Reviews: Nonfiction
Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World: Disclosure time - I know and really like Tim, who once asked me which of us was weirder. I told him that I was weirder but could pass better, which I still believe, since Tim has no brain/mouth filter and I often do. Anyway, Tim and his colleague Goldsmith have written a short, entertaining book about why the internet isn’t a whole new world unregulable by traditional means but rather a new tool surprisingly subject to control by meatspace sovereigns. The best part of the book is about China’s careful filtering and screening of the internet, which makes their point quite persuasively. With enough incentive, a government can, in fact, control what its citizens do online, even while supporting a wired culture. That this is depressing and scary is not reason to ignore it.
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven stories of neurological deficits, from traumatic colorblindness in an artist to Temple Grandin’s autism. Sacks is a good writer who makes the pains and occasional pleasures of these conditions vivid, and occasionally speculates on connection between the brain and the mind. Autism fascinates and scares me, in so small part because I often feel that other peoples’ emotions are mysterious and hard to identify, and so I found the chapters about Grandin and a more severely isolated autistic artist the most compelling in the book. Grandin has written books of her own, and her self-presentation in them has less pathos than Sacks sees.
Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence: American junior and regular high schools are islands where, each day, The Lord of the Flies is reenacted, only with more sex and drinking. That’s the bad news, according to Wiseman. The good news is that there are skills you can give your daughters (and sons) to survive and even come out of the crucible as better people. Though touted as the basis for the movie Mean Girls, this is a regular self-help/kid-help book, not a single narrative. Since my high school didn’t seem as vicious as the environments Wiseman describes - though she points out that it’s really the 6th-to-8th graders who go crazy - I don’t mourn the fact that my parents lacked this resource. But her explanations of why girls turn to their friends instead of their parents for advice, even though her friends have no clue, are helpful and persuasive; I may return to this book in later years when the Rivkid starts to suffer from middle school. Boys need to know how Girls World works too.
Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, eds. Robert Atkins & Svetlana Mintcheva: The idea is ambitious - a collection about all the factors that keep artists from making art, from censorship by the government to censorship by the market to all the concerns that make up self-censorship. In practice, it’s difficult to link all these things coherently, and the collection doesn’t end up doing so. In particular, it is difficult to treat “I’m not buying your book because it’s not commercial/won’t sell enough” as the same thing as “You’re being charged with violating obscenity laws for that picture you took of your 7-year-old daughter in the bath.” The nature of the actor - private publisher, police officer - matters. It’s even harder to account for self-censorship, which can include “this story isn’t good enough” and “this story will lead people to defriend/denounce me.”
Individual pieces are fine on their own, even if the collection is less than the sum of its parts. I hadn’t known that foundations’ reluctance to fund individual artists had removed a huge source of non-market support for artists even as government funding for any kind of art was collapsing. Amy Adler has a fascinating piece about how child pornography law contributes to sexualizing children, especially since it’s collected with narratives from four artists who were investigated for taking pictures of their kids (one lost custody), but it might be better to read the full version of Adler’s piece here. Because the editors pack so much into a single book, some of the pieces are too short - there was a dialogue between African-American collectors of racist Americana and people who were uneasy about valorizing those images, but I didn’t get enough context to evaluate the arguments. The excerpt from Randall Kennedy’s book did make me want to read it, even if I can’t make myself say the word.
Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains: I loved Into Thin Air, and so I picked this up. It’s a collection of earlier pieces Krakauer wrote about various types of climbing, from ice to technically challenging microclimbs on large rocks. Because the pieces were almost all for specialist magazines, they assume a fair amount of background knowledge and, more, interest, and so I didn’t find it nearly as gripping as Into Thin Air; also, of course, that book had a compelling life and death narrative.
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven stories of neurological deficits, from traumatic colorblindness in an artist to Temple Grandin’s autism. Sacks is a good writer who makes the pains and occasional pleasures of these conditions vivid, and occasionally speculates on connection between the brain and the mind. Autism fascinates and scares me, in so small part because I often feel that other peoples’ emotions are mysterious and hard to identify, and so I found the chapters about Grandin and a more severely isolated autistic artist the most compelling in the book. Grandin has written books of her own, and her self-presentation in them has less pathos than Sacks sees.
Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence: American junior and regular high schools are islands where, each day, The Lord of the Flies is reenacted, only with more sex and drinking. That’s the bad news, according to Wiseman. The good news is that there are skills you can give your daughters (and sons) to survive and even come out of the crucible as better people. Though touted as the basis for the movie Mean Girls, this is a regular self-help/kid-help book, not a single narrative. Since my high school didn’t seem as vicious as the environments Wiseman describes - though she points out that it’s really the 6th-to-8th graders who go crazy - I don’t mourn the fact that my parents lacked this resource. But her explanations of why girls turn to their friends instead of their parents for advice, even though her friends have no clue, are helpful and persuasive; I may return to this book in later years when the Rivkid starts to suffer from middle school. Boys need to know how Girls World works too.
Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, eds. Robert Atkins & Svetlana Mintcheva: The idea is ambitious - a collection about all the factors that keep artists from making art, from censorship by the government to censorship by the market to all the concerns that make up self-censorship. In practice, it’s difficult to link all these things coherently, and the collection doesn’t end up doing so. In particular, it is difficult to treat “I’m not buying your book because it’s not commercial/won’t sell enough” as the same thing as “You’re being charged with violating obscenity laws for that picture you took of your 7-year-old daughter in the bath.” The nature of the actor - private publisher, police officer - matters. It’s even harder to account for self-censorship, which can include “this story isn’t good enough” and “this story will lead people to defriend/denounce me.”
Individual pieces are fine on their own, even if the collection is less than the sum of its parts. I hadn’t known that foundations’ reluctance to fund individual artists had removed a huge source of non-market support for artists even as government funding for any kind of art was collapsing. Amy Adler has a fascinating piece about how child pornography law contributes to sexualizing children, especially since it’s collected with narratives from four artists who were investigated for taking pictures of their kids (one lost custody), but it might be better to read the full version of Adler’s piece here. Because the editors pack so much into a single book, some of the pieces are too short - there was a dialogue between African-American collectors of racist Americana and people who were uneasy about valorizing those images, but I didn’t get enough context to evaluate the arguments. The excerpt from Randall Kennedy’s book did make me want to read it, even if I can’t make myself say the word.
Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains: I loved Into Thin Air, and so I picked this up. It’s a collection of earlier pieces Krakauer wrote about various types of climbing, from ice to technically challenging microclimbs on large rocks. Because the pieces were almost all for specialist magazines, they assume a fair amount of background knowledge and, more, interest, and so I didn’t find it nearly as gripping as Into Thin Air; also, of course, that book had a compelling life and death narrative.