(no subject)
First, the archived version of Five Things That Never Happened to Lex Luthor, now with one less spelling error. Then, a few books, three autobiographical and one definitely not.
Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood: Sacks, now a neurologist famous for books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, began life in a large family of doctors and engineers, and despite the privations of WWII, had a wonderful education in chemistry, pursued mostly by himself with the aid of some doting uncles. This book contains some autobiography, and a lot of interesting chemistry, as they are the same thing for Sacks. His paean to the periodic table is the best part of a very good book.
Mary Wells Lawrence, A Big Life (in Advertising): I picked this up because, as a book about advertising, I could buy it out of my research budget. While not particularly well-written, this is an interesting story about being a successful woman in a male-dominated profession from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lawrence's philosophy was that the advertising for a product should make the consumer love the product - emotional reaction was what she was after, and she was good at it. An undercurrent of the story, as she describes various big campaigns she created or oversaw and her personal life (she married a big client), is the corporatization and conglomeration of the advertising business itself, and her firm is ultimately swallowed up by an international concern. The other thing that really popped out was that, for Lawrence, the ad business in the 60s and 70s had the flavor of the Internet bubble: They really thought they were going to change the world, and become rich and famous besides. I'm not all that happy with the legacy that Lawrence and her ilk left us; I wish ads had more information and fewer smiles. But there's not much to be done about it now.
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day: I mentioned this book briefly a while back. Sedaris is a brutal writer, brutal on himself, his family, and everybody else in his path, and yet a surprising amount of compassion for the human condition comes through this witty collection of essays about everything from growing up with a lisp - the equivalent, in his school's opinion, of growing up gay - to the hilarious saga of his family's pets, to learning to speak French. Actually, I suppose the reason I see the compassion in the cutting humor is that so much of the book is about the inevitable gaps in communication between people, and how they hurt and create us. Highly recommended.
Olivia Judson, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: This lightweight book explores the sexual peculiarities of many species, a lot of them insects, including banana slugs with penises nearly as big as they are, lots of fruit flies, frogs, birds, fish, and the occasional mammal, though her focus on the weird makes mammals generally less common in her discussions. Her discussion of sexual violence is therefore a lot less fraught than most biologists', since human males don't in general glue their lovers' vaginas shut with a sperm plug, like some insects, or stab their penises anywhere they can on a victim's body in a hit-and-run insemination attempt, like one type of flatworm. A lot of somewhat interesting trivia, in a breezy style, and, precisely because she stays away from our closest cousins, not much of enduring interest.
Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood: Sacks, now a neurologist famous for books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, began life in a large family of doctors and engineers, and despite the privations of WWII, had a wonderful education in chemistry, pursued mostly by himself with the aid of some doting uncles. This book contains some autobiography, and a lot of interesting chemistry, as they are the same thing for Sacks. His paean to the periodic table is the best part of a very good book.
Mary Wells Lawrence, A Big Life (in Advertising): I picked this up because, as a book about advertising, I could buy it out of my research budget. While not particularly well-written, this is an interesting story about being a successful woman in a male-dominated profession from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lawrence's philosophy was that the advertising for a product should make the consumer love the product - emotional reaction was what she was after, and she was good at it. An undercurrent of the story, as she describes various big campaigns she created or oversaw and her personal life (she married a big client), is the corporatization and conglomeration of the advertising business itself, and her firm is ultimately swallowed up by an international concern. The other thing that really popped out was that, for Lawrence, the ad business in the 60s and 70s had the flavor of the Internet bubble: They really thought they were going to change the world, and become rich and famous besides. I'm not all that happy with the legacy that Lawrence and her ilk left us; I wish ads had more information and fewer smiles. But there's not much to be done about it now.
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day: I mentioned this book briefly a while back. Sedaris is a brutal writer, brutal on himself, his family, and everybody else in his path, and yet a surprising amount of compassion for the human condition comes through this witty collection of essays about everything from growing up with a lisp - the equivalent, in his school's opinion, of growing up gay - to the hilarious saga of his family's pets, to learning to speak French. Actually, I suppose the reason I see the compassion in the cutting humor is that so much of the book is about the inevitable gaps in communication between people, and how they hurt and create us. Highly recommended.
Olivia Judson, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: This lightweight book explores the sexual peculiarities of many species, a lot of them insects, including banana slugs with penises nearly as big as they are, lots of fruit flies, frogs, birds, fish, and the occasional mammal, though her focus on the weird makes mammals generally less common in her discussions. Her discussion of sexual violence is therefore a lot less fraught than most biologists', since human males don't in general glue their lovers' vaginas shut with a sperm plug, like some insects, or stab their penises anywhere they can on a victim's body in a hit-and-run insemination attempt, like one type of flatworm. A lot of somewhat interesting trivia, in a breezy style, and, precisely because she stays away from our closest cousins, not much of enduring interest.