Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.

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Why read a book? Harry Potter; also Harry Potter en Español. The Mental Health of George W. Bush "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (US Supreme Court, 2003.)

Reader's Bill of Rights [after Daniel Pennac in Better than Life from November 2003 Utne Magazine] includes the rights to:

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{ June (junio (see also books on Spanish)) 2007 }

(6.30.2007)

• La Oreja Rota (Las Aventuras de Tintín) by Hergé.

• Lesson 3 of Natural History of Birds: Field trip to Davenport cliffs (seabirds) and Rancho del Oso (chaparral and forest birds).

• Award ceremony for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize took place in Oxford today. And the winner is ... Chinua Achebe.

• Lesson 2 of Natural History of Birds: Avian origins and systematics.

• Read Issue 38.2 (Summer 2007) of Modern Haiku

  Much interesting work.

  See also our comments on issue 38.1 of Modern Haiku. and comments on issue 36.2 of Modern Haiku.

• Skimmed: Dragonflies and Damselflies of California by Tim Manolis.

  Hunting for the amazing yellow-headed and yellow+black-ringed dragonfly I saw on a trail rising from redwoods by a creek into chaparral. Looks like it's the Pacific Spiketail (Cordulegaster dorsalis).

  Equally important, the names in this book show further evidence of J. K. Rowling's sense of humor: the dragons in Harry Potter books are named after Dragonflies!

• Lesson 1 of Natural History of Birds (Wings; flight; field observations in redwood glades), the UCSC bird class with Breck Taylor.

  Began reading and using:

  • The Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley.
  • Sibley's Birding Basics written and illustrated by David Allen Sibley.
  • National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America, 5th edition.

• The Comedians by Graham Greene

  Shows the same macabre sense of humor that prevades emergency rooms and mortuaries, though in Papa Doc's Haiti very few such services were available.

• A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain by Marilee Strong.

  Explores the causes of self-mutilatation as a mood stabilizer and presents alternatives. Discusses aspects of the psychology of cutters. See also notes on the nature of the criminal mind and child abuse and physical abuse, psychological abuse, and child neglect.

• Read Poetry (June 2007).

  Finally, the annual issue that is devoted to poetry. Favorites include:

  • A.E.Stallings's Misspent.
  • Heidy Steidlmayer's I Say So Long To The Hedge-Rider.

• Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region by Harold Gilliam for study of Santa Cruz Mountains.

• Reread The Snow Watcher by Chase Twichell.

• Read The Singer and Others: Flamenco Hay(na)ku by Eileen Tabios.

  A collection of hay(na)ku sequences.

  Oh sure, this text might be available on-line. But that lacks the four-dimensional glory experience of opening up this smootchy chap. Contact the author. Beg for a copy. Kneel on your flamenco-infused knees.

• Summer: from the journal of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau.

(6.10.2007)

Completing A Year of Living Your Yoga (2006) by Judith Hanson Lasater. See also beginning A Year of Living Your Yoga. A book of daily aphorism, spoken by Judith Hanson Lasater over thirty years of Yoga classes and jotted down by her faithful student and scribe Kathy Vasquez. Lasater adds a suggestion of how to put each aphorism into practice. Light-handed, unpreachy, and delightful. A best book read in 2007.

Sample:

Day	Aphorism	How to apply the aphorism to your life
June 10	"Being present is not difficult; remembering to be present is."	"When you finish reading these words, stop where you are and be aware of what is happening to your body, of the sensations of breath, of the noises around you. Can you bring this quality of awareness to all that you do? It is not a hard process but one that is overcome by busy mind again and again. Remember to practice this exercise whenever you can."

(6.8.2007)

• Amphibians: The World of Frogs, Toads, Salamanders, and Newts edited by Robert Hofrichter.

  Reviewed this big, well-illustrated book for information on newts eggs, as in the spheres observed in the June 2007 Big Basin survey. But this book followed the consensus of other texts, that newts eggs are deposited and are to be found singly.

• The History of the English Language: Part 1 by Seth Lerer.

  Excellent adjunct to my studies of language and linguistics.

• Abandoned (after three attempts) listening to the anti-Communist Communism: A History by Richard Pipes read by George Wilson.

  NOT recommended.

  The book's snide tone, seeming to revel in listing and commenting on faults of the thinkers and actors in Communism, suggest the author is biased. For balance, one needs to read about Communism from a more objective author.

  It made me research Richard Pipes, and led me to the information [as wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pipes, Retrieved June 3, 2007] that:

  " Pipes was head of the 1976 Team B, comprised of civilian experts and retired military officers and created by then CIA director George Bush as a competitive analysis exercise. Team B was created as antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials, known as Team A, and argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated Soviet military power and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions. A top CIA analyst called it 'a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view.' ... Team B also came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed ... a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system ... undetectable with our current technology.[4] This information was later proven to be false. According to Dr. Anne Cahn in 2004 (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-1980) 'I would say that all of it was fantasy... if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.'[5][6]"

  Claims that socialism and communism are the same organism, with socialism being the first step and inevitable step toward communism. This is the same argument that marijuana use inevitably leads to main-lining heroin.

The Pesthouse (2007) by Jim Crace. Remarkable novel about a dystopia in a future world where North America loses its population and its nationwide organization. What is of rare and great value, however, is loyalty and love. Wonderful. Read it. A best book read in 2007.

{ May (mayo (see also books on Spanish)) 2007 }

(5.29.2007)

• The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Geoffrey K. Pullum.
  Completed as part of a study of language and linguistics.

  See also Pullum's Far from the Madding Gerund.

• UNIX Power Tools by Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly, and Mike Loukides.
  What a power-house practical book. My favorite text when I was self-teaching UNIX.

  Very practical with lots of examples on various shells (especially bash and tsch, but also sh and csh. Includes more than I ever wanted to know about vi, the Morse Code of text editors. And lots of tools on the included CD-ROM.

  Chapter 51 ("Curiosities") is so UNIX. And Stars and Shrieks to all our readers: *!*!*!*!*!*!* Almost makes me want to keep the book ...

• C & C++ Code Capsules: A Guide for Practitioners by Chuck Allison.
  Parts:
  1. Preliminaries on C++ and C.
  2. Key Concepts: data abstraction through classes and as implemented by the template mechanism; conversions; visibility; control structures; exceptions; object-oriented programming.
  3. Leveraging the Standard Library.
  
  And what makes a language "object-oriented"? From p.338: "Object-oriented languages support three concepts:
  1. Data abstraction [the ability to manage complexity by defining new data types] via encapsulation.
  2. Inheritance [to reduce duplicated code].
  3. Polymorphism [which provides a user interface whose behavior adjusts automatically, based on the types of objects that it interacts with].

• JAVA in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference by David Flanagan.
  JAVA has is another Object-oriented language, but it plays the portability card and thrives in the Internet environment. It supports multiple threads (light-weight processes) which can be prioritized and synchronized. Compares JAVA and C++, and insists that knowing C++ does not mean you know JAVA.

• Understanding the New SQL: A Complete Guide by Jim Melton and Alan R. Simon.
  In the process came across the oldie-but-goodie review by Peter(?X?) on the site of Ocelot Computer Services Inc, at http://www.ocelot.ca/melton.htm.
  The book is good; the first copy I bought was never returned by a coworker over a decade ago!

  This was the best of the lot and the hardest to let go. So I'm writing up this quotation from their preface and giving the Chapter overviews below:
  

  "In a world of enormous and intricate interfaces, constantly changing tools and languages and systems, and relentless pressure for more of everything, one can lose sight of the basic principles -- simplicity, clarity, generality -- that form the bedrock of good software. One can also overlook the value of tools and notations that mechanize some of software creation and thus enlist the computer in its own programming. Our approach in this book is based on these underlying, interrelated principles, which apply at all levels of computing. These include simplicity, which keeps programs short and manageable; clarity, which makes sure they are easy to understand, for people as well as machines; generality, which means they work well in a broad range of situations and adapt well as new situations arise; and automation, which lets the machine do the work for us, freeing us from mundane tasks. By looking at computer programming in a variety of languages, from algorithms and data structures through design, debugging, testing, and performance improvement, we can illustrate universal engineering concepts that are independent of language, operating system, or programming paradigm."

  Chapters:

  1. Style. Includes: Names; Expressions and Statements; 'Magic' Numbers (literals).
  2. Algorithms and Data Structures. Includes: Searching; Sorting; Libraries; Quicksort; O-Notation [Order-of-magnitude]; Arrays; Lists; Trees; Hash Tables.
  3. Design and Implementation. Includes: Markov Chain Algorithm [using any text to construct a statistical model of language as used in that text, one can then generate text that has similar statistics to the original] as the candidate for a small implementation; Data Structure Alternatives; versions in C, Java, C++ with STL [standard Template Library], Awk, and Perl. The C version was the largest and the fastest; Java was the second largest and the most slow; Perl was the smallest, followed closely by Awk, and both were much faster than Java though slower than C. Note their comment that:
     

     Production quality [code] requires one or two orders of magnitude more effort than a program intended for personal use.

  4. Interfaces. Includes: Comma-Separated Values; A Prototype Library; Interface Principles; Resource Management; Abort, Retry, Fail; User Interfaces.
  5. Debugging. Includes: Debuggers; Good Clues, Easy Bugs; No Clues, Hard Bugs; Last Resorts [use a good debugger, look for mental misconceptions]; Non-reproducible Bugs [initialization failure, memory allocation error, dangling pointer]; Debugging Tools [besides a debugger]
     

     Well-written code has fewer bugs to begin with, and those that remain are easier to find.

  6. Testing. Includes: Test as You Write the Code; Systematic Testing
     

     Test incrementally ... Test simple parts first ... Know what output to expect ... Verify conservation properties (sums, differences) ... Compare independent implementations ... Measure test coverage

     
     Test Automation; Test Scaffolds; Stress Tests.
     

     The single most important rule of testing is to do it.

  7. Performance. Includes: A Bottleneck; Timing and Profiling [to measure where a program spends most of its time]; Strategies for Speed; Tuning the Code; Space Efficiency.
  8. Portability. Includes: Language; Headers and Libraries; Program Organization; Isolation; Data Exchange; Byte Order; Internationalization.
  9. Notation. Includes: Formatting Data; Regular Expressions Programmable Tools; Interpreters, Compilers, and Virtual Machines; Programs that Write Programs; Using Macros to Generate Code; Compiling on the Fly

  But it's gone to the Blessed Box for the second-hand bookstore, after a fond re-re-re-reading of its Appendix of Collected Rules on:

  1. Style: Be consistent ... Be accurate ... Be clear ... Don't comment bad code; rewrite it ...
  2. Interfaces: Free a resource in the same layer that allocated it ...
  3. Debugging: Read before modifying code to 'fix' a bug ... Explain your code to the teddy bear ... Use tools ...
  4. Testing: Test code at its boundaries ... Test incrementally ... Measure test coverage ...
  5. Performance: Don't optimize what doesn't matter ... Don't store what you can easily recompute ...
  6. Portability: Stick to the standard ... Try several compilers ... Use standard libraries ...
• The Story of Buddhism: a Concise Guide to its History and Teachings by Donald S. Lopez.
  Looks like a very serious book on Buddhism. I have had it from the library for 3 months and have not been able to read the whole of it. Its Introduction and its eight-page glossary are admirable. I could do with its Chapter 6 on Enlightenment.

  I like his final paragraph:

  But there is also ... the challenge provided by the dharma, which makes the remarkable claim that it is possible to live a life untainted by what are called the eight worldly concerns: gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, happiness and sorrow.

  Meanwhile, chopping water, carrying wood.

• A Student's Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum.
  Another book that I'd like to have spent more time with, but it's due back to the library.

• Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States, Volume II by Jacqueline Jones et al.
  Completed, as part of the study of USA Modern History.

• Discovering the American Past: A Look at the Evidence by William B. Wheeler and Susan D. Becker.
  Completed, as part of the study of USA Modern History.

• Skimmed some of Studs Terkel's Coming of Age: the story of our century by those who've lived it as part of the study of USA Modern History.

• Read The Last of the Nuba by Leni Riefenstahl.

  Nuba is the region of Sudan immediately east of Darfur.

  Riefenstahl, film maker of Nazi propaganda films including Triumph of the Will, talked about "my Nuba", the colonial possessive, perhaps? The photos look to me a little old-fashioned with way too much saturated black. There are however some haunting pictures, including one of a young Nuban widow with pale ash and mud painted across her eyes; someone with European eyes might tend to see her as a European woman veiled completely in black ... till one does the double take.

• Also read (and agree with) Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism" in The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975. It concerns The Last of the Nuba and its author, and includes:

  Here is a book of 126 splendid color photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, certainly the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere in recent years. ... And here is a biographical sketch of Riefenstahl on the dust jacket, and an introduction (unsigned) entitled 'How Leni Riefenstahl came to study the Mesakin Nuba of Kordofain' -- full of disquieting lies.... The Last of the Nuba is the last, necessary step in Riefenstahl's rehabilitation. It is the final rewrite of the past; or, for her partisans, the definitive confirmation that she was always a beauty freak rather than a horrid propagandist.

  Sontag's criticizes Riefenstahl's attempt to spin herself as a non-Nazi. Of Riefenstahl's propaganda film (for Hitler), Triumph of the Will, Sontag writes:

  a film whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker's having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda. The facts, denied by Riefenstahl since the war, are that she made Triumph of the Will with unlimited facilities and unstinting official cooperation (there was never any struggle between the filmmaker and the German minister of propaganda) ... [She was] a leading propagandist for the Third Reich.

• Read Hannah Hinchman's A Trail Through the Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place.

• Read John R. Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic (1998).

  A "pay attention" book that advises walking and cycling and noticing and "reading the landscape" for the information it gives you about social and historical and political connections. Most haiku poets will find this somewhat familiar. Chapters on:

  1. Beginnings. To get you started.
  2. Lines. Like electric lines, telephone lines, etc.
  3. Mail.
  4. Strips
  5. Interstate.
  6. Enclosures.
  7. Main street.
  8. Stops. Which is about motels.
  9. Endings:

     Whoever owns the real estate and its constituents, the explorer owns the landscape. And the explorer owns all the insights, all the magic that comes from looking. [p. 187]

  See also his Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English.

• Read Native Guard (2006) by Natasha Trethewey.

  Natasha Trethewey's 3rd collection of poems.

  Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

• Read On the Water Meridian (2007) by Barbara Bloom.

  Barbara Bloom's 1st book-length collection of poems contains heart-touching poems of love, family, and attention. The book's three parts are:

  1. " Holding Fast", particularly poems of childhood.
  2. " Mountains That Cannot Be Worn Away", particularly poems of love and being an adult.
  3. " What the Rain Has Touched", particularly poems of elegies, loss, and death.

• Listened to Bob Woodward's Plan of attack, about The Mental Health of George W. Bush's planning process for Bush's War.

• Read Burton Watson's translation of Masaoka Shiki's Collected Poems, which are primarily haiku and tanka.

• Read The Accidental (2005) by Ali Smith.

  The complete lack of communication and self-absorption in a rather dreadful family allows a complete stranger to walk in to their house, make herself a long-term guest, and disrupt each one of them, without any of the others knowing. Implausible as reality, but somewhat believable as an allegory.

  Valiant attempt to convey the story through a set of streams of consciousness, but those of the two children seem rather unnatural. Repetitive of some of the characters in her Hotel World.

  A short-list nominee for 2005 Booker Prize.

• Listened to The Devil's Code (2000) by John Sandford (Pulitzer prize-winner John Camp), read by Richard Feronne.

  Geek love, hackers, murder, and encryption in this beach-reading thriller. And heck, they're in the Silicon Valley and the Central California Coast instead of Minnesota. What's not to like?

  Lighter fair that the author's Lucas Davenport series involving the criminal mind of the serial killer. Leaves the reader happy instead of paranoid after it's finished.

  Books read in the Lucas Davenport series:

  Title	Series ordinal	Year
  Broken Prey	16th	2005
  Mind Prey	7th	1995
  Naked Prey	14th	2003
  Night Prey	6th	1994
  Rules of Prey	1st	1989
  Secret Prey	9th	1997
  Sudden Prey	8th	1996

• On Karl Marx birthday (he was born in the early hours of 5 May 1818, in Trier in the Moselle valley), skimmed Karl Marx: A Life (1999) by Francis Wheen.

  Quotes Marx' first manuscript on pp. 68-69:

  'Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can live without him.' From this premise all else follows. The worker has become just another commodity in search of a buyer; and it isn't a seller's market. Whatever happens, the worker loses out. ... Furthermore, in a prosperous society there will be a growing concentration of capital and more intense competition. 'The big capitalists ruin the small ones and a section of the former capitalists sinks into the class of the workers which, because of this increase in numbers, suffers a further depression of wages and becomes ever more dependent on the handful of big capitalists. ... So, Marx concludes, ... the only consequence for the worker is 'overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital'.

  A chatty informative book, though I am disappointed that he relies so heavily on other uncited authors for his more interesting turns of phrase.

• Read Poetry (May 2007).

  Favorites include:

  • Anne Stevenson's Inheriting My Grandmother's Nightmare.
  • Lucia Perillo's The Garbo Cloth.

• Finished Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (1995) by Michael Eric Dyson, as part of the study of USA Modern History.

  See also The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as told to Alex Haley with 1965 "Epilogue" by Alex Haley.

• Finished Witches Abroad (1991) by Terry Pratchett.

  Three witches (the Weatherwax-Ogg-Garlick trio), two fairy godmothers (Garlick again as well as a different Weatherwax), and one swamp witch bring renewed life to zombies and to the city-state of Genua (the New Orleans of Discworld).

  The maiden-mother-crone trio combat the difficulties of foreign travel and the foreigners. A highlight is Granny Weatherwax as riverboat gambler. The funniest Weatherwax book read so far in the Discworld series.

  More favorites from the many reviewed books by Terry Pratchett:

  • Hogfather.
  • Jingo.
  • Monstrous Regiment.

• Read John R. Stilgoe's Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English (2003).

  A pretty little hardback, with calm little illustrations by Jane Sheinman of various artifacts including Stilgoe's Essay, his 16-foot, 3-seat, bilge-bottomed rowboat with a long 4-inch deep skeg (a fixed rudder).

  "This dictionary, a sort of salvage operation of words drifting from dictionary language, may serve to moor the terminology of estuary English." [p. 3]

  Words include:

  brook

  cove

  creek

  ditch

  flats

  gut

  gutter

  guzzle

  lake

  quicksand

  rill

  river

  rivulet

  sandbank

  sandbar

  shore

  spit

  stream

  wrack line

  as well as many terms for a variety of small hand-powered boats.

  See also his Outside Lies Magic.

{ April (abril (see also books on Spanish)) 2007 }

(4.28.2007)

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006) by Barack Obama. Terrific book. Very readable. Insightful about politics, the U.S. constitution, himself, and his beliefs. Read it.

(4.25.2007)

blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) by Malcolm Gladwell. Terrific book. Very readable. Insightful about practical social psychology and cognitive psychology. Biopsychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Personality Psychology. Includes one of the best impressions for a non-autist for how a person with autism experiences situations with people. Read it. One of the best books read in 2007. See also Gladwell's Tipping Point.

(4.22.2007)

• Skimmed A Walk Around the Pond: Insects in and over the Water (2006) by Gilbert Waldbauer.

  Recommended. With gorgeous line drawings by Meredith Waterstraat, the sections of the book are:

  1. A first look. About 10,000 aquatic and semi-aquatic species of insects are found in North American freshwater habitats. That's fewer than the 84,000 North American land-dwelling insects, but ten times its species of birds and almost 100 times its species of frogs, toads, and salamanders. Insects predated the dinosaurs by almost 200 million years (according to the fossil record), the oldest being a mayfly found in sedimentary rock about 320 million years old.
  2. Who's who in the water. Of the 900,000 known insects (p. 13), "Aquatic insects ... represent 11 of the 33 orders (major groups) of insects -- indicating that in evolutionary time there were at least 11 independent invasions of the water from the land."
     They include:
     • Mayflies (Order Ephemeroptera [day wing]).
     • Dragonflies and damselflies (Order Odonata).
     • Stoneflies (Order Plecoptera [folded wing]).
     • True bugs (Order Hemiptera [half wing]).
     • Dobsonflies, fishflies, and alderflies (Order Megaloptera [giant wing]).
     • Spongillaflies (Order Neuroptera [veined wing]).
     • Beetles (Order Coleoptera [sheath wing]).
     • Caddisflies (Order Trichoptera [hairy wing]).
     • Moths and butterflies (Order Lepidoptera [scale wing]).
     • Mosquitoes and other flies (Order Diptera [two wing, the rear pair of wings having evolved into small, gyroscopic sense organs]).
     • Wasps (Order Hymanoptera [membrane wing]).
     • Spiders (Class Archnida, Order Araneae); spiders are related to, but not, insects; a few are semi-aquatic.
  3. Where they live.
  4. The breath of life.
  5. Finding food and eating.
  6. Going places.
  7. The next generation.
  8. On being eaten.
  9. How not to be eaten.
  10. Coping with the climate.
  11. Our friends and enemies.

  Selected readings take up 22 more pages.

• Listened to Hotel World (2001) by Ali Smith, well narrated by Helen Lederer.

  Recommended. Fascinating streams of five consciousnesses in the aftermath of an accident. One is dead, with an incomplete memory of the life of its person (in contrast with The Lovely Bones). The interactions between the different women are diverse and reveal different aspects of the central story, how one person died.

  A short-list nominee for 2001 Booker Prize.

• Listened to Secret Prey (1997) by John Sandford (Pulitzer prize-winner John Camp), read by Richard Feronne.

  Detective Davenport's fiancé, Weather (a surgeon), having had enough of Davenport's lethality, has separated from him and has canceled their wedding. This leaves Davenport tumbling into depression until he is 'rescued' by yet another serial killer.

  This one is a rather caricatured woman, whose criminal mind is somewhat unhinged.

  A flock of opium-addicted grandmas also star.

  Rather more swearing than usual.

  Other books read in this series:

  Title	Series ordinal	Year
  Broken Prey	16th	2005
  Mind Prey	7th	1995
  Naked Prey	14th	2003
  Night Prey	6th	1994
  Rules of Prey	1st	1989
  Sudden Prey	8th	1996

Beginning A Year of Living Your Yoga (2006) by Judith Hanson Lasater. A book of daily aphorism, spoken by Judith Hanson Lasater over thirty years of Yoga classes and jotted down by her faithful student and scribe Kathy Vasquez. Lasater adds a suggestion of how to put each aphorism into practice. Light-handed, unpreachy, and delightful. A best book read in 2007.

Sample:

Day	Aphorism	How to apply the aphorism to your life
April 17	"Shifting and giving in are not the same thing."	"Today when you feel pressured to make a different choice in some small thing, focus on the other person's point of view. If you can, shift to his point of view. This is not the same as giving in. Shifting your viewpoint requires strength; giving in comes from fear."

(4.15.2007)

• While working on my tax forms, I listen to Howard Zinn's talks on The People's History Project: Volume One -- good for Income Tax Day. This six-CD set has:
  • "A People's History of the United States" (a lecture at Reed College).
  • Heroes and Martyrs: Emma Goldman, Sacco & Vanzetti, and the Revolutionary Struggle.
  • "Stories Hollywood Never Tells"
  • Artists in a time of war.

  Echoes the socialist leader Eugene Debs: "It is the master class that makes the war, and the working class that fights it."

• Read Poetry (April 2007 -- the translation issue).

  The views on translation range from complete accuracy to mere inspiration and faux translation. The many remarkable poems, poets, and translators include:

  Poet	Poem	Translator and sampling of Translator's Notes
  Novica Tadic	"Dark Things" They stay where they are, in our chests, murmuring in our hearts. and from an unnamed poem: I can't see the stake, don't know who is being burned alive or why.	Charles Simac from Serbian. "Tadic is a poet of modern history. He is aware of the enormity of evil that hangs over all our lives. His poems are short and hard to translate. They say little and mean a lot. ... I worship accuracy in translation. Strict literalism--word for word, phrase for phrase is my rule until I get stuck. It pains me to take the smallest liberties."
  Valzhyna Mort	"New York"	Franz Wright (author of the iridescent Walking to Martha's Vineyard as well as the petulant letters to Poetry published May 2005) and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, from Belarusian. His note includes: "It's simply impossible on the basis of one relatively short printed poem to convey the cumulative impact of her [Mort's] work, with its naked directness and poignancy and dark wit."
  Alcman	"Halcyon"	A.E. Stallings from Ancient Greek.
  Anonymous	"Lament"	John Peck from Chinese. A faux translation: "The hand is entirely mine, though the poem might plausibly come from a Chinese writer invested in the traffic between Western traditions and his own."
  Jin Eun-Young	"Long Finger Poem"	Peter Campion from Korean. "Since Jin Eun-Young's poems work by virtue of their directness, their simple surfaces beneath which larger insinuations ripple, I tried to employ no embellishment in the English. I worked phrase by phrase, paralleling the original. I did take liberties with prosody. The original is in free verse, but I found the pentameter best accommodated my impression of the tone, its play between convention and immediacy. ... Her style rests on an edge. ... [Her] sensibility is one of attentive restlessness ... humble but persistent curiosity."
  Antonio Machado	"The Wind"	Don Paterson from Spanish. "What the poet meant and what the poem means rarely coincide perfectly; my own better poems are always partly unconscious compositions, and my own conscious intention — when I'm dumb enough to express it as some kind of definitive gloss — is really just one more partial reading. ... Machado, too, suffered from the poet's disease of philosophy."
  János Pilinszky	"Harback 1944"	Clive Wilmer and Goerge Gömöri from Hungarian. "The language of the original is so austerly economical and the simple syllabic meter so precise that they offer the translator no openings for paraphrase. ... Every syllable counted."

  Lastly, my favorite bio is of Chris Bianchi (who drew the cover art), partly because it is the briefest: "a graphic artist living and working in London. He is currently trying to master the trumpet."

• Abandoned the gossipy and boring A treasury of royal scandals by Michael Farquhar.

• Listened to Sudden Prey (1996) by John Sandford (Pulitzer prize-winner John Camp), read by Richard Feronne.

  One of the more intense of Sandford's series on Lucas Davenport and serial killers, with a quartet of killers (including a rogue cop) whose criminal minds take on the similar (but differently channeled) mind of Davenport. Strong women, including Davenport's fiancé, Weather (a surgeon), star.

  Other books in this series include:

  • Broken Prey (14th)
  • Mind Prey (7th; 1995)
  • Naked Prey
  • Night Prey.
  • Rules of Prey (1st; 1989)

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as told to Alex Haley with 1965 "Epilogue" by Alex Haley.

  See also: Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (1995) by Michael Eric Dyson.

• Christine Falls by John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black).

  A fascinating mystery novel of parental abandonment told for many people from many points of view, and of the dangerous practice of the farming of souls:

  "A scheme that's been going on for twenty years ... Can you imagine how many children that is? How many babies taken over here and handed out like ... like ..." She could find no word sufficiently encompassing. "They call it charity, but that's not what it is. It's power, just naked power. ...Power over people. Over their souls."

• Reinventing comics: how imagination and technology are revolutionizing an art form by Scott McCloud.

  Preferred:

  • Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) by Scott McCloud.
  • Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of comics, manga, and graphic novels (2006) by Scott McCloud

• Opera: György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1997 version with English libretto). Nekrotzar (Tzar of the Dead) takes Piet the Pot as his servant to bring the end of the world. But somehow love (Amanda and Amando) prevails.

Related pages: Books on Buddhism. Books on Learning Spanish. Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own. Forests of California and Trees of the World.

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