A Modest Construct

¶ Earth (The Book)

Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart et al: Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; Year: 2010; Pages: 256

Think back to the heady days of 2004-2005, when the entire country was embroiled in (pre- and post-) election politics, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had suddenly become an important political and cultural entity, due in no small part to Stewart’s very public flogging of Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on Crossfire. Stewart and Colbert’s recent Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew just under a quarter-million attendees, so one can hardly say that the entity has diminished in the intervening years, but there was something particularly novel about Jon Stewart et al. at that point that made their leap from TV to print easy and popular. America (The Book) was a wild success, and so it should have been: it was a well-executed parody of a children’s American history textbook, pointedly satirical and wickedly funny.

Five years later, the same crew (more or less) gives us Earth (The Book), evidently a scaled-up version of the same concept, written as a communique to an alien race that stumbles onto our planet long after we’ve obliterated ourselves.

§6119 · November 25, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, Daily Show, humor, nonfiction, reviews, satire

¶ Holy Water

Holy Water by James P. Othmer: Publisher: Doubleday; Year: 2010; Pages: 304

Othmer’s debut novel, The Futurist, was something of a mixed bag, though ultimately I enjoyed it and thought it represented a promising start to a good (if not exactly groundbreaking) writing career. Four years later, Othmer offers up Holy Water as a sophomore effort, and while it’s a palatable read, the author not only makes the same mistakes as in his first book, but has in fact crafted a much less compelling story.

§6121 · November 19, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, fiction, reviews

¶ Hunting Evil

Hunting Evil by Guy Walters: Publisher: Broadway; Year: 2010; Pages: 528

It has been more than a half-century since the Nazi rise to power; in that time, the Nazi ideology, its adherents, and its titular leader, Adolph Hitler, have come to be known in a stylized, somewhat exaggerated way. This is not to say that such opprobrium is any way undeserved; while the Nazis may not have been the most imaginatively cruel men to have murdered in the 20th century (regimes such as Pol Pot come to mind), the sheer scale and enthusiasm of their extermination of more than six million noncombatants has made them the favorite secular devil of the popular mind. Hence things like Godwin’s Law and the constant comparisons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Hitler (the former because, I suppose, he’s apparently a warmonger? and the latter because he apparently wants to gas your grandmother).

Needless to say, Nazis hold a certain place in the popular imagination, and for much of the civilized world, we desire nothing more than the application of justice to the outstanding iniquity of the Holocaust. That’s why figures such as Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi-hunter, are so revered, and why books about the topic sell so well.

§6117 · November 15, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, history, nonfiction, reviews

¶ The Stories of English

The Stories of English by David Crystal: Publisher: Overlook; Year: 2009; Pages: 608

Studying linguistics and etymology is something of a hobby of mine; I’ve read Baugh’s A History of the English Language, which is a more formal academic work, as well as books which would count as, I suppose, “pop linguistics” or “pop etymology”: Bryson’s Made in America and The Mother Tongue; Hitching’s The Secret Life of Words; John Mann’s excellent informal history of the alphabet, Alpha Beta; and probably others which don’t immediately spring to mind.

In the canon of linguistics/etymology books written for a general audience, there is perhaps no figure more formidable than David Crystal; he’s written more than a hundred books, most of which are related to language in some capacity. A whole-hearted descriptivist, he’s a sort of anti-William Safire, accepting that that Prescriptivism is a lot like the Empire: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. ”

§6041 · November 12, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, history, linguistics, nonfiction, reviews

¶ The Gold Bug Variations

The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers: Publisher: Harper Perennial; Year: 1992; Pages: 640

With the exception of Powers’ latest novel (which, admittedly, felt more like a novella, for him), or at least everything of his that I’ve read, invariably contains two parallel plots, one current and one historical, that converge around some central idea. The Gold Bug Variations is no different, and it may be easily be Powers’ most well-known work, and I daresay his most lengthy and daring.

To put it glibly, The Gold Bug Variations draws connecting lines between genetics, music (specifically Bach’s Goldberg Variations), and to some degree, computer science. While the book certainly has a long reach, its ultimate impact fails to be quite as impressive as it promises to be.

§6061 · November 5, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, fiction, mathematics, music, reviews, Richard Powers, science