Books: February 2006 Archives

Born in 1895 in the Bronx, Milt Gross was a cartoonist during the first half of the 20th Century. He's not well-known today, but among today's top cartoonists, he is considered one of the masters of the field. This 256 graphic novel was created by Gross in 1930, and like the movies of the era, is "silent" in that it has no words in it. It's no coincidence that Gross collaborated with Charlie Chaplin in the 1928 movie, The Circus.

When I first came across Milt Gross, I suddenly realized where Mad magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman got his inspiration. I think it is safe to say that if there was no Milt Gross, there'd be no Mad magazine.

Here's what Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi said about Gross:

John K: "The greatest guy even in that style is Milt Gross -- the greatest comic strip artist of all time and he does a style that's very similar to Gerald McBoingBoing except it's funny. It's funny and it's human. He'd draw a crowd scene and every character looks completely different, and you can tell instantly by looking at the character what kind of a person it is. He is amazing. And he has great drawing principles behind his work. A lot of people will look at his work, a lot of accomplished artists today and they would say he draws primitively. He doesn't at all. He has fantastic composition; the best composition of any cartoonist I've ever seen in my life." $11.53 on Amazon

How Computers Work: Processor and Main Memory, by Roger Young is a free PDF and Internet book that explains how computers do their thing at the very lowest, bit-shuffling level. You don't need to know anything about math or science to understand this book. Excerpt:

The picture above shows a 'bottom key' that controls an electromagnet.

The electromagnet, in turn, controls the top key. A key and the electromagnet that controls it are, together, called a relay. The relay is in the dashed box.

When the bottom key is pressed, the electromagnet is powered and the electromagnet becomes magnetic. That makes the electromagnet attract the top key and pull the top key down just like a finger can push a key down. A magnet (or a powered electromagnet) attracts the top key because the top key is made of steel. A magnet (or a powered electromagnet) does not attract the wires because the wires are made of copper.

Important: The electromagnet does not ever touch the top key. No electricity can go from the electromagnet to the wires attached to the top key.

A computer is almost entirely made up of a lot of relays (today, transistors) connected by wires. Just how the relays are connected and just what they do is the main subject of this book. Other concepts, especially programming, will also be explained.

If you read this book and Forest M. Mim III's Getting Started in Electronics, you'll know more about the subject than 99.9 percent of the people on the planet. Link

These inexpensive anthologies of 1960s Jack Kirby comics contain the finest stories Marvel comics ever published. As far as superheroes go, nothing can compare with these. I haven't read them in a long time, and I expected the passing of time, as well as the jadedness that comes with age, to diminish my enjoyment of this work. But they're fresh and exciting. Kirby really is king. Vol 3 Vol 4 (More Kirby: Kamandi, Marvel Masterworks Fantastic Four)

One square inch of a Todd Schorr painting has more eyeball kicks than an acre of canvases from a typical modern art gallery. Schorr begins where Robert Williams leaves off -- both artists mine the artifacts of trash pop culture: tikis, Bettie Page, hot rods, tattoos, cartoon characters, bikers, skulls, Polynesian pop, Beatniks, kitsch -- but Schorr's level of detail surpasses Williams. It must take him months to complete a painting, and they are all beautiful and a joy to pore over.

As a bonus, the accompanying commentary is expertly written by former bOING bOING contributor and science fiction writer, Paul DiFilippo, who has an eye for the whimsical and the intellect to find the profound truths hiding behind the pop culture icons that Schorr incorporates into his work. $25.17 on Amazon

You can't go wrong with a Bill Bryson book. I've read several, and they're all excellent. Bryson is mainly known as a travel writer. He was born in the midwest, but spent 20 years living in England, where he got married to a Brit and raised a family. (He even picked up a bit of a British accent, judging from the audio book version of In A Sunburned Country the he entertainingly read.)

When Bryson returned to the United States, one of his UK newspaper editors asked him to write a weekly column about what it was like to move back to America after two decades in the UK. This book, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away is a compilation of those columns. Bryson insightfully and hilariously (I had to suppress laughter while reading it late at night in bed so as not to wake up my wife) comments on everyday life in a small New England town. Excerpt:

Still, I can't criticize because I live in the state with the most demented of all license plate slogans, the strange and pugnacious "Live Free or Die." Perhaps I take these things too literally, but I really don't like driving around with an explicit written vow to expire if things don't go right. Frankly, I would prefer something a little more equivocal and less terminal-"Live Free or Pout" perhaps, or maybe "Live Free or Bitch Mightily to Anyone Who'll Listen."

All this is a somewhat circuitous way of introducing our important topic-namely, how boring it is to make a long car journey these days. If you have been following this space closely (and if not, why not?) you will recall that last week I discussed how we recently drove from New Hampshire to Ohio in order to deliver my eldest son to a university that had offered to house and educate him for the next four years in return for a sum of money not unadjacent to the cost of a moon launch.

What I didn't tell you then, because I didn't want to upset you on my first week back from vacation, is what a nightmare experience it was. Now please understand, I am as fond of my wife and children as the next man, no matter how much they cost me per annum in footwear and Nintendo games (which is, frankly, a lot), but that isn't to say that I wish to pass a week with them ever again in a sealed metal chamber on an American highway.

$10.17 on Amazon

Everyone has heard of John Huston's movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart. For some reason, I never got around to seeing it. I decided to read the book first. It ranks among the top 20 or so books I've ever read.

Dobbs is an out-of-work hard-luck American loser living in Mexico in the 1930s, in the waning years of the Mexican oil boom. Work in the oil fields is hard to come by, and he makes ends meet by bumming pesos off well-heeled Americans. One night, he and another drifter listen to an old man named Howard spin a tale about a fabulous gold mine in the Sierra Madre mountains. The next day, the trio make up their mind to prospect for gold in the lawless Mexican countryside.

It's a lot harder getting the gold than the two younger men expect. You have to grind up tons of rocks into sand, and haul water a long distance to wash the sand, just to yield a few ounces of gold. Days are scorching, nights are freezing, the diet is monotonous, the work is exhausting, and there's the constant fear of banditos and corrupt soldiers waiting to take their gold and shoot them on the spot. But bit-by-bit, the three men accumulate a sizable pile of gold dust, and that's when the greed of gold-fever sets in, with nasty consequences.

The author B. Traven, reminds me a bit of Hemingway and Steinbeck, but I find his work even more engaging and empathetic. Not much is know about Traven. He appears to have been as desirous of his privacy as Pynchon. The rumor is that he was a German anarchist who fled to Mexico in the early 1930s. No one knows for sure. $10.20 on Amazon

I'm an unabashed fan of Merlin Mann's 43 Folders productivity weblog. It's where I learned about David Allen's now-famous book about productivity, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity . I bought the book and read it last year, and incorporated a lot of what I learned into my daily routine. But I re-read the book recently and came back with a deeper understanding of what the book is really about. The best summary is on page 19: "The real issue is how to make appropriate choices about what to do at any point in time. The real issue is how we manage actions."

That's the GTD process in a nutshell. It's about setting up a system that allows you to quickly review every single thing you want to do -- large (writing a book) and small (changing the wiper blades on your car) -- so you can decide on the best next physical action you can take to elicit the changes in your life that you desire.

I want to read this book once a year. I have a feeling there is still much to learn. $10.20 on Amazon