We owe much to Francis Bacon for his pioneering work in establishing the scientific method. There's none of that in this book, but surely anyone who mWe owe much to Francis Bacon for his pioneering work in establishing the scientific method. There's none of that in this book, but surely anyone who made such essential contributions to science would have to be a fine essayist as well.
A few of these essays are simple, practical and smart and deal with subjects that we all think about, but not so deeply as Bacon. These are reminiscent of Montaigne and are worthy of Montaigne's genius. In particular, the ones that fell into this category for me were "Of Travel," "Of Riches" and "Of Youth and Age".
Some deal with economic questions, such as "Of Usury". In these Bacon shows himself to be smart and moderate in his methods. For example, he says that money is like muck because it works best if you spread it. He advocates for legal usury with most loans at a fixed 5% rate, with a separate class of high interest loans for risky transactions. But a century before Adam Smith, there is much about economics that escapes him.
Then there are the essays that speak to his experience as a royal advisor and his efforts to lobby for more prestigious and better paying positions, such as "Of Counsel" and "Of Negotiating." His ideas are not bad, but for me these essays had a bit of the stink of politicking.
And then there are the rest. There were gems of wisdom to be found, but they were buried deep in a convoluted style and the prejudices of Bacon's era. So overall, there was much good to be found here, but not up to the standard of Bacon's model, Montaigne, whose essays are almost uniformly wise and timeless....more
I have not read Mr. Gide's work before, and I think that starting with this essay collection was not the best introduction for me. Now I need to read I have not read Mr. Gide's work before, and I think that starting with this essay collection was not the best introduction for me. Now I need to read one of his novels or some of his longer form literary criticism, maybe his writing on Dostoyevsky. In this book, Mr. Gide comes across as a decent person and a thoughtful observer of art and society, but not at the level of brilliance that I hoped for and half expected. I like how he tries to find the good in everything. Even when he writes about people with whom he disagrees, he is able to find positive things to say and to avoid going on the attack. That stands in refreshing contrast with the low level of polarized attack discourse that we commonly see in public forums today. My favorites in this collection were the essays on Conrad and Paul Valery which glow with personal warmth and affection. I also liked the essay on the little lemur that Mr. Gide brings back from Africa as a pet, which sadly, but not surprisingly sickens and dies. Again, you can feel how much he loves the little creature, and at the same time he feels an appropriate guilt for snatching it from its natural environment and enslaving it as a pet....more
I liked Mr. Macfarlane's walking book, The Old Ways. This seemed to have even greater promise. What lies beneath the surface? Secrets certainly, but aI liked Mr. Macfarlane's walking book, The Old Ways. This seemed to have even greater promise. What lies beneath the surface? Secrets certainly, but also caves, minerals, fungus, tales of adventure, the dead and much mythology. Mr. Macfarlane covers all of these topics and more. But somehow it didn't come together for me. I wanted more of a common theme. I wanted a new way of thinking about the world below, a paradigm that would show me connections and that would help me to frame my future thinking about the Underland. But I didn't get that. The writing is good, and there's coherence within each chapter, but it felt to me more like a collection of essays than a unified book....more
Too often I follow the addict's mantra that everything worth doing is worth doing to excess. But even without the compulsive need for more possessed bToo often I follow the addict's mantra that everything worth doing is worth doing to excess. But even without the compulsive need for more possessed by many of us with addictive minds, isn't there glory in going overboard? The simple designs of Japan and ancient Greece are beautiful, but so are the complexities of the Baroque and Rococo. I love to look at a complex painting or architectural flourish and discover new details that add to the whole each time I look at it. In my own home and office, I favor clutter. The mess is my mess and its very messiness sparks my joy. So there, Marie Kondo! And who can resist the feeling of bounty that comes with having enough to meet all of your basic needs and then some? So the idea that is touted as the premise behind these essays is a good one, a nice antidote to popularized ideas about declutter and less being more.
But Ms. Rothfeld didn't take it far enough for me. There are a lot more spandrels and curlicues to be found in the idea of excess than she discusses in her essays. I wanted more excess in her theory of excess.
I had another big issue, which was that Ms. Rothfeld spent too much time shooting fish in a barrel. Gurus of minimalism, purveyors of MacMindfulness and fragmented post-modern literature are easy targets. I would have liked it better if she could have found some new, harder to hit targets for her scorn of simplicity. Maybe there is some hidden beauty in an insanely complicated and cluttered 300 page prospectus for an offering of a collateralized debt obligations. I don't think so, but it would have been fascinating for her to make a case for beauty to be found in insanely excessive things in which nearly all of us can only see ugliness. Come on, go out on a limb! Risk it all! Isn't that a part of the greatness of excess?
There were a number of other potentially fascinating ideas hinted at in these essays but not fully explored - the idea of eroticism in the repellent, disappointment in stories that end, the concept of beauty lying in the elusive or in surprise, rather than in symmetry or conformity to conventional norms. Ms. Rothfeld was thinking in interesting directions. I hope that she continues to do so. If she would just dare to dive a little deeper and to follow her ideas further in the directions that they point, I could come to love the way her mind works. Give us more, more and then some more, Becca!...more
Dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, deer, tigers and all the rest of the animals that live among and around us parade through the pages of this book. SusanDogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, deer, tigers and all the rest of the animals that live among and around us parade through the pages of this book. Susan Orlean gives us a series of essays about our relationship with the animals we love and live with. I could certainly relate to many of her feelings about our animal friends and acquaintances. There's a lot of anthropomorphizing, though that's not always a bad thing. If it can make me calmer, kinder and more loving to think of the animals around me in human terms, that's mostly fine, though all of us have known animal lovers who take it a step or two too far and lose sight of who the animals are in treating them like humans....more
Another good book from one of my local free little libraries. This one doesn't fit easily into any conventional genre. It's a series of essays about hAnother good book from one of my local free little libraries. This one doesn't fit easily into any conventional genre. It's a series of essays about how we relate to nature and fit nature into our unnatural environment in the modern world. The first essay which describes the extinction of the passenger pigeon is a typical story of heedless destruction of a bird once so prolific that its flocks darkened the sky and the collective beating of wings sounded like thunder. Until the 1870s whenever the massive flocks came, the hunters could bag three birds with each shot by aiming into the flock without picking out individual targets. And then over a stretch of a decade they went from being overwhelmingly many to extinction. In this essay the focus is on how the tragedy of extinction was blamed on the hunters while the consumers who ate the birds in fancy restaurants and the trap shooters who used them for sport and target practice got a free pass. But then it goes the opposite way in the next essay that discusses how the Audubon Society was formed by a group of women who opposed the practice of using stuffed birds and exotic feathers on women's hats. Here the entire blame for the birds being hunted to extinction was put on the consumers. The later essays shift perspective a bit, discussing what is nature and what is artifice in the modern world. It turns out that upon examination the most artificial things, like plastic lawn flamingos have a bit of nature in them and the most natural seeming things, like the goods at The Nature Company and nature shows on television are filled with artifice. What is nature anyway? Upon consideration, everything that we normally think of as being natural is marked by the heavy hand of humans. Where can we find true nature or does it even really exist? And if it does exist, how can we enjoy it when our every interaction with it spoils it and turns it into a human thing? But surely we can't just throw up our hands and let humans continue to worm their way into everything and ruin it. I think that we have to be satisfied with matters of degree and accept a certain amount of human intervention as inevitable while seeking to see ourselves as part of nature living in symbiosis with it while still recognizing that we change it constantly by our every action....more
Unfortunately, I have decided that Kate Zambreno is not for me. It's a little hard for me to put my finger on exactly why. She's smart. She writes welUnfortunately, I have decided that Kate Zambreno is not for me. It's a little hard for me to put my finger on exactly why. She's smart. She writes well. She cares about her family. She cares about art and literature and speaks of them with some authority. So what's not to like? I should be part of her fan club, but I'm not. I think perhaps she is a little too tightly wound for me, too concerned about getting it right, too concerned about raising her daughters the right way. She doesn't have the ease, the flow, the charm that I wished I could find in her writing and that would make me fall in love with her as a reader.
At the same time that I read this one, I have been reading "The Long Form" by Kate Briggs, which is also about a mother's relationship with her new-born daughter, which is reflected and refracted through the lens of literature as the new mom reads "Tom Jones" in her brief moments apart from her daughter. In that book the mother/daughter relationship is much closer, more intense, more compassionate than in Ms. Zambreno's book, and the connection to literature is organic to the mother/daughter story, not just the musings of the smart mother about life and culture. It's a totally different reading experience. To be honest I wasn't loving Mr. Briggs' book when I started it. It was only when I picked up "The Light Room" and felt dissatisfied with it that I began to understand what an accomplishment "The Long Form" is....more
I read one earlier book by John McPhee about the geology of California. It was quite good, but I had forgotten that he wrote it until he references itI read one earlier book by John McPhee about the geology of California. It was quite good, but I had forgotten that he wrote it until he references it a third of the way into this book. This book is mostly a career retrospective by an older writer. Mr. McPhee is currently 92. I enjoyed his memories of how he built his career as a writer, his many years at Princeton and his dealings with his students. Most of all I enjoyed his discussion of the projects that he started but never finished writing. But I think that the whole thing would have been much more meaningful to me if I had been better acquainted with his work. This would be a lot of fun for anybody who is a McPhee fan. For the rest of us who don't know him or only know him a little, it is good enough, but it would have been better for me to have read a couple more of his other books first....more
There were times when I wanted to throw the book against the wall and sneer at Ms. Biss for her privilege and for her hand wringing over her complicitThere were times when I wanted to throw the book against the wall and sneer at Ms. Biss for her privilege and for her hand wringing over her complicity in the evils of capitalism. Oh, come on. If she were sincere in her convictions, she'd throw it all over and live in one room with nothing more than a cot and a night table and devote her days to the poor. And even then she'd still wear clothes made in sweatshops in Bangladesh and use electricity made with fossil fuels. Just accept it! But then I'd look in the metaphorical mirror and see more of myself in her point of view than I like to admit. I have many of the same thoughts that she expresses - wanting to find a way to live my life in a way that is not purely materialistic, that leaves a light footprint, that doesn't further oppress the poor. But though I am not strongly drawn to material things, I do like having my own house in a desirable neighborhood, equipped with basic modern comforts. It has always been important to me to take care of my family. And I have sought and enjoyed well paying, mostly rewarding work that isn't overtly damaging most of the time to people or the world. Look at all of the qualifications in my words! Of course, I am complicit, probably more so than Ms. Biss, and it bothers me (a little), but I do nothing about it. How did I get up on this high horse of judging her? Despite my occasional reservations about her perspective, Ms. Biss got me thinking about myself and the way that I live my own life. It's hard to ask for more than that in a book....more
I liked Hector Tobar's novel, "The Barbarian Nurseries." This was even better.
This book is a lyrical celebration of what it means to be Latino in the I liked Hector Tobar's novel, "The Barbarian Nurseries." This was even better.
This book is a lyrical celebration of what it means to be Latino in the United States. It covers the good, the bad and all of the rest. It is beautiful. We are lucky to have these wonderful people living among us to enrich our world. The old idea of the Melting Pot is wrong. We don't need to all blend together into a single whole, but each ethnicity in the United States influences the others, so that we all become something different here than our ancestors were in their old world, wherever that was. And as Mr. Tobar points out, Latinos are not themselves a single culture within the United States but are many different interconnected cultures.
One idea that I liked is that it is better in fiction and art and journalism not to focus on Latinos as victims or as heroes. We are all victims sometimes and heroes sometimes, but that isn't who anyone is most of the time, and focusing on those aspects of a person paints a false picture that may be misleading and sometimes condescending. So in "The Barbarian Nurseries" all of Mr. Tobar's characters are imperfect. Sometimes they are harsh or stupid. They make mistakes. But still they are mostly good-hearted and are almost always interesting and ultimately sympathetic....more
The beginning of this book is quite beautiful. It is literary criticism, but it is also almost poetry. I didn't learn so much about the great HispanicThe beginning of this book is quite beautiful. It is literary criticism, but it is also almost poetry. I didn't learn so much about the great Hispanic poets who Mr. Paz discusses and who I will never read since my Spanish isn't good enough and since reading poetry in translation is usually an exercise in futility, but the flow, the style, the imagery and the emotional quality of Mr. Paz' writing transported me. It made me think about Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," another work about a poet reading poetry that transcends its subject and becomes a work of art in its own right.
The second half of the book consists of essays on drugs/alcohol, philosophy, social questions and spiritual/religious topics. It was interesting, but not terribly deep or transformative. Don't get me wrong - Mr. Paz is well read and erudite. He'd make a great dinner table companion, but there was nothing earthshaking in this part of the book, which was a bit of a letdown after the beauty of the first part....more
Three times in the past week I have run into references to Lewis Thomas as a top popular science writer. I had to give him a try. This book was writteThree times in the past week I have run into references to Lewis Thomas as a top popular science writer. I had to give him a try. This book was written in 1972 and sadly has not aged well. Mr. Thomas may have been ahead of his time when he was writing, but his social focus, his writing style and his science all felt dated. There was nothing that offended me or that I found wrong with his perspective. It's only that it was yesterday's news. I think that in the field of popular science, though there are exceptions, it generally pays to focus on works that are more current than this....more
I like Dickens and Prince too, but it's a bit of stretch to find commonalities. The big idea here is that they were both prolific. That does count forI like Dickens and Prince too, but it's a bit of stretch to find commonalities. The big idea here is that they were both prolific. That does count for something, though it's a slender reed to hang a whole book on. So it's really just brief blended biographies of two great creative artists that Mr. Hornby likes. Why not? I've found plenty of worse ways to spend a few hours than reading this book....more
Edwidge Danticat is a respected writer, and she has one of the world's best names. I have never read her before, so I thought I'd try this short book Edwidge Danticat is a respected writer, and she has one of the world's best names. I have never read her before, so I thought I'd try this short book as an introduction to her work. She wrote this book about the treatment of death in literature as a way of coming to terms with the death of her own mother. Death in literature is a giant subject. Death is a presence in nearly every work of fiction ever written and in much non-fiction. You couldn't possibly address it comprehensively it in a single big book, much less in a little one like this. But comprehensive treatment isn't the point, as the approach of Ms. Danticat is deeply personal. She looks at how death has been a personal subject for other writers and how their writings have been personally meaningful for her and have impacted her dealing with the final illness and death of her mother. It's well done. It just wasn't the right thing for me at this moment in my own life. I am blessedly at a point in my own life when nobody has died recently or is about to die (I hope). I'm more interested in affirming life than death right now, so I didn't love the book as much as I might have if I had read it at a different time....more
This book was worth reading for the title alone, though it turns out that the title is a bit of a red herring since Dostoyevsky may or may not have reThis book was worth reading for the title alone, though it turns out that the title is a bit of a red herring since Dostoyevsky may or may not have read Hegel when he was in Siberia and probably didn't burst into tears if he did. The idea behind the title is that when Dostoyevsky was in Siberia he might have read Hegel's bit about Siberia being outside of the flow of history, which Dostoyevsky might have taken as a slight on his beloved Russia or which might have caused Dostoyevsky to cry at a point in his life when he was embracing the spiritual and rejecting the rationalism of people in the Hegelian camp despite the pivotal position of Hegel for Russian intellectuals of Dostoyevsky's generation.
The bigger idea that runs through all of these essays is that the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment caused Western culture to lose something vital and important. Sometimes there is deep wisdom and humanity to be found in the irrational that is lost in rationalistic reductionism. We need to embrace the whole, not just the parts, to experience happiness, melancholy, fear and the transcendent in ways that were part of pre-Enlightenment thinking and that defy rational analysis. Maybe we shouldn't be maximizing happiness. That diminishes the importance of what happiness can be on a deeper level and suggests that unhappiness is a thing to be squashed like a bug when that is neither possible nor desirable. In short, we need to re-enchant the world, but we need to do it in a way that is deeply connected to the natural world and to our human core, not with technology or Harry Potter-style magic. The Romantics rejected rationalism, but Mr. Foldenyi sees in them a modern sentimentalism that is as alienated from the natural world as the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Sometimes Mr. Foldenyi gets a bit too religious for me without acknowledging that he is doing so, and sometimes he goes too far in blasting rationalism and in failing to acknowledge the great value that we have gotten from rational thinking, but I can mostly get behind his program. It was an interesting book that articulated a lot of ideas that I have been thinking about for a while in ways that I didn't always agree with, but that were mostly smart and stimulated my thinking....more
At first I was liking this book. It felt like a sort of Eminent Victorians for the 21st century -- cleverly written snarky short biographies. I liked At first I was liking this book. It felt like a sort of Eminent Victorians for the 21st century -- cleverly written snarky short biographies. I liked Mr. Wolff's other book, "Television Is The New Television," and I learned a few things about the dysfunction of the Trump White House from "Fire and Fury." I enjoy Mr. Wolff's writing style. But it's hard if not impossible to do Eminent Victorians today. Famous people today, particularly the ones selected here, are already so self-parodic that no amount of irony and clever writing can send them up properly. So it just came off for me as malicious and mean spirited. Sometimes I'd think that Mr. Wolff was trying to find something positive to say about one of his subjects, but the few postive things were just straw men, set up so that he could knock them down two sentences later. I'm not a fan of most of the people profiled in this book, but I didn't need Mr. Wolff's snark to be able to reach my conclusions about them, and in the moments where he was able to make me feel some Schadenfreude, my next feeling was always shame and regret that I let him bring me down to his level. Then when I got to the final essay about Jeffrey Epstein, my unhappiness with the book went up another order of magnitude, because the portrait of Epstein is largely positive. Wow. Yes, I undestand that it is meant to be ironic and that the portrayal of the supportive meeting in which Steve Bannon, Ehud Barak, Epstein's lawyer and a crisis management PR person talk about ways to make Epstein's image more postive can be read as second degree sarcasm intended to draw you in so that the mockery is more intense when you realize that you have been had. But you can't do that with a character like Epstein. I'm sure that a lot of the unsavory things that have been said about Epstein are untrue or exaggerated, but I'm convinced of the essential truth that he was a flim flammer and blackmailer who took advantage of hundreds of young women, many of them underage, and offered them up like candy to his rich friends. I can't condone a book that offers sympathy for such a person, even if it tries to take it back with a "just kidding" ironic tone....more
Mr. Chesterton would say that I am a person with no philosophy, that I have no principles and that I am not even wrong because I dislike rules and ideMr. Chesterton would say that I am a person with no philosophy, that I have no principles and that I am not even wrong because I dislike rules and ideologies. I am of the view that we do best when we just muddle along, looking at all of the facts and circumstances and carefully planting our feet without thinking too far beyond the next few steps. There are no iron rules of history and few questions that have the same right answer at all times and places. Mr. Chesterton wants to live in a world governed by a neat set of rules. He thinks that English and Christian traditions provide the right answers. I don't like this part of his thinking. It's a small minded conservatism that ignores the injustices and suffering that were meted out for many years to anyone not lucky enough to be born a wealthy Englishman who was a practicing member of the established church. But then when I scratch below the surface, I find that I like Mr. Chesterton more and more. He carefully picks and chooses the kind of traditions that he wants to follow and bends the rules that don't work the way that he wants, so that his values are closer to my own than they first appear. This is a man with a heart. He has compassion for the downtrodden. He's smart. He has a sense of humor. He is able to find things to admire in the people with whom he disagrees. In short, he is the kind of conservative that I could do business with, someone with whom I disagree about important things, but who would have made a fine companion for a night of serious drinking and talking....more
I mostly agree with Rebecca Solnit's point of view, and her writing style is so excellent that she is a pleasure to read even when I disagree with herI mostly agree with Rebecca Solnit's point of view, and her writing style is so excellent that she is a pleasure to read even when I disagree with her. But it is precisely my disagreements with her that keep bringing me back to her books because she challenges me to look a little differently at things about which I thought I already had settled opinions. George Orwell was equally challenging and hard to pin down. He was for the people, but very self-consciously not of the people, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War on the side of freedom, who saw all the weaknesses and self destructive tendencies of the Republican cause, a socialist who wrote the iconic anti-communist novels, "Animal Farm" and "1984." And now we learn that this famously practical independent thinking political writer was a lover of roses. I liked him before, but after learning this about him, as a gardener myself, I now consider him to be fully redeemed.
And this brings me back to Ms. Solnit, who suggests that flower gardening, and in particular rose gardening, is an expression of aesthetic values - beauty without purpose. She talks about the slogan "Bread and Roses" which meant that oppressed people needed and had a right to more than just food. To live the full life that every human has a right to enjoy, you must also have access to beauty and an opportunity to enjoy it. Now that's an idea that I can get behind. She also talks about how the joy of country living is a myth created by the upper classes. The poor people fled rural poverty and had no great urge to retun to country life. So it may be true that when I garden, I'm living out a rich man's fantasy, but I prefer to think that it is a way to show care for nature and to appreciate the beauty in the world around me. Gardening lets me be a master of nature but also to be part of it and to mold it into my desired image, but to do so respectfully, coaxing cooperation out of the plants, water, sun and soil, while at the same time getting my hands dirty and engaging in honest toil. Yes for sure it a play form of toil, but I still get almost as tired, dirty and cut up from a full day of gardening as any farm hand. This aspect of gardening as care, communion and labor is largely missing from Ms. Solnit's discussion, though I'll warrant that it was part of what drew Orwell back to his roses....more
This lady is very smart and has some good points, but she's so angry that it was hard to read. It's exhausting to read hundreds of pages of anger, andThis lady is very smart and has some good points, but she's so angry that it was hard to read. It's exhausting to read hundreds of pages of anger, and though the anger may be an appropriate reaction to the massive injustices that people of color have suffered, it's just too much after a while.
I agree with the proposition that all writing has a political element to it, so to pretend that it doesn't is incorrect and is a political statement in its own right. I suppose that even my reviews are political, though they are generally not intended to be. Of course good writing, even good political writing, isn't just political, and once you get past the rhetoric, Ms. Castillo recognizes that. She suggests at one point that the proper attitude of the reader is as a tiny fragment of a great flawed world. I think it has to be more than that, but that's going in the right direction.
I enjoyed the dethroning of Joan Didion. It was a little harsh, sometimes too harsh, but I have always been dissatisfied with Ms. Didion's writing, so Ms. Castillo helped me to feel vindicated, and she articulated some of my feelings about Ms. Didion's writing better than I had previously formed them in my own mind. I liked the criticism of writing representative model characters in works about people of color. Characters are better when they are complex and imperfect. I'd rather read about someone who is interesting than about some idealized role model.
One thing that I didn't like besides the excess anger was the use of a lot of academic jargon words like "precarity" and "performative." This kind of language makes me wince because the words are awkward and are often a lazy substitute for original creative expression. But Ms. Castillo is too smart a person and too good a writer to have done this unconsciously. It is part of her political statement about who she is. I'm fine with that part of it. And I agree with much of the political position, but I do wish that she could have expressed it with a different vocabulary....more
Carlo Rovelli has become my favorite writer of popular physics books. He's very clear and puts forward new and unusual ideas that get my thinking goinCarlo Rovelli has become my favorite writer of popular physics books. He's very clear and puts forward new and unusual ideas that get my thinking going. I particularly liked The Order of Time, and Reality Is Not What it Seems and Helgoland were almost as good. So this book was a bit of a disappointment. Like many books that are collections of essays, this one seemed to me like a lazy man's way to fulfill a book contract - just throw together a collection of old stuff with a little editing and collect some royalties instead of going to the trouble to write something new. I still like Mr. Rovelli and his style. I agree with nearly all of his scientific, social and philosophical perspectives, but I'm reading a Rovelli book for the physics, and I didn't get enough of that here to satisfy my appetite.
I did learn some new physics in the discussion of white holes - the opposite of a black hole, a white hole an object that light and matter can only go out of not into. They can potentially give birth to new universes with mini big bangs. And most interesting of all, they can exist inside of black holes in a weird asynchronous time relation with the black hole that encompasses them.
And on the non-physics side Mr. Rovelli got me interested in doing some more investigation into the philosophical writing of David Lewis and the fiction of Elsa Morante. Any book that leads me down new pathways of reading can't truly be considered a disappointment....more
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