Books: May 2006 Archives
Excerpt:
1962: The Last Good Year
by Davin Seay
It's rare when an esthetic consensus-a movement or school or linkage of like-minded- simply ceases to exist. It's relatively certain, after all, that the cherished flame of any fashion or fancy, no matter how transitory, must somewhere still be lit. In the foothills of the Hindu Kush or the backstreets of Oakland, some cat with bare feet and Goulimine beads still blows on the ruddy embers of peace and love. Off a dank alley in Greenwich Village or North Beach, a bereted and goateed hepster still howls the beatnik mantra. But nowhere it seems is the breath of that last great year still fogging the windows of our collective memory. Nineteen sixty-two is gone forever. Goodbye and amen.
So why '62? Why not '56 or '68, or why not even '23? Sixty-two seems, in retrospect, a year when the singular naivete of the spanking new decade was at its guileless height, with only the vaguest, most indistinct hints of the agonies and ecstasies to come marring the fresh-scrubbed, if slightly sallow complexion of the times. On the first day of that year, the Federal Reserve raised the maximum interest on savings accounts to 4 percent while "The Twist" was sweeping the nation. A month later "Duke of Earl" was topping the charts, and John Glenn was orbiting the good, green globe. That spring Wilt Chamberlain set the NBA record by scoring 100 points in a single game and West Side Story won the Oscar for Best Picture. The Seattle World's Fair opened, followed five weeks later by the deployment of five thousand U.S. troops in Thailand. Dick Van Dyke and The Defenders won Emmys, and Adolph Eichman got his neck stretched. By that summer, the Supreme Court had banned prayer in public school, Algeria went indy, and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose. "Loco-Motion" was Number One, Sherry Finkbine was on her way to a Swedish abortion, Sonny Liston K-O'd Floyd Patterson in the first round, and The Beverly Hillbillies graced the airwaves. By the time the grass of '62 had withered and died, the discovery of DNA's double helix had garnered the Nobel Prize, Kennedy had ordered the blockade of Cuba, "He's A Rebel" topped playlists and eleven thousand military advisers were in South Vietnam.
Out of print. $3.90 and up on Amazon
I just learned that the book's editor, Gene Sculatti, has a website called The Catalog of Cool.
In the 1930s and 1940s, before television, Sunday funny cartoonists were wealthy celebrities on par with movie stars. Tom De Haven's novel about the cartoon world during the Great Depression, Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, is funny and achingly sad at the same time.
The narrator is a young man named Al Bready, a writer who cranks out the scripts for six newspaper comics and four 75,000 word trash novels each month for Thrilling Marriage.
Bready starts working for Walter Geebus, the fantastically wealthy creator of the Derby Dugan strip (sort of a male Little Orphan Annie). At age 60, Geebus is an unhealthy miserable bastard who is hell to be around. The plot rides along a murder mystery, taking Bready into the streets, bars, flophouses, chop suey joints, and offices of a seedy, romantic, hard-boiled, heartbreakingly nostalgic New York, populated with terrifically colorful characters.
In the end, the plot isn't nearly as central to the story as is Bready's struggle with the realization that he can't ever be anything more than a rapid-fire pulp fiction hack. $0.29 and up on Amazon
When people ask me how to design a website (as if I know!), I point them to this book. Every page has worthwhile information. It won't make you a great designer overnight, but it will help you avoid the mistakes most beginners make. It's also has excellent advice on all the other non-design stuff you need to know about making and maintaining a web site. $23.09 on Amazon
After buying this book, I've installed six light fixtures in our house. Basic Wiring includes an excellent introduction to home electrical systems, and covers lights and cord repair, connecting switched and receptacles, installing lights and fans, and wiring low voltage systems such as doorbells and wall-mounted stereo speakers. $4.42 and up on Amazon
A thouroughly readable history of the World Wide Web as told by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. I bought this book while researching an article, and intended to read just a couple of pertinent pages, but it was so much fun I read the whole book in one day. It was interesting to read Berners-Lee's account of how difficult it was to "sell" the idea of the Web to people. Nobody could really grasp what he was talking about. (Today, he has the same problem trying to "sell" the idea of the Semantic Web). )$9.75 on Amazon
If you enjoy the art of Stanislav Szukalski, Ernst Haeckel, and Boris Artzybasheff, then you'll like this book of surreal charcoal drawings (plus a color section) by comic book artist Jim Woodring.
Woodring fishes in the deep waters of his subconscious to pull up bizarre creatures, some malevolent, some benign, and others who seem to vacillate between good and evil depending on how you look at them. My kids are as intrigued as I am about his work. My three-year-old likes to have conversations with the characters, and I supply the voice. $11.02 on Amazon.com
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
I've been emailing Kevin Kelly about old science books, and he recommends this one:
"I have another book I got as a kid (junior high school). This is 75 cent paperback called Rocket Manual For Amateurs, published in 1960, written by Bertrand R. Brinley. I've seen used copies of this paperback listed in the $200-300 range. It's the real thing. Not whimpy Estes rocket engines. These are huge things you fill with powder zinc and sulfur; where you engineer and manufacture the nozzles, that require real chemistry and physics to design, and will go miles into the sky. True rockets. If you saw the movie October Sky, this is what we are talking about. You really could build something dangerous with it. I never actually built anything with it because it is aimed not at kids but at adult amateurs with access to lathes, chemcials, and some money.
"I tried to also get official permission to reprint this book. I finally tracked the copyright down to the author's son, who wasn't interested in reprinting. His excuse was that the illustrations were not owned by him and he could reprint it without them. I know there are scans of this book out there, even though it is 382 pages, but I haven't looked for them.
"I just checked Alibris. They have four copies. Highest is $159, lowest is $33. Rocket Manual For Amateurs
"If you are collecting old science books they won't make anymore, this is a keeper."
Kevin also pointed out that Bertrand R. Brinley was the author of the amazing Mad Scientists' Club book series
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
The photos in Bugs in 3-D are meant to be viewed using a set of glasses cleverly bound in the front cover. If you have chameleon-like control of your eyes, you can probably merge the dual images of the bugs without the aid of the glasses.
Either way, the photos are incredible. The water under the waterbug looks so real, it seems like you could dip your finger into it.
Out of print. $3 and up on Amazon.com
I do most of my book reading on a Palm OS handheld, so I'm surprised that I didn't discover Manybooks.net sooner. This elegantly designed site offers over 13,000 free e-books for download in a variety of ready-to-use formats. Many of the titles are from Project Gutenberg, but have been cleaned up so I don't have to copy and paste them into BB Edit and remove the line breaks.
Shown here: Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper a 1962 science fiction story about a race of cute little monkey like creatures that live on a planet earmarked for a mining operation. The law forbids mining companies from working on planets with sentient beings, so the conflict is between those who stand to make a huge profit and therefore don't want to consider the fuzzies to be sentient, and those who get to know the fuzzies and like them so much that they want to think of them as sentients. Here are the top 20 downloaded titles of 2005. Link
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
It's only 54 pages long, but the illustrations are as wonderful as you could hope, and the information makes math very exciting. I went over the pages about pi with my 8-year-old daughter, and her mind was blown. She freaked out that pi's decimal places went on forever and never repeated themselves. For the rest of the night, she peppered me with questions about pi and math. I've included the pages about Fibonacci numbers here, to give you an idea of the look and tone of the book.
I'm guessing that this book is an abridged version of The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics. I just bought a copy on Amazon for $28. But you can buy a copy of the 54-page book on Amazon for as low as $0.25.
A few years ago, I read a bizarre and wonderful article from Harper's called "The Radioactive Boy Scout." It was the true story about David Hahn, a boy who attempted to make a breeder reactor in his backyard garden shed, and ended up collecting enough radioactive material that a geiger counter could detect the material from five houses away.
In January 2005, the article's author, Ken Silvestein, published a book based on the article, called The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor.
The article and book mention that young David had been inspired to practice chemistry after receiving a 1960 book The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. The book is long out of print, and used copies are very expensive (Amazon.com has a copy for $250). Of course, in today's litigious environment, no major publisher would dare republish a book that had actual chemistry experiments in it, for fear getting sued. The experiments in The Golden Book include making chlorine, ammonia, hydrogen, and ethanol.
I have long wanted to own a copy of The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. I sort of forgot about it, but recently a friend emailed me a page he had scanned from a copy he owns. It prompted me to search for a sub-$100 copy. I got lucky and found a $0 copy, thanks to BitTorrent. Here's a link to the torrent file for a nice scan of the 112 page book.
The book is an example of everything great about vintage children's science books. Once you lay your eyes on it, you will come to the sad realization that our society has slipped backwards in at least three important ways: 1. The writing quality in old kids' science books was better; 2. The design and illustration was more thoughtful and skillful; 3. Children in the old days were allowed and encouraged to experiment with mildly risky but extremely rewarding activities. Today's children, on the other hand, are mollycoddled to the point of turning them into unhappy ignoramuses.
I can't wait to conduct these experiments with my daughters at my side.
Yesterday I wrote about Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series. Equally, and perhaps even more exciting is his World of Tiers series, beginning with the Maker of Universes and followed by The Gates of Creation and A Private Cosmos.
The first novel (published in 1965) starts out with a bang. An old man named Robert Wolff hears a trumpet call coming from a closet. He thinks he is going senile, but the closet is a portal to another world, filled with Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventures. The first three books have plenty of great death traps, puzzles, and surprises that I didn't see coming (I was 14 or 15 when I read them for the first time.)
This collection has the first three books. The other books in the series are not very good. $11.67 on Amazon
One of my favorite science fiction novels is To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer. The main character is the famous explorer and adventurer, Richard Francis Burton, who, seemingly immediately after dying, finds himself (along with everyone who has ever lived on Earth), naked and hairless, reborn on a strange planet with a river thats spirals around the entire surface from pole to pole.
The strangeness doesn't stop there. All the residents of the new planet (dubbed Riverworld) have issued a metal can that only they can open. By placing the can into one of the large mushroom shaped stones placed at regular intervals along the river's shore and waiting for a thrice-daily jolt of lightning, the cans are opened to reveal a multi-course meal. (Woe to the person who loses his or her can, also called a grail, because there's not much else to eat on Riverworld).
What's going on? Who issued the cans? Why is every person on the planet -- including Neanderthals -- here? Those are the questions Burton and his companion (Alice Liddel, the inspiration for Lewis Carrol's Alice) and all the other characters attempt to discover.
There are several other books in the series. The second one, The Fabulous Riverboat is really good, too, but the other ones are pretty lousy. But don't let that dissuade you from reading To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat. $10.74 on Amazon
Martin Gardner is one of my favorite writers. Like a kinder, gentler James Randi, Gardner is a master hoax debunker, but he also delights in recreational mathmatics, paradoxes, brain teasers, science and philosophy.
As a child, I read and loved Entertaining Science Experiments with Everyday Objects before I knew who Gardner was. I'm sharing the experiments in this book with my eight-year-old daughter. Make one wooden match penetrate another! See through your hand! Push a quarter through a dime-sized hole!
Can you believe how cheap this book is? $3.95 on Amazon
