accelerant here. The problem is the power of mass marketing, online or not.

Toward the end of the book, Keen goes off on a weird tangent regarding internet gambling and sex predators. Which are certainly things to be concerned about - but they don't relate to his central thesis, and he doesn't even try to make the connection. Instead we get facile statements about how badly-written laws like COPA should be enforced, glossing right over serious questions about appropriate limits on expression and the problems with a definition of "child pornography" that includes images that don't even include children.

But those are questions for serious people, and Keen establishes himself as a non-serious person here. Here's the rub, though; I think he's fundamentally right. It is not good for us, as a society, to see journalism struggling for financial survival while people get news from "citizen journalists" who don't actually investigate anything. It impoverishes us to have 3 million unsigned bands on MySpace releasing MP3s but not making enough money to buy food, but little financial supports for proven talents to do their work the way they used to.

I'm not anti-amateur - hello, I'm a blogger - but there is a role for the experts, the gatekeepers, the people who've invested in learning and developing skills.

I wish there were a better messenger delivering that news, though.

The Cult of the Amateur at Amazon. Yes, he sells his book on Amazon. Go figure.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

2007-06-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Somehow I'd never read this Vonnegut novel; it's a funny, insightful critique of religion and human foibles, describing the creation of new religion that acknowledges that all religions are untrue, but useful for keeping people happy. Combine that with the human tendency toward self-destruction, and you've got Vonnegut at his best.

Cat's Cradle at Amazon.com

Surveillance by Jonathan Raban

2007-06-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

I became interested in this after hearing Raban on a segment of Christopher Lydon's Open Source radio program. This is not, as it claims to be, a novel; it's more of a sketch of American post-9/11 paranoia in a country where everybody's watching somebody, and being watched. It's interesting, and I found myself giving it the benefit of the doubt... right up to the last couple of pages, where Raban gives us a stagey non-ending. I can't say it was a waste of time, but I am glad I got it from the library instead of buying it.

Surveillance at Amazon.com