son of 30 second book reviews
by John at 6/04/2004 04:33:00 PM
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner
"Water flows uphill towards money." If you live in the American West, or plan to live there, or once lived there, you should read this book. It will make you think about some of the things you take for granted, like tap water and cities of millions of people in the middle of one of the world's largest deserts. This is a powerful text, if a little long winded. It delivers an extensive history of the (mis)utilization of water resources in the western United States, and in the process skewers hypocritical conservatives, profligate liberals, arrogant engineers, and self-perpetuating government bureaucracies. A happier afterward in the revised edition discusses some of the recent victories of environmentalism and a more realistic notion of what the West should be.
The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster - Mike Davis
This is an interesting, but not great, book. I read it because my library didn't have a copy of City of Quartz. It is a dissection of Southern Californian fears, from fires, earthquakes, and floods to crime to racial demons. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in here (Los Angeles has more tornadoes than Oklahoma City!), but my favorite chapter concerns the literary and filmic destruction of LA. It is occasionally humorous, but I found the history of the popular depiction of racial wars very disturbing - have some of us come nowhere in the last century? I'll finish by noting that many people say that this book is a work of fiction, not history. Had I known that going in, I might not have read it. True or not, Davis' biases are evident.
The Confusion - Neal Stephenson
Fantastic book! As long as Quicksilver, this book feels shorter. There is less natural philosophy and more swashbuckling (including a complete circumnavigation of the globe). There's a bit about the alchemical properties of King Solomon's gold and some pre-Enlightenment chemical engineering. Additionally, there is a significant amount of banking, as many of the events in the book orbit the disintegration of the traditional feudal land economy of Europe and the rise to dominance of a market economy driven by international trade. We also are clued in to the conceptualization and creation of the first computing machines. Other than that, this novel is all over the place. So far, The Baroque Cycle is a really great story. Give it a chance if you have a lot of time on your hands.
The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People - Peter S. Bellwood
After my trip to Hawaii (and a few tantalizing tidbits of information), I wanted to learn more about the origin and travels of the Polynesian people. Sure, I read all about the environmental disasters precipitated by the Polynesians in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I wanted to learn about the Polynesians themselves this time. This book told me everything I wanted to know. It is a detailed, scientific (read "dry" - there are many figures, but no pretty pictures) review of languages, ethnography, anthropology, and archaeology across all the major islands of Polynesia. The version I read was from 1978, and I wonder if the updated version makes use of DNA tracing technology that has been developed since then. It seems to me that this would be a useful tool in establishing the chronology of Polynesian expansion and origins.
"Water flows uphill towards money." If you live in the American West, or plan to live there, or once lived there, you should read this book. It will make you think about some of the things you take for granted, like tap water and cities of millions of people in the middle of one of the world's largest deserts. This is a powerful text, if a little long winded. It delivers an extensive history of the (mis)utilization of water resources in the western United States, and in the process skewers hypocritical conservatives, profligate liberals, arrogant engineers, and self-perpetuating government bureaucracies. A happier afterward in the revised edition discusses some of the recent victories of environmentalism and a more realistic notion of what the West should be.
The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster - Mike Davis
This is an interesting, but not great, book. I read it because my library didn't have a copy of City of Quartz. It is a dissection of Southern Californian fears, from fires, earthquakes, and floods to crime to racial demons. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in here (Los Angeles has more tornadoes than Oklahoma City!), but my favorite chapter concerns the literary and filmic destruction of LA. It is occasionally humorous, but I found the history of the popular depiction of racial wars very disturbing - have some of us come nowhere in the last century? I'll finish by noting that many people say that this book is a work of fiction, not history. Had I known that going in, I might not have read it. True or not, Davis' biases are evident.
The Confusion - Neal Stephenson
Fantastic book! As long as Quicksilver, this book feels shorter. There is less natural philosophy and more swashbuckling (including a complete circumnavigation of the globe). There's a bit about the alchemical properties of King Solomon's gold and some pre-Enlightenment chemical engineering. Additionally, there is a significant amount of banking, as many of the events in the book orbit the disintegration of the traditional feudal land economy of Europe and the rise to dominance of a market economy driven by international trade. We also are clued in to the conceptualization and creation of the first computing machines. Other than that, this novel is all over the place. So far, The Baroque Cycle is a really great story. Give it a chance if you have a lot of time on your hands.
The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People - Peter S. Bellwood
After my trip to Hawaii (and a few tantalizing tidbits of information), I wanted to learn more about the origin and travels of the Polynesian people. Sure, I read all about the environmental disasters precipitated by the Polynesians in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I wanted to learn about the Polynesians themselves this time. This book told me everything I wanted to know. It is a detailed, scientific (read "dry" - there are many figures, but no pretty pictures) review of languages, ethnography, anthropology, and archaeology across all the major islands of Polynesia. The version I read was from 1978, and I wonder if the updated version makes use of DNA tracing technology that has been developed since then. It seems to me that this would be a useful tool in establishing the chronology of Polynesian expansion and origins.
I read City of Quartz a long time ago for college, really enjoyed it, that one didn't strike me as fiction, more a mix of sociology and a sort of anthropology, biases were very evident though...great for a northern californian as I was at the time.
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