Charlie Parker Played Be Bop – Chris Raschka

I love a children’s book that you have to think about. This one I had to ask my jazz musician husband how to read properly. It’s written in the form a jazz song, with a melody, a call and response between a saxophone and drums, the melody, a Charlie-Parker-style saxophone solo, and the melody again – with a lovely sustain at the end. I’ve been calling the lyrics back and forth with my two-year-old all week. And great art work, totally different in style than the other Chris Raschka book I’ve read – Five for a Little One.

I can’t recommend this highly enough.


Charlier Parker Played Be Bop
Chris Raschka
1992
Available from Amazon in boardbook, paperback, or hardcover.

Bad Science – Gary Taubes

Do you remember cold fusion? Wasn’t it going to save the world? Whatever happened? Read this book for an interesting, thorough history of the pseudoscience and sociology of cold fusion. Worth reading just to understand how science can go wrong, and how it corrects itself. Plus you get to see how shockingly venal and self-interested people can be. And you get to see for yourself the complete lack of evidence for cold fusion. The “discovery” Pons and Fleischmann reported (and some scientists thought they had confirmed) was just an artifact of bad experimental technique, combined with abuse of statistics, lack of expertise in physics, and an abiding desire for more grant money.

As a point of interest, check out the Amazon reviews for this book. Two of the five reviews (only five because it was published way back in the pre-historic era of 1993), give it the lowest level of one star, because the reviewers believe that cold fusion is going to save the world any day now and Gary Taubes is going to have to eat his words. These two reviews were written in 1999 and 2004, so I guess they’re still waiting. Tossing out the politically motivated reviews, it gets 4.7 stars.

Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion
1993
Gary Taubes
Out of print, but here is the listing at Amazon

The Conscience of a Liberal – Paul Krugman

Makes me feel hopeful about the future. Maybe now really is the time to get universal health coverage in the US and start making the country more equal.

The Conscience of a Liberal
Paul Krugman
2007
Available from Amazon

Buy, Buy Baby - Susan Gregory Thomas

A look at marketing to children 0-3. The author lays out the recent history behind the push for educational toys/TV for babies and toddlers – tracing it to the 1997 Clinton conference on early childhood development that was intended to promote high-quality preschools, but instead was seized upon by toy makers and TV producers as justification for academic-type toys and shows for very young children. She discusses what children under 3 really get from “educational television”. The answer: even with the best programs, the only thing they retain is recognition of the characters. For kids under 3, TV is just program-length commercials, like the Transformers or the Smurfs.

She talks about Baby Einstein, Sesame Street and Elmo, the Disney Princess package, the re-packaging and merchandising of childhood favorites (Clifford, Winnie-the-Pooh, Curious George), the impact of spin-off books on children’s book publishing, the use of curricula developed by toy/TV producers in preschools. Sometimes I stood in awe of the marketing genius, while at the same time being horrified by the uses to which it was being put.


Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds
Susan Gregory Thomas
2007
Available from Amazon

Five for a Little One - Chris Raschka

A marvelous children’s book about the senses. It has gorgeous illustrations, mostly woodcuts with some (I think) airbrushing. It also has an unusual and interesting rhyme scheme for a children’s book. The author has also written and/or illustrated a number of children’s books about jazz greats (like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker), and the rhyme scheme reflects that jazz feel. You can imagine the book being read out loud at a poetry slam by a man with a deep, melodic voice.

Five for a Little One
Chris Raschka
2006
Available from Amazon

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) - Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

Discussion of self-justification, the good and (mostly) bad side. Talks about how cognitive dissonance reinforces our positions. Fascinating, thorough, and scary chapters on “recovered” memories (a mental health disaster) and police interrogation (never talk to the police without a lawyer).

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) : Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
2007
Available from Amazon

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett

Fun, light, short.

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
Alan Bennett
2007
Available from Amazon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

Amazingly, dumbfoundingly good for 468 pages. The ending (pages 469 - 636) feels perfunctory and workman-like, but the first 468 pages are incredible and make the book definitely worth reading.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
2001
Available from Amazon

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007 - Richard Preston, Editor

Twenty-eight interesting science essays, picked out by Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees, which is also an excellent book.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007
Richard Preston, Editor
2007
Available from Amazon

Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig explains why copyright as it exists today undermines American culture, values, and creativity. He lays out the history of copyright in various fields and the recent (past 30 years) sudden expansion of copyright. He talks about possible solutions that could protect creators’ rights while allowing the explosion of creativity (both commercial and non-commercial) made possible by new technologies. This is not an apologia for college students downloading music, though he does discuss how we got to rampant downloading and he does point out the ludicrous magnitude of punishments for downloading. Worth reading – valuable background for understanding the current copyright fights. I hope we legislate something half so elegant as he suggests.

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Lawrence Lessig
2004
Available from Amazon

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep – D. T. Max

An account of prion diseases, among them mad cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and fatal familial insomnia (the family of the title). This book provides lucid explanations of interesting diseases and lays out their frightening implications. It discusses the animal husbandry and butchering practices that spread prion diseases, and it talks about how conflicts of interest within departments of agriculture encourage lackadaisical responses to disease outbreaks. I learned, for instance, that there have been four identified cases of mad cow in the US (the last in April 2006). There is every reason to believe that this is just the beginning.

I was surprised to learn that “prion” refers to one particular protein encoded by a gene on Chromosome 20, rather than a larger class of infectious proteins. The prion protein can fold in two different ways, one healthy and one not, and apparently it can be mis-coded, resulting in heritable forms of prion diseases. Reading the book, I was frustrated that I couldn’t understand how one mis-folded protein could cause different strains of disease. For instance, sporadic CJD, which arises randomly, has a different disease progression than variant CJD, which is caught from cows. Perhaps my confusion is well-founded – the author in his acknowledgements thanks Gary Taubes, “the author of a famous take-down of Stanley Prusiner”, one of the Nobel Prize winners for prion discoveries. Luckily for us, Slate has re-printed the takedown and also printed an update when Prusiner won his Nobel prize. I can’t tell if the science is valid or not, but Taubes (and also Wikipedia) suggests that the prion protein may not cause these diseases after all.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep
D. T. Max
2007
Available from Amazon

What Not to Wear - Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine

A nice explanation of what clothing looks good on different female body types. On the plus side, pictures of every outfit, pictures on women with fairly normal bodies, and an upbeat, "you can look good if you just learn a few things" attitude. On the minus side, only two models (the authors), though they have very different shapes and manage to cover a surprising number of good and bad examples. If you read the Amazon reviews, many people complain that the ideas in this book are too basic. And I would agree: if you are at all fashion-advanced, this is not the book for you. But for beginners (like me), it is a great place to start.

Once you’ve mastered these ideas, I suggest the Lucky Shopping Manual by Andrea Linett and Kim France, which discusses how to create outfits. It also gives explanation of the function of different items of clothing (e.g., demi-bras are for wearing under button-down shirts) and suggestions for building a wardrobe. I would avoid Secrets of Style by the Editors of InStyle. Not enough pictures, and those that they have are either line-drawings (too hard to interpret) or photographs of actresses (honestly, how useful are photographs of Charlize Theron and Halle Berry in learning how to dress your normal body with your normal amount of money and total lack of stylists?).

What Not to Wear
Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine
2003
Available from Amazon

Troublesome Young Men - Lynne Olson

Lynne Olson writes a fascinating account of British politics in the two years before Winston Churchill became prime minister of Great Britain. It focuses on the young Conservative politicians who worked to bring down the Chamberlain government, but along the way it discusses in detail the catastrophic, appalling, craven policies of appeasement, illuminating why even now politicians invoke “Munich” to encourage the march to war.

The book also provides glimpses of the class structure of Britain – boy, howdy, am I glad not to be a part of that. For instance, the Cavendish family, thought to possibly be richer than the royal family, owns a 30,000-acre estate and an ancestral home with 297 rooms – putting America’s largest house, the Biltmore Estate, to shame. The Cavendishes looked down on Harold Macmillan, who married into their family, because while his family was wealthy (they founded Macmilllan Publishers), they had made their money “in trade”, that is, by working for it. Even after Macmillan became prime minister, held that post for six years, and presided over great prosperity in Britain, the Cavendishes thought him beneath them.

Also, the book is full of interesting characters and incisive language. After Chamberlain came back from Munich where he had sold Czechoslovakia out to the Germans, he proclaimed, “Peace with honor.” The first lord of the admiralty, Duff Cooper, resigned in protest of the Munich agreement. He said later to friends that if Chamberlain had said “peace with terrible, unmitigated, unparalleled dishonor” perhaps he, Cooper, would have been able to stay on.


Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
Lynne Olson
2007
Available from Amazon

The beginning

This blog is for things I recommend. Mostly books, occasional films, essays, other things (like the OXO Smooth Edge Can Opener).