The Half-Life of Facts : Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date

Read brief review of bookin 10/29-11/5/12 issue of New Yorker.
http://goo.gl/RTkky

Some readers may lose interest as Arbesman discusses such esoteric topics as logistic curves, linked S-curve theory, semantic and associative data processing and actuarial escape velocity. But like a good college professor, Arbesman's enthusiasm and humor maintains our interest in subjects many readers may not have encountered before. Does what popular science should do--both engages and entertains. Copyright Kirkus 2012

Calligraphy bible & photography

Had just seen "Hedgehog" DVD, and saw this book.

: a complete guide to more than 100 essential projects and techniques. Maryanne Grebenstein, consulting editor. New York: Watson Guptill. 2012.

 745.61 C  

And this one, Thinking photography was also new that very same day.

Escher

(1992). M.C. Escher: his life and complete graphic work ; with a fully illustrated catalogue. New York: Abradale Press/Harry N. Abrams.

Found a reference to an Escher work in Arellano, G. (2012). Taco USA : how Mexican food conquered America. New York: Scribner.

Mismatch

How affirmative action hurts students it's intended to help, and why universities won't admit it. Richard Sander, Stuart Taylor. New York : Basic Books. 2012.

The Joy of X

Strogatz, Steven. A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012

When America first met China

an exotic history of tea, drugs, and money in the Age of Sail. Eric Jay Dolin. New York: Liveright Pub. Corp. 2012.

The best thing since sliced bread

cliches: what they mean and where they came from. Nigel Fountain. New York : Reader's Digest, 2012.

Calligraphy bible

: a complete guide to more than 100 essential projects and techniques. Maryanne Grebenstein, consulting editor. New York: Watson Guptill. 2012.

 745.61 C  

A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story

Baer, Robert. (2010). The company we keep. New York: Crown Publishers.

He appears on CNN often.

Kirkus: An intermittently engaging but not entirely satisfying tale of love and espionage.

Code talkers

http://sun.nls.lib.ny.us/search~S60?/tcode+talker/tcode+talker/1%2C6%2C8%2CB/frameset&FF=tcode+talker&1%2C1%2C/indexsort=-

Left change

American dreamers : how the left changed a nation

Infinite jest

by David Foster Wallace. Mentioned in "Red Hook Road," P.156

Columbus affair

http://goo.gl/t9snU

Recommended by MV, 6/27/12

To be sung underwater

Saw while making it a 28 day book at PN.

The exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Kirkus Reviews A dyspeptic dystopian's mad secret notebooks, imposing order--at least of a kind--on a chaotic world. "The majority of these writings…are neither familiar nor wholly lucid nor, largely, elegant," write editors Lethem and Jackson. That's exactly right. But it is a measure of the esteem in which the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick is held in the literary world that Lethem and Jackson could be brought into this vast disorder--a project, in its own way, rather like the frankensteining of David Foster Wallace's Pale King, and with many of the same conditions present: a vastness of notes, a hint of a complete system (in this case, partially imposed by a previous editor) and the impossibility of that completeness without much posthumous help. And that complete system is surpassing strange. Dick writes of a critical moment in 1974, "at the initial height of the ‘Holy Other' pouring into me, when I saw the universe as it is, I saw as the active agent, a gold and red illuminated-letter like plasmatic entity from the future, arranging bits and pieces here: arranging what time drove forward." Very well, then. That entity--perhaps, the editors whisper, a manifestation of epilepsy, though perhaps not--seems to have confirmed Dick's suspicion, which lies at the heart of so much of his work, that the world we inhabit is an elaborate ruse and that any freedom we have is illusory: "We are being fed a spurious reality"; "one cannot sense that reality is somehow insubstantial unless somehow, unconsciously, one is comparing or contrasting that reality with a kind of hyper-reality; otherwise the intuition makes no sense." A blend of diary, notebook, ledger, blotter and back-of-envelope scribbles, Dick's "exegesis" of that reality ranges from sublime philosophizing ("Our sin is self-centered monocamerality") to chronicling (among other things, Richard Nixon's last days in office) to strange ranting. In short, it's in perfect keeping with his body of work at large. Fascinating and unsettling. Still, at more than 900 pages, this will test the mettle--and the stamina--of even the most devoted of Dick fans. Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Tulpan

Joe Morgerstern's review

Taken

A patron at Peninsula raved about Robert Crais, and said this is his latest work. Kirkus is not thrilled: For some reason, the normally reliable Crais (The Sentry, 2011, etc.) doesn't trust his story, loaded with the promise of vigilante heroics and nonstop violence, to deliver the goods. So he jazzes it by pulverizing it into sections that leap back and forth in time and among different points of view (e.g., "ELVIS COLE: four days before he is taken"). The result is to loosen the logical links that connect one set piece to another and recast the whole story as if it were a string of trailers for a dozen hellacious summer movies.

Leak

Leak : why Mark Felt became Deep Throat : Holland, Max.

Wherever I wind up

A patron asked for this book (5/30/12); seemed interesting. And then, Dickey pitched a marvelous game yesterday, Saturday 2 June.

Day After No-Hitter, Dickey Puts Up More Zeros

‎

New York Times - 19 hours ago

R. A. Dickey saw the ninth inning of Johan Santana's no-hitter with a towel wrapped around his head, because he could not bring himself to ...

Jefferson, twice Hamilton, Burr, too.

Zacks, Richard. (2005). The pirate coast: Thomas Jefferson, the first marines, and the secret mission of 1805. New York: Hyperion.

Found on shelf; seems interesting.

Kennedy, Roger G. (2000). Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: a study in character. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

ditto.

Impressive thriller by first-time novelist

Expats, Chris Pavone. New York : Crown, 2012.

Kirkus:  A thoroughly competent and enjoyable thriller with unanticipated twists that will keep readers guessing till the end.

{ from 3/10/12}

Luis Urrea

A patron asked for The devil's highway : a true story.  The hummingbird's daughter and  Into the beautiful North also look interesting.

www.luisurrea.com

1Q84

An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.

Have seen this before; hstess at Cucina 24 in Asheville, NC was reading it when we went in for dinner on Wednesday 25 April, 2012.

Russia, and Turkey

Molotov's magic lantern: travels in Russian history / Rachel Polonsky.
 A note from 1 November 2011: reading "Sashenka" and searched for Pushkin & travel. Didn't care for Sashenka much, but always intrigued by Pushkin.


Snow. by Orhan Pamuk.
 read article by Elif Batuman in 24 October 2011 New Yorker issue: Natural Histories (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/24/111024fa_fact_batuman)

The House of Rajani

A patron asked for this book. No library on Long Island owns it; only a handful of academic libraries do own it. Curious, I looked into it a bit. I found two reviews in the Guardian (UK). One, by Linda Grant (author of The Clothes on Their Backs, which I tried to read and didn't like), is not favorable (and with her own political views, in fact, sprinkled in): Revelatory as this reopening of the interred past may be for Israeli readers force-fed on the victors' version of history, the novel has a strongly didactic tone, as if one of the country's New Historians had turned their hand to fiction.

A second review, by the Guardian's Middle East editor, Ian Black, is favorable. He titles his review Palestine's catastrophe foreshadowed, and subtitles it Israeli writer Alon Hilu's acclaimed historical novel tackles the most sensitive of Zionist taboos head-on.

Edward Said's Orientalism has been invoked by some to deconstruct the book's themes of sexual and colonial domination. But it is the menacing shadow of future catastrophe – the unique experience of the Palestinian nakbah – that gives the story both its dramatic force and contemporary relevance: moves are under way in Israel to stop official funding for nakbah commemoration.

While Grant concerns herself with literary criticism, and tells of its being changed some from its original Hebrew writing to the English translation, Black writes about Hilu himself. Hilu says his own taboo-breaking views were partly moulded by his background: parents who immigrated to Israel from Syria and who did not share the dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) experience, with its emphasis on the Holocaust, and with no affinity for Arab life, language and culture.
The author's website has some blurbs from favorable reviews.

Sounds quite interesting.

60 years as a photojournalist

In February I was hungry to find a new book to read. I did not immediately remember the name of the author of a book I greatly enjoyed (it turned out to be The beautiful things that heaven bears, by Dinaw Mengestu), only remembering that he was Ethiopian American. Thus, I searched for the keyword Ethiopia, and, lo and behold, came up with this book (as well as with a biography of Marcus Garvey, Negro with a hat, by Colin Grant). This book includes a chapter, Immigration from Russia and Ethiopia.

Reinventing fire

saw on Business Report on PBS, 1 November 2011: Amory Lovins

Americans in Paris

A couple of weeks ago, a middle school student doing a report on the development of the telegraph asked for books on Samuel F.B. Morse; I found this one while searching for him.

Destiny of the Republic

Highly recommended by a patron, who happens to be married to a first cousin of Max Yasgur (yes, that Yasgur; a couple of days ago they told me that when the family gets together they sing the song about going to Yasgur's farm). She also highly recommended Candice Millard's first book, River of doubt : Theodore Roosevelt's darkest journey .

And this is high praise, indeed.
Kirkus Reviews
The shocking shooting and the painful, lingering death of the 20th president.


"Killed by a disappointed office seeker." Thus most history texts backhand the self-made James Garfield (1831–1881), notwithstanding his distinguished career as a college professor, lawyer, Civil War general, exceptional orator, congressman and all too briefly president. Millard follows up her impressive debut (The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, 2005) by colorfully unpacking this summary dismissal, demonstrating the power of expert storytelling to wonderfully animate even the simplest facts. As she builds to the president's fatal encounter with his assassin, she details the intra-party struggle among Republicans that led to Garfield's surprise 1880 nomination. The Stalwarts, worshippers of Grant, defenders of the notorious spoils system, battled the Half-Breeds, reformers who took direction from Senators John Sherman and James G. Blaine. The scheming, delusional Charles J. Guiteau, failed author, lawyer and evangelist, listened to no one, except perhaps the voices in his head assuring him he was an important political player, instrumental in Garfield's election and deserving of the consulship to Paris. After repeated rebuffs, he determined that only "removing the president" would allow a grateful Vice President Chester A. Arthur to reward him. During the nearly three excruciating months Garfield lay dying, Alexander Graham Bell desperately scrambled to perfect his induction balance (a metal detector) in time to locate the lead bullet lodged in the stricken president's back. Meanwhile, Garfield's medical team persistently failed to observe British surgeon Joseph Lister's methods of antisepsis—the American medical establishment rejected the idea of invisible germs as ridiculous—a neglect that almost surely killed the president. Moving set pieces—the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exhibition which Garfield attended and where both Lister and Bell presented, the deadlocked Republican Convention, the steamship explosion that almost killed Guiteau, the White House death watch—and sharply etched sketches of Blaine, the overwhelmed Arthur and larger portraits of the truly impressive Garfield and the thoroughly insane Guiteau make for compulsive reading.


Superb American history.

Symbol

Fascinating. How symbols are used as logos and trademark, around the world. Saw on HW new book cart, 1/11/12

Collision course

McCartin, Joseph A.Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. New York : Oxford University Press.

A patron asked for this book today. This is a chapter of modern American history that I have forgotten about, and reading a review of the book reminds me of its importance.


On the 30th anniversary of the showdown between Ronald Reagan and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), McCartin revisits the most consequential labor dispute since the New Deal. As a two-time governor of California, Ronald Reagan regularly bargained with public-service employees and, as president (the only one in American history ever to have helmed a union), he offered PATCO, one of the few labor organizations to endorse his candidacy, an unprecedented contract in 1981. When PATCO rejected the proposal and called an illegal strike, Reagan issued a 48 hour return-to-work ultimatum. He ended up firing the vast majority of the more than 10,000 highly specialized controllers, destroyed PATCO and set a precedent that continues to reverberate. An expert on the labor movement, McCartin reviews the origins and evolution of public-sector unions—once universally decried, even by iconic liberal presidents—outlines and translates for the general reader the applicable laws and delivers a detailed history of PATCO from its 1968 founding to its demise. Demonstrating a thorough understanding of PATCO's culture, the author powerfully describes the high-pressure world of air-traffic control, examines the historically contentious relations between the controllers and the hidebound FAA and charts PATCO's increasing militancy, even as a powerful anti-union backlash gathered in the country. Although his union sympathies are clear, McCartin, for the most part, plays it straight, relying on extensive interviews with government and union officials, rank-and-file members, pilots, airline executives and politicians to get the full story behind this dramatic confrontation. Breaking the strike proved more expensive to the federal government than meeting the controllers' demands. But the chilling effect of Reagan's swift dismissal of seemingly indispensable workers has proven more costly to organized labor. With the collective-bargaining power of public employees under fierce assault, McCartin's story couldn't be timelier or more important.

As so much else about and in today's GOP, the impetus and inspiration of today's Republican party comes from Ronald Reagan. But, I contend, not from the Gipper himself, but from how today's Republicans (choose to) see him.

Perhaps Reagan himself would prove to be too moderate for today's right wingers. Notice that President Reagan first proposed an unprecedented contract, and only then moved to crush the union. O, there is no mistaking that Reagan was ruthless, hard-assed, and started the right-wing counter-revolution; I am under no such illusions. But he would compromise, he would negotiate, and he would even joke and socialize with his archnemesis, Tip O'Neill.

I simply can not imagine Obama and Boehner doing this, enjoying each other this much.

King short stories

Barcelona, 1945

(2004). New York; Penguin.  Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Lucia Graves (translator).

Kirkus: The histories of a mysterious book and its enigmatic author are painstakingly disentangled in this yeasty Dickensian romance: a first novel by a Spanish novelist now living in the US.We meet its engaging narrator Daniel Sempere in 1945, when he's an 11-year-old boy brought by his father, a Barcelona rare-book dealer, to a secret library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Enthralled, Daniel "chooses" an obscure novel, The Shadow of the Wind, a complex quest tale whose author, Julian Carax, reputedly fled Spain at the outbreak of its Civil War, and later died in Paris. Carax and his book obsess Daniel for a decade, as he grows to manhood, falls in and out of fascination, if not love with three beguiling women, and comes ever closer to understanding who Carax was and how he was connected to the family of tyrannical Don Ricardo Aldaya-and why a sinister, "faceless" stranger who identifies himself as Carax's fictional creation ("demonic") "Lain Coubert" has seemingly "got out of the pages of a book so that he could burn it." Daniel's investigations are aided, and sometimes impeded, by a lively gallery of vividly evoked supporting characters. Prominent among them are secretive translator Nuria Monfort (who knows more about Carax's Paris years than she initially reveals); Aldaya family maid Jacinta Coronada, consigned to a lunatic asylum to conceal what she knows; Daniel's ebullient Sancho Panza Fermin Romero de Torres, a wily vagrant working as "bibliographic detective" in the Semperes' bookstore; and vengeful police inspector Fumero, a Javert-like stalker whose refusal to believe Carax is dead precipitates the climax-at which Daniel realizes he's much more than just a reader of Carax's intricate, sorrowful story.The Shadow of the Wind will keep you up nights-and it'll be time well spent. Absolutely marvelous.