Michael Shields blog XML

Briefly noted

You often ask what I am reading. Here are ten books I’ve read recently. These are not the ten best or the ten most recent, just ten books and my terse commentary.

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf, 2005)

Ellis takes unreliable narration to clever new places in this book, a novel that masquerades as a memoir. In the second act it disintegrates into a horror story and blends in characters from his own work, blah blah. Maybe watch Adaptation instead.

The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth (Random House, 1986)

Normally, I’m not so excited by a story about 1980s yuppies and their love interests and social concerns and whatnot, but this one is in sonnets? Seth unwinds the story across 300 pages of iambic tetrameter, clearly having a lot of fun in the process. Form over content here, but so be it.

It Must’ve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything, by Jeffrey Steingarten (Random House, 2002)

You like reading about food, right? This is on the remainder table not on its merits but only because anthologies of articles never sell well.

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, by Michael Ruhlman (Henry Holt, 1997)

Michael Ruhlman made his name as a food writer with this book, in which he enlists in the CIA on a modified schedule. You can see that he did not commit to it as fully as the students who are there for their livelihood (cf. Ted Conover’s Newjack), but by the end Ruhlman has clearly gone native, and it’s also apparent from his work since this book that he has a lot more cred than pansy dilettante eater-writers like Jeffrey Steingarten, Calvin Trillin, or me.

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000, by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, 2001)

These collected articles about literature are omnivorously broad, including reviews of John Updike, J.G. Ballard, Cervantes, Thomas Harris, and Nabokov. Like Susan Sontag or Pauline Kael, Martin Amis is always highbrow but never a snob. Plus, it’s a killer title, isn’t it? In a hypothetical better world, I would attract girls by reading this.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Knopf, 2005)

Manhattan Project obsessives like me will not be disappointed by this ruthlessly researched 700-page biography, but others might not be so fascinated. As fiction, Oppenheimer’s story would be a true dramatic tragedy, but you’d tell it by streamlining away all the minutiae that was carefully reconstructed here.

A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922, by David Fromkin (Henry Holt, 1989)

In this period the Turks, British, and Arabs knew almost nothing about each other, and today we remember almost nothing about them. This is a true story of major events where none of the principals, even towering personalities like the young Winston Churchill, have more than a dim view of the situation. The Middle Eastern situation is hard to follow today because it never made sense, and Fromkin lays out a cold autopsy of the period. World history has never seemed so capricious.

London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd (Nan Talese, 2001)

More of a memoir than an a biography, this book consists almost entirely of unfootnoted anecdotes. Fans of the city will drink it up. I wish New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo had books equal to this.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, by Scott Rosenberg (Crown, 2007)

Despite what some reviews have said, all this book is about is some spoiled techies spending years to produce an incomplete prototype that never had clear goals and now is too late to matter. This will not stand with the classic stories of systems engineering: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, a Pulitzer-winning 1981 report of how engineers come together to build things under intense pressure to ship while it will still be relevant, and Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month, a first-hand account of how we learned in the 1960s that building large software is almost impossible. Little has been learned since then. We are not even within decades of producing work about which someone will write a book like The Great Bridge. No software yet written is “transcendent”, and if programmers were more perceptive, they would have physics envy too.

The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall, by Ian Bremmer (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

Bremmer’s “J Curve” refers to his graph of a country’s stability (on the y axis) against its openness (on the x axis). He argues convincingly that although both dictatorial and democratic countries are open, the transition between them is extremely risky, and especially so without some external stabilizing influence (such as money from natural resources, or the Marshall Plan). The “J Curve” is an obvious Gladwellesque marketing hook and does not exactly explain “why nations rise and fall”, but I don’t think his motive is just to sell books here or raise his consultancy’s profile — those are goals, of course, but not the only ones. I think Bremmer would like this essay to undermine the conventional view that Africa and Eastern European countries are “developing” economies that need only to be gardened in order to become modern, open, prosperous nations. He is clearly a smart and articulate guy who has spent many years thinking about this in a professional, global, and mostly disinterested context. See also Bremmer’s talk at Google (one-hour video).

posted at: 2007-02-20 06:16 UTC | permanent link to this entry | comment