NielsenGW's Dewey Challenge

Here we go, folks! I'm keeping the overall stats here, then more granular stats below.

Overall reading breadth:
Sections: 349 / 904 (38.60%) {! = 264 => +29.20%}
Divisions: 99 / 99 - COMPLETE!

(!) = I have a book in this Dewey section, but haven't read it yet.
* = I read this book before Dec 26, 2011 (actual start of project) and will be either rereading this one or finding a replacement selection for this section (currently at 1 section).

(Note: The listing below reflects almost exactly my full copy of the DDC 22, and therefore, may be different from other members' section listings.)

Quick jumps:

000s: General Knowledge
100s: Philosophy and Psychology
200s: Religion
300s: Social Science
400s: Language
500s: Pure Science
600s: Applied Science (Technology)
700s: Fine Arts
800s: Literature
900s: History and Geography

000s: Computer science, information & general works: (21/84) {! = 17}

000 Computer science, information, general works (5/7)
  000 Computer science, knowledge and general works (!)
  001 Knowledge – Atlantis and the Silver City
  002 The book (i.e. Meta writings about books) – Outwitting History
  003 Systems – Complexity and the Arrow of Time
  004 Data processing and computer science – The App Generation
  005 Computer programming, programs and data (!)
  006 Special computer methods – Numbersense
  007 Unassigned
  008 Unassigned
  009 Unassigned

010 Bibliography (2/9)
  010 Bibliography
  011 Bibliographies (!)
  012 Bibliographies and catalogs of individuals (!)
  013 Unassigned (Relocated to 011.8)
  014 Bibliographies of anonymous and pseudonymous works
  015 Bibliographies and catalogs of works from specific places
  016 Bibliographies and catalogs of works on specific subjects or in specific disciplines – Bizarre Books
  017 General subject catalogs
  018 Catalogs arranged by author, date, etc. – Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist
  019 Dictionary catalogs

020 Library and information sciences (5/8)
  020 Library and information sciences – Foundations of Library and Information Science
  021 Relationships of libraries, archives, information centers (!)
  022 Administration of physical plant – The Book on the Bookshelf
  023 Personnel management (Human resource management) (!)
  024 Unassigned
  025 Operations of libraries, archives, information centers – Essential Classification
  026 Libraries, archives, information centers devoted to specific subjects and disciplines (!)
  027 General libraries, archives, information centers – Main Street Public Library
  028 Reading and use of other information media – 12 Books That Changed the World
  029 Unassigned

030 Encyclopedias & books of facts (2/10)
  030 General encyclopedic works (!)
  031 General encyclopedic works in American English – mental_floss presents Forbidden Knowledge
  032 General encyclopedic works in English (!)
  033 General encyclopedic works in other Germanic languages
  034 General encyclopedic works in French, Occitan and Catalan
  035 General encyclopedic works in Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romanian, or Rhaeto-Romanic languages
  036 General encyclopedic works in Spanish and Portuguese
  037 General encyclopedic works in Slavic languages
  038 General encyclopedic works in Scandinavian languages
  039 General encyclopedic works in Italic, Hellenic, or other languages – Too Much to Know

040s All unassigned (formerly Collected essays by language)

050 Magazines, journals and serials (1/10)
  050 General serial publications
  051 General serial publications in American English – Good Days and MAD
  052 General serial publications in English
  053 General serial publications in other Germanic languages
  054 General serial publications in French, Occitan, or Catalan
  055 General serial publications in Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romanian, or Rhaeto-Romanic languages
  056 General serial publications in Spanish and Portuguese
  057 General serial publications in Slavic languages
  058 General serial publications in Scandinavian languages
  059 General serial publications in Italic, Hellenic, or other languages (!)

060 Associations, organizations and museums (1/10)
  060 General organizations and museology (!)
  061 General organizations in North America
  062 General organizations in British Isles; in England
  063 General organizations in central Europe; in Germany
  064 General organizations in France and Monaco
  065 General organizations in Italy and adjacent territories
  066 General organizations in Iberian Peninsula and adjacent islands; in Spain
  067 General organizations in eastern Europe; in Russia
  068 General organizations in other geographic areas
  069 Museology (Museum science) – The Stranger and the Statesman

070 News media, journalism and publishing (1/10)
  070 Documentary media, educational media, news media; journalism; publishing – The Dead Beat
  071 Journalism and newspapers in North America
  072 Journalism and newspapers in British Isles; in England
  073 Journalism and newspapers in central Europe; in Germany (!)
  074 Journalism and newspapers in France and Monaco; in France (!)
  075 Journalism and newspapers in Italy and adjacent islands; in Italy
  076 Journalism and newspapers in Iberian Peninsula and adjacent islands; in Spain (!)
  077 Journalism and newspapers in eastern Europe; in Russia
  078 Journalism and newspapers in Scandinavia
  079 Journalism and newspapers in other geographic areas

080 General collections (2/10)
  080 General collections
  081 General collections in American English (!)
  082 General collections in English (!)
  083 General collections in other Germanic languages – The Words of Albert Schweitzer
  084 General collections in French, Occitan, or Catalan
  085 General collections in Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romanian, or Rhaeto-Romanic languages
  086 General collections in Spanish and Portuguese
  087 General collections in Slavic languages
  088 General collections in Scandinavian languages (!)
  089 General collections in Italic, Hellenic, or other languages – Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs

090 Manuscripts & rare books (2/10)
  090 Manuscripts, rare books, or other rare printed materials
  091 Manuscripts – The Friar and the Cipher
  092 Block books
  093 Incunabula
  094 Printed books
  095 Books notable for bindings
  096 Books notable for illustrations and materials
  097 Books notable for ownership or origin
  098 Prohibited works, forgeries and hoaxes – Great Forgers and Famous Fakes
  099 Books notable for format

100s – Philosophy and psychology: (30/89) {! = 28}

100 Philosophy (2/9)
  100 General works on philosophy (!)
  101 Theory of philosophy – Wittgenstein's Beetle
  102 Miscellany of philosophy – Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar
  103 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and concordances of philosophy (!)
  104 Unassigned
  105 Serial publications of philosophy
  106 Organizations and management of philosophy
  107 Education, research, and related topics of philosophy (!)
  108 History and description of philosophy with respect to kinds of persons
  109 Historical and collected persons treatment of philosophy

110 Metaphysics (3/9)
  110 Metaphysics (!)
  111 Ontology – The Infinite Book
  112 Unassigned
  113 Cosmology (Philosophy of nature) (!)
  114 Space (!)
  115 Time (!)
  116 Change – The Emergence of Everything
  117 Structure – Complexity and Postmodernism
  118 Force and energy (!)
  119 Number and quantity

120 Epistemology (4/9)
  120 Epistemology, causation, and humankind
  121 Epistemology (Theory of knowledge) (!)
  122 Causation – The Why of Things
  123 Determinism and indeterminism (!)
  124 Teleology
  125 Unassigned
  126 The self – The Mind's I
  127 The unconscious and the subconscious
  128 Humankind – Death and the Afterlife
  129 Origin and destiny of individual souls – Spook

130 Parapsychology and occultism (2/7)
  130 Parapsychology and occultism (!)
  131 Parapsychological and occult methods for achieving well-being, happiness, success – The Outline of Psychoanalysis
  132 Unassigned
  133 Specific topics in parapsychology and occultism – America Bewitched
  134 Unassigned
  135 Dreams and mysteries
  136 Unassigned
  137 Divinatory graphology
  138 Physiognomy
  139 Phrenology

140 Philosophical schools of thought (1/10)
  140 Specific philosophical schools and viewpoints (!)
  141 Idealism and related systems and doctrines
  142 Critical philosophy (!)
  143 Bergsonism and intuitionism
  144 Humanism and related systems and doctrines
  145 Sensationalism
  146 Naturalism and related systems and doctrines – Darwin's Dangerous Idea
  147 Pantheism and related systems and doctrines
  148 Dogmatism, eclecticism, liberalism, syncretism, and traditionalism (!)
  149 Other philosophical systems and doctrines (!)

150 Psychology (5/7)
  150 Psychology – Freud for Beginners
  151 Unassigned
  152 Perception, movement, emotions, and physiological drives – The Joy of Pain
  153 Conscious mental processes and intelligence – Consciousness and the Social Brain
  154 Subconscious and altered states and processes (!)
  155 Differential and developmental psychology – Designing the Creative Child
  156 Comparative psychology (!)
  157 Unassigned
  158 Applied psychology – Why Men Don't Listen
  159 Unassigned

160 Logic (3/8)
  160 Logic – Crimes Against Logic
  161 Induction
  162 Deduction
  163 Unassigned
  164 Unassigned
  165 Fallacies and sources of error (!)
  166 Syllogisms
  167 Hypotheses
  168 Argument and persuasion – The Art of Deception
  169 Analogy – Surfaces and Essences

170 Ethics (Moral philosophy) (5/10)
  170 Ethics (Moral philosophy) – On the Genealogy of Morals
  171 Ethical systems (!)
  172 Political ethics
  173 Ethics of family relationships
  174 Occupational ethics – Doing Nothing
  175 Ethics of recreation, leisure, public performances, and communication
  176 Ethics of sex and reproduction (!)
  177 Ethics of social relations – True Enough
  178 Ethics of consumption – The Complete Book of Greed
  179 Other ethical norms – Stay (Hecht)

180 Ancient, medieval, and eastern philosophy (3/10)
  180 Ancient, medieval, and eastern philosophy
  181 Eastern philosophy – The Analects
  182 Pre-Socratic Greek philosophies (!)
  183 Sophistic, Socratic, and related Greek philosophies (!)
  184 Platonic philosophy – Symposium
  185 Aristotelian philosophy (!)
  186 Skeptic and Neoplatonic philosophies
  187 Epicurean philosophy – Travels with Epicurus
  188 Stoic philosophy (!)
  189 Medieval western philosophy

190 Modern western philosophy (19th-century, 20th-century) (2/10)
  190 Modern western and other non-eastern philosophy
  191 Modern western philosophy of the United States and Canada (!)
  192 Modern western philosophy of the British Isles (!)
  193 Modern western philosophy of Germany and Austria (!)
  194 Modern western philosophy of France – The First and Second Discourses
  195 Modern western philosophy of Italy
  196 Modern western philosophy of Spain and Portugal (!)
  197 Modern western philosophy of the former Soviet Union
  198 Modern western philosophy of Scandinavia and Finland
  199 Modern western philosophy in other geographic areas – The Invention of Africa

200s: Religion (40/88) {! = 28}

200 Religion (3/10)
  200 General works on religion – The Future of an Illusion
  201 Religious mythology, general classes of religion, interreligious relations and attitudes, social theology – Ecology and Religion
  202 Doctrines (!)
  203 Public worship and other practices (!)
  204 Religious experience, life, practice (!)
  205 Religious ethics
  206 Leaders and organization (!)
  207 Missions and religious education
  208 Sources – The Voice, the Word, the Books
  209 Sects and reform movements

210 Natural theology (1/7)
  210 Philosophy and theory of religion – God and the Reach of Reason
  211 Concepts of God (!)
  212 Existence, ways of knowing, and attributes of God (!)
  213 Creation (!)
  214 Theodicy
  215 Science and religion (!)
  216 Unassigned
  217 Unassigned
  218 Humankind
  219 Unassigned

220 Bible (5/10)
  220 The Bible (General) – God's Secretaries
  221 Old Testament (Tanakh) (!)
  222 Historical books of Old Testament (!)
  223 Poetic books of Old Testament – Job for Everyone
  224 Prophetic books of Old Testament (!)
  225 New Testament – Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene
  226 Gospels & Acts – Mark by the Book
  227 Epistles – How to Like Paul Again
  228 Revelation (Apocalypse) (!)
  229 Apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and intertestamental works (!)

230 Christian theology (5/9)
  230 Christianity and Christian theology – When Donkeys Talk
  231 God – God: A Biography
  232 Jesus Christ and his family; Christology – Zealot
  233 Humankind – God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality
  234 Salvation (Soteriology) & grace – One with Christ
  235 Spiritual beings (!)
  236 Eschatology (!)
  237 Unassigned
  238 Creeds, confessions of faith, covenants, and catechisms
  239 Apologetics and polemics (!)

240 Christian moral and devotional theology (4/8)
  240 Christian moral and devotional theology
  241 Christian ethics – The Decalogue through the Centuries
  242 Devotional literature – Majestic and Wild
  243 Evangelistic writings for individuals and families
  244 Unassigned
  245 Unassigned
  246 Use of art in Christianity (!)
  247 Church furnishings and related articles
  248 Christian experience, practice, life – Silence: A Christian History
  249 Christian observances in family life – The Praying Family

250 Christian orders & local church (2/7)
  250 Local Christian church and Christian religious orders
  251 Preaching (Homiletics) (!)
  252 Texts of sermons
  253 Pastoral office and work (Pastoral theology) – The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good
  254 Parish administration (!)
  255 Religious congregations and orders – The Calling
  256 Unassigned
  257 Unassigned
  258 Unassigned
  259 Pastoral care of families, of specific kinds of persons

260 Christian social theology (6/10)
  260 Christian social and ecclesiastical theory – A Gathering of Memories
  261 Social theology and interreligious relations and attitudes – Hope After Faith
  262 Ecclesiology – The Legend of Pope Joan
  263 Days, times, places of religious observance – Journey Into the Heart of God
  264 Public worship (!)
  265 Sacraments, other rites and acts
  266 Missions – By the Rivers of Water
  267 Associations for religious work (!)
  268 Religious education
  269 Spiritual renewal – A Shopkeeper's Millennium

270 Christian church history (4/10)
  270 Historical and geographic treatment of Christianity and Christian persons; Church history – Why Cities Matter
  271 Religious congregations and orders in church history – Chasing Francis
  272 Persecutions in general church history (!)
  273 Doctrinal controversies and heresies in general church history (!)
  274 Christianity and the Christian church in Europe (!)
  275 Christianity and the Christian church in Asia
  276 Christianity and the Christian church in Africa
  277 Christianity and the Christian church in North America – Meetinghouse Hill, 1630-1783
  278 Christianity and the Christian church in South America – On Earth as It Is in Heaven
  279 Christianity and the Christian church in other parts of the world

280 Christian denominations & sects (6/9)
  280 Denominations and sect of Christian church – The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline
  281 Early church and Eastern churches
  282 Roman Catholic Church – The Vatican
  283 Anglican churches (!)
  284 Protestants denominations of Continental origin and related bodies – Letters to Lutheran Pastors
  285 Presbyterian churches, Reformed churches centered in America, Congregational churches, Puritanism – Presbyterians and American Culture
  286 Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Adventist churches – Signs, Wonders, and a Baptist Preacher
  287 Methodist and related churches – William and Catherine
  288 Unassigned
  289 Other denominations and sects (!)

290 Other & comparative religions (4/8)
  290 Other religions (!)
  291 Unassigned (Relocated to 200)
  292 Classical (Greek & Roman) religion
  293 Germanic religion
  294 Religions of Indic origin – The Easy Path
  295 Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism, Parseeism) (!)
  296 Judaism – Hanukkah in America
  297 Islam, Bábism & Bahá'í Faith – The Koran: Selected Suras
  298 Permanently unassigned
  299 Other religions – The EarthKeeper

300s: Social sciences (44/90) {! = 33}

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology (6/8)
  300 Social sciences – How to Conduct Surveys
  301 Sociology and anthropology (!)
  302 Social interaction (!)
  303 Social processes – Social Acceleration
  304 Factors affecting social behavior – Exodus (Collier)
  305 Social groups – It is Well with My Soul
  306 Culture and institutions – The Call of the Mall
  307 Communities – The Company Town
  308 Unassigned
  309 Unassigned

310 General statistics (1/7)
  310 General collections of statistics
  311 Unassigned
  312 Unassigned
  313 Unassigned
  314 General statistics of Europe – On An Average Day in The Soviet Union
  315 General statistics of Asia (!)
  316 General statistics of Africa (!)
  317 General statistics of North America (!)
  318 General statistics of South America
  319 General statistics of other parts of the world; of Pacific Ocean islands

320 Political science (6/9)
  320 Political science (Politics and government) – Thomas Paine
  321 Systems of governments and states (!)
  322 Relation of state to organized groups and their members – On Dissent
  323 Civil and political rights – We Shall Not Be Moved
  324 The political process – 1912
  325 International migration and colonization (!)
  326 Slavery and emancipation (!)
  327 International relations – Her Majesty's Spymaster
  328 The legislative process – The American Senate
  329 Unassigned

330 Economics (8/10)
  330 Economics – Tropic of Hopes
  331 Labor economics – Behind the Kitchen Door
  332 Financial economics – Building Home
  333 Economics of land and energy – Cod
  334 Cooperatives – Food Co-ops in America
  335 Socialism and related systems (!)
  336 Public finance – Austerity
  337 International economics (!)
  338 Production – Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
  339 Macroeconomics and related topics – Scroogenomics

340 Law (6/10)
  340 Law – Rebels at the Bar
  341 Law of nations – Capital of the World
  342 Constitutional and administrative law – Though the Heavens May Fall
  343 Military, defense, public property, public finance, tax, commerce and trade, and industrial law
  344 Labor, social service, education, and cultural law (!)
  345 Criminal law
  346 Private law – The Democracy of Sound
  347 Civil procedure and courts – Out of Order
  348 Laws, regulations, cases
  349 Law of specific jurisdictions, areas, socioeconomic regions, and regional intergovernmental organizations – You Can Get Arrested For That

350 Public administration (2/10)
  350 Public administration and military science (!)
  351 Public administration (!)
  352 General considerations of public administration – Ask Not
  353 Specific fields of public administration (!)
  354 Public administration of economy and environment
  355 Military science – The Art of War
  356 Foot forces and warfare (!)
  357 Mounted forces and warfare (!)
  358 Air and other specialized forces and warfare; engineering and related service
  359 Sea (Naval) forces and warfare (!)

360 Social services; association (3/10)
  360 Social problems and services; associations
  361 Social problems and social welfare in general – Chasing Chaos
  362 Social welfare problems and services – Madness and Civilization
  363 Other social problems and services (!)
  364 Criminology – Skull in the Ashes
  365 Penal and related institutions (!)
  366 Associations (!)
  367 General clubs
  368 Insurance
  369 Miscellaneous kinds of associations

370 Education (4/8)
  370 Education – Youth, Education, and Marginality
  371 School and their activities; special education – Three Cups of Tea
  372 Elementary education (!)
  373 Secondary education (!)
  374 Adult education – Reading with Oprah
  375 Curricula (!)
  376 Unassigned
  377 Unassigned
  378 Higher education – Tuesdays with Morrie
  379 Public policy issues in education (!)

380 Commerce, communications, transport (4/10)
  380 Commerce, communications, and transportation (!)
  381 Commerce (Trade) (!)
  382 International commerce (Foreign trade) (!)
  383 Postal communication (!)
  384 Communications; Telecommunication – The Phone Book
  385 Railroad transportation – Nothing Like It In the World
  386 Inland waterway and ferry transportation (!)
  387 Water, air, space transportation – Tales of the Seven Seas
  388 Transportation; Ground transportation – London Underground’s Strangest Tales
  389 Metrology and standardization (!)

390 Customs, etiquette, folklore (4/8)
  390 Customs, etiquette, folklore – All the Time in the World
  391 Costume and personal appearance (!)
  392 Customs of life cycle and domestic life (!)
  393 Death customs – American Afterlife
  394 General customs – A History of the World in 6 Glasses
  395 Etiquette (Manners)
  396 Unassigned
  397 Unassigned
  398 Folklore – The Rotinonshonni
  399 Customs of war and diplomacy (!)

400s: Language (26/85) {! = 20}

400 Language (3/10)
  400 Language – Verbatim
  401 Philosophy and theory – Real Presences
  402 Miscellany – The Toils of Language
  403 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and concordances
  404 Special topics or language
  405 Serial publications
  406 Organizations and management
  407 Education, research, related topics
  408 Treatment of language with respect to kinds of persons (!)
  409 Geographical and persons treatment (!)

410 Linguistics (4/9)
  410 Linguistics
  411 Writing systems of standard forms of languages (!)
  412 Etymology of standard forms of languages (!)
  413 Dictionaries of standard forms of languages – The Man Who Made Lists
  414 Phonology and phonetic of standard forms of languages – The Music of Everyday Speech
  415 Grammar and syntax of standard forms of languages (!)
  416 Unassigned
  417 Dialectology and historical linguistics – Holy Sh*t
  418 Standard usage; Applied linguistics – After Babel
  419 Sign languages (!)

420 English & Old English (5/8)
  420 English and Old English – The Prodigal Tongue
  421 Writing system, phonology, phonetics of standard English (!)
  422 Etymology of standard English – The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two
  423 Dictionaries of standard English – The Professor and the Madman
  424 Unassigned
  425 Grammar and syntax of standard English (!)
  426 Unassigned
  427 Historical, geographic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard English – Wicked Good Words
  428 Standard English usage; Applied linguistics – Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams
  429 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) (!)

430 Germanic languages; German (2/8)
  430 German and Germanic languages (!)
  431 Writing system, phonology, phonetics of standard German – Elements of German
  432 Etymology of standard German
  433 Dictionaries of standard German
  434 Unassigned
  435 Grammar and syntax of standard German
  436 Unassigned
  437 Historical, goegraphic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard German
  438 Standard German usage
  439 Other Germanic languages – Born to Kvetch

440 Romance languages; French (1/8)
  440 French and Romance languages (!)
  441 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of standard French
  442 Etymology of standard French
  443 Dictionaries of standard French
  444 Unassigned
  445 Grammar and syntax of standard French – Grammaire Francaise (Bruce)
  446 Unassigned
  447 Historical, geographic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard French
  448 Standard French usage
  449 Occitan, Catalan, and Franco-Provençal

450 Italian, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic (2/8)
  450 Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romanian, and Rhaeto-Romanic languages – La Bella Lingua
  451 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of standard Italian
  452 Etymology of standard Italian
  453 Dictionaries of standard Italian
  454 Unassigned
  455 Grammar and syntax of standard Italian
  456 Unassigned
  457 Historical, geographic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard Italian – The Higher Functional Field
  458 Standard Italian usage
  459 Romanian and Rhaeto-Romanic (!)

460 Spanish and Portuguese languages (1/8)
  460 Spanish and Portuguese languages (!)
  461 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of standard Spanish
  462 Etymology of standard Spanish
  463 Dictionaries of standard Spanish
  464 Unassigned
  465 Grammar and syntax of standard Spanish (!)
  466 Unassigned
  467 Historical, geographic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard Spanish
  468 Standard Spanish usage – 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish
  469 Portuguese (!)

470 Italic languages; Latin (3/8)
  470 Italic and Latin languages – Latin Alive
  471 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of classical Latin – ABC Et Cetera
  472 Etymology of classical Latin
  473 Dictionaries of classical Latin
  474 Unassigned
  475 Grammar and syntax of classical Latin (!)
  476 Unassigned
  477 Old, Postclassical, Vulgar Latin – Ad Infinitum
  478 Classical Latin usage (!)
  479 Other Italic languages

480 Hellenic languages; Classical Greek (1/8)
  480 Classical Greek and Hellenic languages
  481 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of classical Greek – Alpha to Omega
  482 Etymology of classical Greek
  483 Dictionaries of classical Greek
  484 Unassigned
  485 Grammar and syntax of classical Greek
  486 Unassigned
  487 Preclassical and postclassical Greek
  488 Classical Greek usage
  489 Other Hellenic languages

490 Other languages (4/10)
  490 Other languages (!)
  491 East Indo-European and Celtic languages
  492 Afro-Asiatic languages; Semitic (!)
  493 Non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages – The Linguist and the Emperor
  494 Altaic, Uralic, Hyperborean, and Dravidian languages (!)
  495 Languages of East and Southeast Asia; Sino-Tibetan languages – A Cultural History of the Chinese Language
  496 African languages – Language and Colonial Power
  497 North American native languages
  498 South American native languages
  499 Non-Austronesian languages of Oceania; Austronesian languages, miscellaneous languages – In the Land of Invented Languages

500s: Science (42/93) {! = 29}

500 Sciences (5/9)
  500 Natural sciences and mathematics – Cosmic Apprentice
  501 Philosophy and theory – The Invisible Century
  502 Miscellany – The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself
  503 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and concordances (!)
  504 Unassigned
  505 Serial publications
  506 Organizations and management (!)
  507 Education, research, related topics (!)
  508 Natural history – Dry Storeroom No. 1
  509 Historical, geographic, persons treatment – Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer

510 Mathematics (5/9)
  510 General works on mathematics – Number Freak
  511 General principles of mathematics (!)
  512 Algebra – A History of Pi
  513 Arithmetic (!)
  514 Topology – The Colours of Infinity
  515 Analysis (!)
  516 Geometry – Beautiful Geometry
  517 Unassigned
  518 Numerical analysis (!)
  519 Probabilities and applied mathematics – The Unfinished Game

520 Astronomy and allied sciences (5/9)
  520 Astronomy and allied sciences – The Story of Astronomy
  521 Celestial mechanics (!)
  522 Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials – Miss Leavitt’s Stars
  523 Specific celestial bodies and phenomena – The Pluto Files
  524 Unassigned
  525 Earth (Astronomical geography) (!)
  526 Mathematical geography – Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
  527 Celestial navigation
  528 Ephemerides
  529 Chronology – Calendar

530 Physics (5/10)
  530 General works on physics – Time Reborn
  531 Classical mechanics; Solid mechanics – The Lightness of Being
  532 Fluid mechanics; Liquid mechanics (!)
  533 Pneumatics (Gas mechanics) (!)
  534 Sound and related vibrations
  535 Light and infrared and ultraviolet phenomena (!)
  536 Heat – Four Laws that Drive the Universe
  537 Electricity and electronics (!)
  538 Magnetism – Fatal Attraction
  539 Modern physics – Cracking the Quantum Code of the Universe

540 Chemistry and allied sciences (3/8)
  540 General works on chemistry – The Invention of Air
  541 Physical chemistry (!)
  542 Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials
  543 Analytical chemistry (!)
  544 Unassigned
  545 Unassigned
  546 Inorganic chemistry – The Disappearing Spoon
  547 Organic chemistry – The Double Helix
  548 Crystallography
  549 Mineralogy

550 Earth sciences (4/10)
  550 General works on earth sciences – The Map that Changed the World
  551 Geology, hydrology, meteorology – Defining the Wind
  552 Petrology
  553 Economic geology (!)
  554 Earth sciences of Europe
  555 Earth sciences of Asia – Colliding Continents
  556 Earth sciences of Africa (!)
  557 Earth sciences of North America – Geologic History of Florida
  558 Earth sciences of South America (!)
  559 Earth sciences of other parts of the worlds and of extraterrestrial worlds

560 Paleontology; Paleozoology (3/10)
  560 Paleontology and paleozoology
  561 Paleobotany; Fossil microorganisms
  562 Fossil invertebrates
  563 Miscellaneous fossil marine and seashore invertebrates (!)
  564 Fossil Mollusca and Molluscoidea
  565 Fossil Arthropoda – Trilobite!
  566 Fossil Chordata
  567 Fossil cold-blooded vertebrates; Fossil Pisces – How to Build a Dinosaur
  568 Fossil Aves (Fossil birds) (!)
  569 Fossil Mammalia – The Jesuit and the Skull

570 Life sciences (3/9)
  570 General works on life sciences (!)
  571 Physiology and related subjects (!)
  572 Biochemistry – Brave Genius
  573 Specific physiological systems in animals, regional histology and physiology in animals – Unraveling Piltdown
  574 Unassigned
  575 Specific parts and physiological systems in plants (!)
  576 Genetics and evolution (!)
  577 Ecology – The Tapir’s Morning Bath
  578 Natural history of organisms and related subjects (!)
  579 Microorganisms, fungi, algae (!)

580 Plants (3/9)
  580 General works on plants – A Rum Affair
  581 Specific topics in natural history of plants – The Drunken Botanist
  582 Plants noted for specific vegetative characteristics and flowers – Florida Wildflowers
  583 Magnoliopsida (Dicotyledons) (!)
  584 Liliopsida (Monocotyledons)
  585 Pinophyta (Gymnosperms); Coniferales (Conifers)
  586 Cryptogamia (Seedless plants)
  587 Pteridophyta (!)
  588 Bryophyta
  589 Unassigned

590 Zoological sciences/Animals (6/10)
  590 General works on animals – The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals
  591 Specific topics in natural history of animals – Dark Banquet
  592 Invertebrates
  593 Miscellaneous marine and seashore invertebrates
  594 Mollusca and Molluscoidea
  595 Arthropoda (!)
  596 Chordata – The Kingdom of Rarities
  597 Cold-blooded vertebrates, fishes – American Alligator
  598 Aves (Birds) – Imperial Dreams
  599 Mammalia (Mammals) – Rats

600s: Technology (36/93) {! = 26}

600 Technology (Applied sciences) (2/10)
  600 Technology (Applied sciences)
  601 Philosophy and theory – An Engineer's Alphabet
  602 Miscellany (!)
  603 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, concordances
  604 Technical drawing, hazardous materials technology, history and description with respect to kinds of persons
  605 Serial publications
  606 Organizations
  607 Education, research, related topics
  608 Invention and patents (!)
  609 Historical, geographic, persons treatment – The Nearly Men

610 Medical sciences; Medicine (7/9)
  610 Medicine and health – One Doctor: Close Calls
  611 Human anatomy, cytology, histology – Stiff
  612 Human physiology (!)
  613 Personal health and safety – Wilderness Secrets Revealed
  614 Forensic medicine; incidence of injuries, wounds, disease; public preventive medicine – The Ghost Map
  615 Pharmacology and therapeutics – Charlatan
  616 Diseases – Feeding Eden
  617 Miscellaneous branches of medicine; surgery – The Knife Man
  618 Other branches of medicine; gynecology and obstetrics (!)
  619 Unassigned

620 Engineering and allied operations (5/9)
  620 Engineering and allied operations (!)
  621 Applied physics – Tesla: Man Out of Time
  622 Mining and related operations – Lost Mountain
  623 Military and nautical engineering – Airship
  624 Civil engineering – Engineers of Dreams
  625 Engineering of railroads and roads
  626 Unassigned
  627 Hydraulic engineering (!)
  628 Sanitary and municipal engineering; Environmental protection engineering
  629 Other branches of engineering – How to Build an Android

630 Agriculture (6/10)
  630 Agriculture and related technologies – One-Woman Farm
  631 Specific techniques, apparatus, equipment, materials (!)
  632 Plant injuries, diseases, pests (!)
  633 Field and plantation crops
  634 Orchards, fruits, forestry
  635 Garden crops (Horticulture) – American Green
  636 Animal husbandry – The Medici Giraffe
  637 Processing dairy and related products – The Science of Cheese
  638 Insect culture – Robbing the Bees
  639 Hunting, fishing, conservation, related technologies – Introduction to Restoration Ecology

640 Home economics & family living (5/10)
  640 Home and family management – Pigs in Clover
  641 Food and drink – The Man Who Ate Everything
  642 Meals and table service (!)
  643 Housing and household equipment – At Home
  644 Household utilities
  645 Household furnishings
  646 Sewing, clothing, management of personal and family life – The Best Time to Do Everything
  647 Management of public households – Life at the Marmont
  648 Housekeeping (!)
  649 Child rearing; home care of persons with disabilities and illnesses (!)

650 Management and auxiliary services (3/7)
  650 Management and auxiliary services (!)
  651 Office services (!)
  652 Processes of written communication
  653 Shorthand (!)
  654 Unassigned
  655 Unassigned
  656 Unassigned
  657 Accounting – More Than a Numbers Game
  658 General management – Why We Buy
  659 Advertising and public relations – Adland

660 Chemical engineering (3/10)
  660 Chemical engineering and related technologies (!)
  661 Technology of industrial chemicals
  662 Technology of explosives, fuels, related products
  663 Beverage technology – Fizz
  664 Food technology (!)
  665 Technology of industrial oils, fats, waxes, gases (!)
  666 Ceramic and allied technologies – Glass: A World History
  667 Cleaning, color, coating, related technologies – Mauve
  668 Technology of other organic products
  669 Metallurgy

670 Manufacturing (2/10)
  670 Manufacturing – Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years
  671 Metalworking and primary metal products
  672 Iron, steel, other iron alloys
  673 Nonferrous metals
  674 Lumber processing, wood products, cork – The Pencil
  675 Leather and fur processing (!)
  676 Pulp and paper technology (!)
  677 Textiles (!)
  678 Elastomers & elastomer products
  679 Other products of specific kinds of materials (!)

680 Manufacture for specific uses (2/9)
  680 Manufacture of products for specific uses
  681 Precision instruments and other devices (!)
  682 Small forge work (Blacksmithing)
  683 Hardware and household appliances
  684 Furnishings and home workshops (!)
  685 Leather and fur goods, related products
  686 Printing and related activities – Gutenberg
  687 Clothing and accessories (!)
  688 Other final products and packaging technology – LEGO: A Love Story
  689 Unassigned

690 Buildings (1/9)
  690 Buildings (!)
  691 Building materials
  692 Auxiliary construction practices (!)
  693 Construction in specific types of materials and for specific purposes
  694 Wood construction; Carpentry
  695 Roof covering
  696 Utilities – Flushed
  697 Heating, ventilating, air-conditioning engineering
  698 Detail finishing
  699 Unassigned

700s: Arts (32/94) {! = 24}

700 Arts (3/10)
  700 The Arts; fine and decorative arts – Other Entertainment
  701 Philosophy and theory of fine and decorative arts
  702 Miscellany of fine and decorative arts – The Art Detective
  703 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, concordances of fine and decorative arts (!)
  704 Special topics in fine and decorative arts
  705 Serial publications of fine and decorative arts
  706 Organizations and management of fine and decorative arts
  707 Education, research, related topics of fine and decorative arts
  708 Galleries, museums, private collections of fine and decorative arts
  709 Historical, areas, persons treatment of fine and decorative arts – The Rape of Europa

710 Civic & landscape art (2/10)
  710 Civic and landscape art
  711 Area planning (Civic art) (!)
  712 Landscape architecture and design – The Hermit in the Garden
  713 Landscape architecture of trafficways
  714 Water features in landscape architecture
  715 Woody plants in landscape architecture (!)
  716 Herbaceous plants in landscape architecture
  717 Structures in landscape architecture (!)
  718 Landscape design of cemeteries (!)
  719 Natural landscapes – The English Park

720 Architecture (2/10)
  720 Architecture (!)
  721 Architectural structure (!)
  722 Architecture from earliest times to ca. 300
  723 Architecture from ca. 300 to 1399
  724 Architecture from 1400
  725 Public structures
  726 Buildings for religious and related purposes – Brunelleschi's Dome
  727 Buildings for education and research purposes – The Flower of Empire
  728 Residential and related buildings (!)
  729 Design and decoration of structures and accessories

730 Plastic arts; Sculpture (3/10)
  730 Plastic arts and sculpture – The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis
  731 Processes, forms, subjects of sculpture
  732 Sculpture from earliest times to ca. 500; sculpture of nonliterate peoples
  733 Greek, Etruscan, Roman sculpture (!)
  734 Sculpture from ca. 500 to 1399
  735 Sculpture from 1400 – Contemporary Public Sculpture
  736 Carving and carvings (!)
  737 Numismatics and sigillography (!)
  738 Ceramic arts – The Arcanum
  739 Art metalwork

740 Drawing and decorative arts (4/9)
  740 Drawing and decorative arts – The Civil War and American Art
  741 Drawing and drawings – Watchmen
  742 Perspective in drawing
  743 Drawing and drawings by subject
  744 Unassigned
  745 Decorative arts (!)
  746 Textile arts – The Improbable Return of Coco Chanel
  747 Interior decoration – House Thinking
  748 Glass
  749 Furniture and accessories (!)

750 Painting and paintings (3/9)
  750 Painting and paintings (!)
  751 Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials, forms – The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti
  752 Color
  753 Symbolism, allegory, mythology, legend
  754 Genre paintings
  755 Religion and religious symbolism – The Mystery of Love
  756 Unassigned
  757 Human figures (!)
  758 Other subjects
  759 Geographical, historical, areas, persons treatment – The Judgment of Paris

760 Graphic arts; Printmaking and prints (1/8)
  760 Graphic arts; Printmaking and prints – Toulouse-Latrec
  761 Relief processes (Block printing)
  762 Unassigned
  763 Lithographic (Planographic) processes
  764 Chromolithography and serigraphy
  765 Metal engraving
  766 Mezzotinting, aquatinting, and related processes
  767 Etching and drypoint
  768 Unassigned
  769 Prints (!)

770 Photography & photographs (2/9)
  770 Photography, photographs, and computer art – Exposed: Confessions of a Wedding Photographer
  771 Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials (!)
  772 Metallic salt processes
  773 Pigment processes of printing
  774 Holography
  775 Digital photography
  776 Computer art (!)
  777 Unassigned
  778 Special fields and special kinds of photography; cinematography and related activities – Hidden Beauty
  779 Photographs (!)

780 Music (7/9)
  780 Music – Mozart: A Life
  781 General principles and musical forms – Killing Yourself to Live
  782 Vocal music – God Bless America
  783 Music for single voices; The voice
  784 Instruments and instrumental ensembles and their music (!)
  785 Ensembles with only one instrument per part – Roll With It
  786 Keyboard, mechanical, electrophonic, percussion instruments – The Amazing Jimmi Mayes
  787 Regular and bowed stringed instruments (Chordophones) – One Woman in a Hundred
  788 Wind instruments (Aerophones) – Beyond a Love Supreme
  789 Unassigned (Use 781 - 788)

790 Recreational and performing arts (5/10)
  790 Recreational and performing arts (!)
  791 Public performances – Marilyn
  792 Stage presentations – The Shakespeare Riots
  793 Indoor games and amusements – Of Dice and Men
  794 Indoor games of skill – The Turk
  795 Games of chance
  796 Athletic and outdoor sports and games – The Ghost Runner
  797 Aquatic and air sports (!)
  798 Equestrian sports and animal racing (!)
  799 Fishing, hunting, shooting (!)

800s: Literature (34/98) {! = 27}

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism (3/9)
  800 Literature & rhetoric
  801 Philosophy and theory – On Moral Fiction
  802 Miscellany (!)
  803 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, concordances
  804 Unassigned
  805 Serial publications
  806 Organizations and management
  807 Education, research, related topics (!)
  808 Rhetoric and collections of literary texts from more than two literatures – The Triggering Town
  809 History, description, critical appraisal of more than two literatures – This Craft of Verse

810 American literature in English (8/9)
  810 American literature in English – Ornithologies of Desire
  811 American poetry in English – The Book of Nightmares
  812 American drama in English – Wit: A Play
  813 American fiction in English – The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet
  814 American essays in English – Cleavage
  815 American speeches in English (!)
  816 American letters in English – Letters From a Nut
  817 American humor and satire in English – Dave Barry Slept Here
  818 American miscellaneous writings in English – My Planet
  819 Unassigned (Prefer 810 - 818)

820 English and Old English literatures (7/10)
  820 English and Old English literatures – Sacred Tears
  821 English poetry – Very Bad Poetry
  822 English drama – Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life
  823 English fiction – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  824 English essays – Thomas Carlyle
  825 English speeches
  826 English letters
  827 English humor and satire – The Foolish Dictionary
  828 English miscellaneous writings (!)
  829 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) literature – Beowulf

830 German and related literatures (2/10)
  830 Literatures of Germanic languages
  831 German poetry
  832 German drama
  833 German fiction – The Reader
  834 German essays (!)
  835 German speeches
  836 German letters (!)
  837 German humor and satire
  838 German miscellaneous writings – Peeling the Onion
  839 Other Germanic literatures (!)

840 Literatures of Romance languages (1/10)
  840 Literatures of Romance languages (!)
  841 French poetry – Leaves of Hypnos
  842 French drama (!)
  843 French fiction (!)
  844 French essays
  845 French speeches
  846 French letters
  847 French humor and satire
  848 French miscellaneous writings (!)
  849 Occitan, Catalan, Franco-Provencal literatures (!)

850 Italian, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic (2/10)
  850 Literatures of Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic languages
  851 Italian poetry – Between the Blast Furnaces and the Dizziness
  852 Italian drama
  853 Italian fiction – If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
  854 Italian essays
  855 Italian speeches (!)
  856 Italian letters
  857 Italian humor and satire (!)
  858 Italian miscellaneous writings
  859 Romanian and Rhaeto-Romanic literatures

860 Spanish and Portuguese literatures (3/10)
  860 Literatures of Spanish and Portuguese languages – The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes
  861 Spanish poetry (!)
  862 Spanish drama (!)
  863 Spanish fiction (!)
  864 Spanish essays
  865 Spanish speeches (!)
  866 Spanish letters
  867 Spanish humor and satire
  868 Spanish miscellaneous writings – Labyrinths
  869 Portuguese literature – Death with Interruptions

870 Italic literatures; Latin literature (4/10)
  870 Literatures of Italic and Latin languages – Roman Classics
  871 Latin poetry (!)
  872 Latin dramatic poetry and drama (!)
  873 Latin epic poetry and fiction – The Metamorphoses of Ovid
  874 Latin lyric poetry (!)
  875 Latin speeches
  876 Latin letters
  877 Latin humor and satire – The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire
  878 Latin miscellaneous writings (!)
  879 Literatures of other Italic languages – The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century

880 Hellenic literatures; Classical Greek (2/10)
  880 Literatures of Hellenic and Classical Greek languages – Greek Classics
  881 Classical Greek poetry (!)
  882 Classical Greek dramatic poetry and drama (!)
  883 Classical Greek epic poetry and fiction – The Iliad
  884 Classical Greek lyric poetry
  885 Classical Greek speeches
  886 Classical Greek letters
  887 Classical Greek humor and satire
  888 Classical Greek miscellaneous writings
  889 Modern Greek literature (!)

890 Literatures of other languages (2/10)
  890 Literatures of other specific languages and language families
  891 East Indo-European & Celtic literatures – A Treatise on Poetry
  892 Afro-Asiatic and Semitic literatures – All Whom I Have Loved
  893 Non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic literatures
  894 Altaic, Uralic, Hyperborean, Dravidian literatures (!)
  895 Literatures of East and Southeast Asia; Sino-Tibetan literatures (!)
  896 African literatures
  897 Literatures of North American native languages
  898 Literatures of South American native languages
  899 Literatures of non-Austronesian languages of Oceania, of Austronesian languages, or miscellaneous languages

900s: History, geography, (& biography) (44/90) {! = 32}

900 History (2/10)
  900 History, geography, and auxiliary disciplines (!)
  901 Philosophy and theory of history – Questioning the Millennium
  902 Miscellany of history (!)
  903 Dictionaries, encyclopedias, concordances of history
  904 Collected accounts of events
  905 Serial publications of history
  906 Organizations and management of history
  907 Education, research, related topics of history (!)
  908 History with respect to kinds of persons (!)
  909 World history – The Arabs

910 Geography & travel (7/10)
  910 Geography and travel – Explorers House
  911 Historical geography – A History of the World in Twelve Maps
  912 Graphic representations of surface of earth and of extraterrestrial worlds (!)
  913 Geography of and travel in the ancient world
  914 Geography of and travel in Europe – In Turkey I Am Beautiful
  915 Geography of and travel in Asia – Brian on the Brahmaputra
  916 Geography of and travel in Africa (!)
  917 Geography of and travel in North America – Canada's Road
  918 Geography of and travel in South America – Darwin Slept Here
  919 Geography of and travel in other parts of the world (including Pacific Ocean Islands) and of extraterrestrial words – The Ice Museum

920 Biography, genealogy, insignia (1/2)
  920 Biography, genealogy, insignia – Banvard's Folly
  921 Unused
  922 Unused
  923 Unused
  924 Unused
  925 Unused
  926 Unused
  927 Unused
  928 Unused
  929 Genealogy, names, insignia (!)

930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499) (4/10)
  930 History of the ancient world to ca. 499 (!)
  931 History of China to 420 (!)
  932 History of Egypt to 640 – The Shadow King
  933 History of Palestine to 70 – The Life and Times of Herod the Great
  934 History of India to 647
  935 History of Mesopotamia & Iranian Plateau to 637
  936 History of Europe north & west of Italian Peninsula to ca. 499 (!)
  937 History of Italian Peninsula and adjacent territories to 476 – Cicero
  938 History of Greece to 323 – A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities
  939 History of pther parts of ancient world to ca. 640 (!)

940 General history of Europe (8/10)
  940 History of Europe and Western Europe (as a whole) – Between Silk and Cyanide
  941 History of British Isles – The Land that Never Was
  942 History of England and Wales – Faith and Treason
  943 History of Central Europe–Germany – Burning the Reichstag
  944 History of Europe–France and Monaco – Charlemagne*
  945 History of Italy, Italian Peninsula, and adjacent islands – The Borgias
  946 History of Spain, Iberian Peninsula, and adjacent islands – The Last Day
  947 History of Eastern Europe–Russia (!)
  948 History of Scandinavia (!)
  949 History of other parts of Europe – Justinian’s Flea

950 General history of Asia; Far East (7/10)
  950 History of Asia, the Orient, and the Far East – Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
  951 History of China and adjacent areas – Wealth and Power
  952 History of Japan – Samurai William
  953 History of the Arabian Peninsula and adjacent areas – Qatar
  954 History of South Asia and India – Curzon
  955 History of Iran – Revolutionary Iran
  956 History of the Middle East (Near East) – Contested Land, Contested Memory
  957 History of Siberia (Asiatic Russia) (!)
  958 History of Central Asia (!)
  959 History of Southeast Asia (!)

960 General history of Africa (2/10)
  960 History of Africa (as a whole) (!)
  961 History of Tunisia and Libya
  962 History of Egypt and Sudan
  963 History of Ethiopia and Eritrea (!)
  964 History of Northwest African coast, Morocco, and Canary Islands (!)
  965 History of Algeria
  966 History of West Africa and offshore islands – Timbuktu
  967 History of Central Africa and offshore islands – Facing the Lion
  968 History of Southern Africa, and the Republic of South Africa (!)
  969 History of the South Indian Ocean islands (!)

970 General history of North America (9/10)
  970 History of North America – The Inconvenient Indian
  971 History of Canada – The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature
  972 History of Middle America and Mexico – Cities of the Maya in Seven Epochs
  973 History of the United States – Ten Tea Parties
  974 History of the Northeastern United States – The Island at the Center of the World
  975 History of the Southeastern United States – A Year at Monticello
  976 History of South central United States and Gulf Coast states – William F. Winter and the New Mississippi
  977 History of North central United States and Lake states (!)
  978 History of the Western United States – The Heart of Everything That Is
  979 History of the Pacific Coast states, and the Great Basin & Pacific Slope regions of the United States – Junipero Serra

980 General history of South America (3/10)
  980 History of South America – Che on My Mind
  981 History of Brazil – The Mapmaker's Wife
  982 History of Argentina (!)
  983 History of Chile (!)
  984 History of Bolivia
  985 History of Peru – Turn Right at Machu Picchu
  986 History of Colombia and Ecuador (!)
  987 History of Venezuela (!)
  988 History of Guiana (!)
  989 History of Paraguay and Uruguay

990 General history of other areas (1/8)
  990 History of the Pacific Ocean Island, other parts of the world, and extraterrestrial worlds
  991 Unassigned
  992 Unassigned
  993 History of New Zealand (!)
  994 History of Australia (!)
  995 History of Melanesia and New Guinea
  996 History of Polynesia and other parts of the Pacific (!)
  997 History of Atlantic Ocean islands (!)
  998 History of Arctic islands and Antarctica (!)
  999 History of extraterrestrial worlds – Other Worlds

Welcome and good start! I look forward to seeing what books you get into.

@ fundevogel -- thanks for the welcome.

I still have to clean up the 700s, 800s, and 900s to match my DDC listing...but then it's off to the races!

Unfortunately, I'm reading The Big One, a work on the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes, but I already have a 551 book. Sadly, in setting up the list, I realized I have way too many unread books and am far too unread in large swatches of the Dewey.

Cheers!

(BTW, fundevogel = "fledgling". Nice touch; I like it.)

Welcome. And remember that this is a lifetime of reading and isn't meant to be done all at once. It will get you reading books on subjects that aren't in your confort zone. And reading posts from other members seems to add to my ever growing wishlist, including books that I never would have heard about if not for this and other talk threads.

Good luck and happy reading.!

Indeed, Fianna, if my napkin math is right, then it will take roughly 15 years or so to finish the task -- and that's if I don't stray into already trodden areas of comfort. Like many things in life, it's a process.

Just finished The Big One: The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science by Jake Page and Charles Officer. Unfortunately, I already have a 551 in the bag. It's full number is 551.2209778985, which works out to be earthquakes and seismology (551.22) in a historical light (-09) in New Madrid County, Missouri (-778985). Good book, though. Here's the review.

I was recently challenged by the "Go Review That Book!" to read one that will net me a new section. More to follow...

>13 NielsenGW: "Unfortunately, I'm reading The Big One, a work on the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes, but I already have a 551 book. Sadly, in setting up the list, I realized I have way too many unread books and am far too unread in large swatches of the Dewey."

That happens a lot. We've all got our pet sections. I think I've swapped out the title in my 398 ever year of my challenge so far and, true to my namesake, I'm reading another 398 now.

For those interested, I've started a blog on this quest: Lifelong Dewey. No, I didn't check if anyone else was doing one, so I'm sorry if I'm stepping on some toes. I'll post short informative bits and reviews here and longer musings there.

919: Geography and travel in other parts of the world

Just read Joanna Kavenna's The Ice Museum to satisfy 919. It was OK, but took a lot of unnecessary digressions.

Full blog post here: Review

427: Historical, geographic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard English

For all the language books I have, I didn't have a 427 before today. Just picked up Wicked Good Words by Mim Harrison at B&N today and finished it in an afternoon. It's not bad, and would work very well as a bathroom reader.

Full blog post: Review

Another one to cross off the list.

Nice reviews. I like that you throw in a little commentary on the dewey system and it's quirks.

129: Origin and destiny of individual souls

Read Spook by Mary Roach -- very funny and informative.

Full blog post: Review

016: Bibliographies and catalogs of works on specific subjects or in specific disciplines

Bizarre Books by Russell Ash and Brian Lake is awesome! They poke fun at a lot of old books, but there are actually a few books in the listing that I want to pick up (much later, though).

Full blog post: Review

Thanks for the review, I'd been wondering if there was anything worth reading for 016.

24 -- Me too! I have an annotated secondary bibliography on the works of Wallace Stevens, but that would prove to be a very dry read.

I've actually been culling lists of titles to read for the various sections. I have 70% of them covered already--a lot of the problems are actually in the late 400s and late 600s. Findings a good book to read on household utilities and landscaping is proving to be troublesome. Luckily, I have enough books at home to last for a couple of years or so.

I've got loose lists of "maybe" books for the classes, but I doubt I've got books for 70% of the sections. But I think someone used Homes and Other Black Holes for one of the tricky 600's.

Unfortunately, I have to go by the LOC and the DDC and place a lot of those books back in American humor writing (818). If you have a tricky section, let me know -- I may have found something for you.

I'm working on my TBR pile now, but I'll take you up on that when I'm not so behind on my reading. By the way, you should take a look a the Dewey Suggestions Wiki we've put together for the group. It sounds like you might have stuff to add to it.

The Suggestions Wiki

501: Philosophy and theory (of science in general)

Richard Panek's The Invisible Century is a quick read, but densely packed with a rich history of both physics and psychology at the turn of the 20th century.

Full blog post: Review

091: Manuscripts

There aren't many mainstream books on manuscripts, but The Friar and the Cipher was enjoyable just the same.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

070: Documentary media, educational media, news media; journalism; publishing

Marilyn Johnson's The Dead Beat was fun and full of rich portraits of ordinary men and women.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

646: Sewing, clothing, management of personal and family life

Michael Kaplan's The Best Time to Do Everything was pleasant and informative, short but interesting.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

In some twisted effort to get more done, I've somehow gotten myself in the middle of three different books as once:

Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene by Bart Ehrman (DDC 225)
The Rise of the American Circus by S.L. Kotar (DDC 791)
and
Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks (DDC 940)

Two of the three I don't need for this project, but the circus book is for the Early Reviewers Program and the Marks book was mandated by the Go Review That Book! crew. I may have bitten off more than I chew. Oh well...

Added 23 new books from previously unfilled sections today. That killed my reading plan as it took me 3 hours to catalog them all and re-arrange the library. Oh well...

225: New Testament

Finished Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene -- it was exceedingly informative about Early Church history and documents.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Ha, we both have Letters from a Nut for 816.

What did you think of Th 13th Element and A Rum Affair? I have the former on my wishlist and the latter on my shelf to read for this challenge.

First off, Letters from a Nut is a great book for 816. The man behind it (Barry Marder) is a genius of comedy and wit.

The 13th Element was very informative -- the history of phosphorus is replete with wonderful (and often sad) vignettes of our incessant need to make things better and cheaper at the cost of our longevity. You will most likely enjoy it (unless you get squeamish about processes involving human urine).

A Rum Affair requires a little stick-to-it-iveness. I thought it was about the liquor rum and its derivation from plants. That could not be further from the truth. If you like a dry(ish) tale of scientific and botanical fraud written in slanted wry British, then go ahead. Some of the people involved in the matter are still alive and the author does a decent job of staying neutral in his investigation. I finished it in a day, but some people may get bored by the subject matter.

Hope all that helps...

726 Architecture of buildings for religious and related purposes

Brunelleschi's Dome was entertaining and short.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

808 Rhetoric and collections of literary texts from more than two literatures

Switched out my old entry at 808 for Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. After ten years, it was still a pleasure to read. This actually marks the first time in a long time that I re-read a book in my collection. I have so much new material that I hardly ever go back to the classics. This challenge is forcing me in a fun direction with my reading already.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

333 Economics of land and energy

Mark Kurlansky's Cod is another (or probably the first) of his "object biographies". It was fun for a while, then became a lecture.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

901 Philosophy and theory of history

Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium started off very snobbish but, like a good wine, had a pleasant finish.

Full blog review: Lifelong Dewey

811 American poetry in English

Switched out an old entry for Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares. It's a sweet and revolting book-length poem about children and war.

Full blog review: Lifelong Dewey

529 Chronology

David Duncan's Calendar is rich and nicely detailed. Great book if you like science history.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

327 International relations

Stephen Budiansky's Her Majesty's Spymaster is an interesting and slim treatise on how the first European spy networks were established and funded. Nifty little history.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Wow, you're really making progress! I have Her Majesty's Spymaster on my shelf, although I think I already have a 337.

952 History of Japan

Milton's Samurai William was a fun read the second time around. William Adams may have been the world's first cosmopolitan traveler.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

362 Social welfare problems and services

Foucault's Madness and Civilization is tough to get through, but rewarding nonetheless. An interesting history of mental illness in Europe.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

591 Specific topics in natural history of animals

Bill Schutt's Dark Banquet was very interesting and quick to read. All about blood-eating animals and their science and evolution.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

658 General management

Re-read Paco Underhill's Why We Buy for fun. It still delights and contains a lot of fun marketing ideas.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

200 General works on religion

Sadly, the only work I have that is a pure 200 just had to be by Freud. At least The Future of an Illusion kept me amused.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

841 French poetry

Picked up a new division with Rene Char's Leaves of Hypnos. It was a nice selection of post-WWII French poetry.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

158 Applied psychology

Bagged another division with the Peases' Why Men Don't Listen. A witty commentary on neuroscience and psychology.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

709 Historical, areas, persons treatment of fine and decorative arts

Switched out a hefty art entry for Lynn Nicholas' The Rape of Europa. It was an exceptional WWII history book that doesn't read like one.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

940 History of Europe and Western Europe (as a whole)

Switched out an old entry for Leo Mark's Between Silk and Cyanide. An interesting view of the Second Great War from a non-combatant's point of view.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

493 Non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages

Re-read The Linguist and the Emperor -- still weird the second time around. Meyerson needs to go back to writing school.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

696 Utilities

Re-read W. Hodding Carter's Flushed. He's like a kid in a candy store when he talks about plumbing.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

829 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) literature

Picked up a new section with Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Both haunting and delightfully medieval.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

540 General works on chemistry

Switched out a work on Lavoisier for one on Joseph Priestley, from whom many of Lavoisier's refined experiments came: Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

394 General customs

Re-read Tom Standage's A History of the World in 6 Glasses--a nice jaunt through history, stopping along the way to enjoy the drinks of humanity.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

973 History of the United States

Switched out the previous entry for an Early Reviewer book: Joseph Cummins' Ten Tea Parties. Not bad, interesting tidbits, but pretty thin.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

231 God

Netted a new division with Jack Miles' God: A Biography--very intense. I need a little practice before reading another lit crit book.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

868 Spanish miscellaneous writings

Re-read Borges' Labyrinths -- Pretty heady stuff, but fun nonetheless.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

531 Classical mechanics; Solid mechanics

Frank Wilczek's The Lightness of Being pumps your brain full of quantum physics and causes a disturbance in your Grid. Phew.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

920 Biography, genealogy, insignia

Trotted out Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly for old time's sake: it was still amusing. Thirteen people who didn't quite measure up.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

616 Diseases

Switched out an earlier entry for Susan Weissman's Feeding Eden. All about how to deal with the medical and emotional repercussions of severe food allergies.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

194 Modern western philosophy of France

Poked my head into a new division with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's First and Second Discourses -- they were very enlightening indeed.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

338 Production

Switched out an old entry for Tom Gjelten's Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: a sprawling tale of Cuba, the Bacardi family, and the rum empire they created.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

760 Graphic arts; Printmaking and prints

Picked a new division with Robert Burleigh's 29-page opus Toulouse-Latrec--not bad for a YA book.
Side note: I didn't know it was a YA book until I received it. Oh well...

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

481 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of classical Greek

Netted a new division with the Humez brothers' enjoyable Alpha to Omega. Fun and trivia-laden--I'm going to read two more by them soon.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

I'm glad it sounds informative, because I also plan to read it for this number. :)

70> The book was so good, I changed my book forecast to include their ABC Et Cetera (DDC 471) and On The Dot (DDC 411)

255 Religious congregations and orders

Netted a new division with Catherine Whitney's The Calling, a quasi-interesting look into life in a Seattle convent. I, however, was expecting a little bit more.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

999 History of extraterrestrial worlds

Another new division with Michael Lemonick's Other Worlds. It's a lot of fun science, and doesn't really feel like a history text.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

891 East Indo-European & Celtic literatures

Re-read Czeslaw Milosz's A Treatise on Poetry and still just as beautiful and haunting as the first time.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

307 Communities

Hardy Green's Company Town could've a been a lot better, but it is what it is.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

519 Probabilities and applied mathematics

Keith Devlin's The Unfinished Game was about as interesting as one could make the history of modern statistics.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

069 Museology (Museum science)

Netted a new division with Nina Burleigh's The Stranger and the Statesman, the odd tale of the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

937 History of Italian Peninsula and adjacent territories to 476

Switched out an old entry for Anthony Everitt's Cicero, a book I've been meaning to get to for quite some time.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

686 Printing and related activities

Re-read John Man's Gutenberg -- a loose biography packed together with fun tidbits of European history.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Thanks for an interesting review! I'm glad you've found it worthwhile since I was thinking of reading it, too, at some point. I'm curious, though, how he became known as the inventor of the printing press, if he wasn't known for it by the time of his death?

Without giving too much away, he had a lot of debt and his "venture capitalist" basically won the bulk of his business from him and spread the technology elsewhere. I highly suggest the book if you're at all interested in the topic.

402 Miscellany (language)

Noah Jacobs' Toils of Language is a weird, esoteric ride through linguistic history.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

792 Stage presentations

Nigel Cliff's The Shakespeare Riots is an interesting book on a time when everyone had an opinion on Shakespeare, and who could play his roles the best.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

210 Philosophy and theory of religion

Erik Wielenberg's God and the Reach of Reason is a wonderful compilation of the great Lewis/Hume religion debate.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

111 Ontology

John Barrow's Infinite Book is an interesting look into the furthest reaches of infinity.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

870 Literatures of Italic and Latin languages

Cheated a bit and read Mary Snodgrass's Roman Classics, a Cliffs Notes production. Good, but ultimately just made me want to read the real thing.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

384 Communications; Telecommunication

Re-read Ammon Shea's The Phone Book--a wonderful look at the history and current state of telephone directories.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

569 Fossil Mammalia

Re-read Amir Aczel's Jesuit and the Skull--still an insightful look at the Jesuit-cum-anthropologist and his search for evolutionary answers.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

667 Cleaning, color, coating, related technologies

Another re-read--this time one about the birth of industrial chemistry and its founding father, Sir William Perkin. (Simon Garfield's Mauve)

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

967 History of Central Africa and offshore islands

Netted a new division with a delightfully optimistic book about life on the Kenyan grazing plains--Joseph Lekuton's Facing the Lion

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

022 Administration of physical plant (libraries)

Re-read a wonderful history of libraries and bookshelves--Henry Petroski's Book on the Bookshelf.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

643 Housing and household equipment

It's nice when you borrow a book from a friend, and it turns out you need for this project--Bill Bryson's At Home.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

755 Religion and religious symbolism

Sister Wendy Beckett's The Mystery of Love brought back wonderful memories of watching PBS as a kid (yeah, I was that kid).

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

838 German miscellaneous writings

Gunter Grass's Peeling the Onion was a wonderful and sad memoir of his journey through WWII and becoming a writer.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

282 Roman Catholic Church

Introduced to the 280's by Jack Driver's horrible treatise on Catholic conspiracies--The Vatican

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

981 History of Brazil

I now have one book in each of the division of the 900s! Robert Whitaker's The Mapmaker's Wife is a scary and inspirational tale of science, exploration, heartache, and hunger.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Congratulations on the milestone! The book looks interesting, too -- all those reviews complaining about how there's too much science in their biography are very promising.

I hear ya -- I'm always up for more than my fair share of science history!

314 General statistics of Europe

Netted a new division with Tom Heymann's On An Average Day in The Soviet Union--a dated look into comparative demographics.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

577 Ecology

Elizabeth Royte's The Tapir's Morning Bath is a great investigation of both tropical fauna and tropical scientists.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Thanks for a great review! This book looks really interesting. It sounds like the author provides descriptions of the place, with its flora and fauna, of the scientific research that takes place there, and of the culture within the scientific community there, all in one book!

And I'm afraid that I'll also - sadly - have to confine my experience of the tropics to books and film documentaries. It's 96F outside, and that feels like a blazing inferno to me.

Indeed it was. Many times I found myself wanting to know more about the scientists than the lianas or the leafcutter ants.

413 Dictionaries of standard forms of languages

Joshua Kendall's The Man Who Made Lists shows that Peter Mark Roget wasn't just a word collector, but an accomplished physician and inventor as well.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

131 Parapsychological and occult methods for achieving well-being, happiness, success

Sigmund Freud's An Outline of Psychoanalysis: Yep...still weird...

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

851 Italian poetry

Re-read Milo De Angelis's Between the Blast Furnaces and the Dizziness--a very good collection of modern Italian poetry.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

629 Other branches of engineering

David Dufty's How to Build an Android is full of interesting tidbits of robotic construction and philosophy.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

551 Geology, hydrology, meteorology

Re-read Scott Huler's Defining the Wind--science can be very poetic from time to time...

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

342 Constitutional and administrative law

Another new division!
Steven M. Wise's Though the Heavens May Fall helps us understand the history of English abolition and personal freedom.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

770 Photography, photographs, and computer art

New division material should always be as funny as Claire Lewis's Confessions of a Wedding Photographer

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

The photography book sounds like a great find for what could be a technical and boring category.

It was indeed a hoot -- I'm not looking forward to the bromoil and mezzotint books, though.

249 Christian observances in family life

Ugh...a a book about Christian family observances...Kim Butts' The Praying Family
At least I'm into a new division.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

471 Writing systems, phonology, phonetics of classical Latin

The Humez Brothers are probably the only people who could make "writing systems of classical Latin" interesting -- ABC Et Cetera

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

002 The Book

Switched out an old entry for Aaron Lansky's Outwitting History. It was an amazing book!

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

102 Miscellany of philosophy

Cathcart and Klein's Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar does a decent job of walking the reader through the schools of philosophy (with jokes to boot!).

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

747 Interior decoration

Winifred Gallagher's House Thinking expounds on how we find comfort and pride in our own homes.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

457 Historical, geographic, and modern nongeographic variations of standard Italian

Remember that scene from Beetlejuice where they say the "Handbook for the Recently Deceased" is like reading stereo instructions? Yeah, that's what Cecilia Poletto's The Higher Functional Field was like. At least I got a new division out of it.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Ha. I always chuckle when he reads the title "Handbook for the Recently Diseased" the first time. Sorry to hear the book was a snooze. I imagine we're all going to be having problems with the foreign language sections of 400.

168 Argument and persuasion

Nicholas Capaldi's The Art of Deception started out as a good treatise on logic and arguments, but then devolved into a training manual for theatrical lawyers.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

738 Ceramic arts

Re-read Janet Gleeson's The Arcanum--the history of the first European porcelain factory.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

635 Garden crops (Horticulture)

Ted Steinberg's American Green was a good look into the American lawn care industry.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

445 Grammar and syntax of standard French

Mary Stone Bruce's Grammaire française a l’usage des élèves de l’enseignement secondaire (from 1904) is the very definition of old school. Mine had doodles in it.

Another new division...

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

262 Ecclesiology

Re-read Peter Stanford's The Legend of Pope Joan--still an interesting account of an apocryphal female pope.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

146 Naturalism and related systems and doctrines

Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea was a revelation to read.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

031 General encyclopedic works in American English

Switched out an old entry for a fun collection of naughty trivia--mental_floss presents Forbidden Knowledge

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

719 Natural landscapes

Nabbed a new division with a delightful history of English parks by Susan Lasdun: The English Park

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

609 (Technology) Historical, geographic, persons treatment

Mike Green's The Nearly Men was an interesting look at the scientists and engineers who came up just a little short in their race to become famous.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

468 Standard Spanish usage

Holt & Dueber's 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish is a great guide for intermediate Spanish speakers.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

374 Adult education

Kathleen Rooney's Reading with Oprah is a much-needed fair assessment of her much-defamed Book Club.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

277 Christianity and the Christian church in North America

Ola Winslow's Meetinghouse Hill was an interesting look at 17th century New England church formation as well as a side-glance at historiography of the 1950s.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

170 Ethics (Moral philosophy)

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals was interesting but ultimately domineering and self-important.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

083 General collections in other Germanic languages

A collection of quotations from 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer nets me both a new division and a look at a powerful figure in medical history (The Words of Albert Schweitzer).

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

946 History of Spain, Iberian Peninsula, and adjacent islands

Re-read Nicholas Shrady's The Last Day, a decent account of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and the effort to rebuild the city.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

880 Literatures of Hellenic and Classical Greek languages

Mary Ellen Snodgrass's Greek Classics will get you ready for many of the other sections in this division.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

781 General principles and musical forms

Chuck Klosterman's witty rock 'n' roll road-trip in Killing Yourself to Live was mildly amusing and helps me capture all the divisions in the 700s!

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

670 Manufacturing

James Phelan's Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years was a sad and farcical portrait of the aviation giant.
And that's all the divisions in the 600s!

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

580 General works on plants

Re-read Karl Sabbagh's A Rum Affair to finish my divisional tour of the 500s. It's still a wry, interesting tale of post-WWII British botanical fraud.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

In the coming weeks will be five straight books to finish off all five remaining divisions on my to-read list.

439 Other Germanic languages

Michael Wex's Born to Kvetch was a witty and worthwhile immersion in Yiddish langauge and culture.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

352 General considerations of public administration

Thurston Clarke's puts together a decent "biography" of Kennedy's inaugural address in Ask Not.

All the divisions of the 300s are in the bag!

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

297 Islam, Bábism & Bahá'í Faith

Broadened my religious horizons and finished off the divisions of the 200s with The Koran: Selected Suras.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

181 Eastern philosophy

Confucius's Analects were both enlightening and confusing. Luckily, there were a lot of footnotes.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

051 General serial publications in American English

Dick DeBartolo's Good Days and MAD was fun, satirical, and a welcome change of pace...

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

AND THAT'S ALL THE DIVISIONS!

WOOT!

526 Mathematical geography

Switched out an entry for a biography of someone who needs celebrating--Hali Felt's Soundings

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

495 Languages of East and Southeast Asia; Sino-Tibetan languages

Sharron Gu's Cultural History of the Chinese Language is a huge mess.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

814 American essays in English

Switched out an old book for Wayne Koestenbaum's Cleavage--a reluctant read, but one I will definitely revisit when this is over.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Congratulations on finishing all the divisions!

Thanks! There were some clunkers in there, but ultimately, it was very interesting and a lot of fun. And with that part out of the way, I can free-wheel all over the Dewey until the last 99 books (where I plan to tour the divisions again).

702 Miscellany of fine and decorative arts

Philip Mould's The Art Detective shows a whole different area of art appraisal and restoration.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

972 History of Middle America and Mexico

Glassman and Anaya's Cities of the Maya in Seven Epochs was free, and that's the only reason I read it.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

174 Occupational ethics

Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing explains the history behind the hard work of perpetual laziness.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

018 Catalogs arranged by author, date, etc. (Bibliographies)

Carlton Lake's Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist was amusing at first, but gets a little too elitist for my taste.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

853 Italian fiction

Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is both 10 books and no books all at once.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

305 Social groups

Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson gives us an inspiring tour through her 105 years of life in It is Well with My Soul.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

910 Geography and travel

Robert Poole's Explorers House tells the history of National Geographic magazine in very intriguing fashion.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

355 Military science

Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a seminal work in the history of military strategy.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

638 Insect culture

Re-read Holley Bishop's Robbing the Bees to learn about the history of honey and beekeeping.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

509 (Science) Historical, geographic, persons treatment

Michael White's Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer is an quirky look into the great thinker's less traveled areas of study.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

918 Geography of and travel in South America

Re-read Eric Simons' Darwin Slept Here is catch up on both some science history and South Americal travel stories.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

371 School and their activities; special education

Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea relates the story of one man trying to educate the world.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

869 Portuguese literature

Jose Saramago's Death with Interruptions is a weird tale that imagines a country without the regulating hand of death.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

950 History of Asia, the Orient, and the Far East

Re-read Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and gained a renewed appreciation for the great Mongol leader.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

599 Mammalia (Mammals)

Re-read Robert Sullivan's Rats -- now I'm not very hungry for dinner.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

320 Political science (Politics and government)

Craig Nelson's Thomas Paine details a major player in both the American and French Revolutions.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

614 Forensic medicine; incidence of injuries, wounds, disease; public preventive medicine

Switched out an old entry for Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, a recounting of the 1854 London cholera outbreak.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

933 History of Palestine to 70

Re-read Stewart Perowne's The Life and Times of Herod the Great for a dip into ancient Palestinian history. Now on to more exciting stuff...

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

821 English poetry

Kathryn and Ross Petras's Very Bad Poetry makes for a fun read any day of the week.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

510 General works on mathematics

Re-read Derrick Niederman's Number Freak to gain a bit of perspective on the first 200 integers and their history.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

387 Water, air, space transportation

Re-read Dennis Powers's Tales of the Seven Seas and learned about a daring man who captained both sailboats and steamships.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

This book sounds really interesting! I've read a similar one - memoirs of a 19th century American sea captain discovered and published by his descendant, but assumed it would be a 910. However, after reading your post and review, I checked, and it turned out that that book is a 387 also (although some libraries have it in 910). This inspired me to add DD numbers to my whole LT library, and I found two other new numbers, and one book whose number has changed. However, many DD numbers listed were too broad and some totally off the mark, both those displayed in green and in blue. However, even though I now also have a 387, I still intend to read Tales of the Seven Seas at some point.

Thanks! The whole Dewey thing knocks people for a loop sometimes. Once I resolved to organize my whole physical library by Dewey, I made some very interesting discoveries:

- Most general history books about pirates end up in 910
- 305 and 306 are the dumping grounds of last resort in the Dewey
- 808 gets overcrowded with literature anthologies
- Collections of comics are weirdly placed in 741 (drawing) rather than the literature humor sections

If you need help with a particular book, I've found that a mixture of the book's CIP page, the Library of Congress's full records, and the OCLC WorldCat smooth out most problems.

Here's hoping you score some more sections hidden in plain sight.

641 Food and drink

With all the good books out there on food, I decided to go to an old favorite with Jeffrey Steingarten's Man Who Ate Everything.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

975 History of the Southeastern United States

Donald Jackson looks at an oft-neglected year in the life of Thomas Jefferson in A Year At Monticello.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

349 Law of specific jurisdictions, areas, socioeconomic regions, and regional intergovernmental organizations

Rich Smith's You Can Get Arrested For That is an interesting but underwhelming account of his attempt to break silly US laws.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

220 The Bible (General)

Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries provided a lot of much-needed background into the making of the King James Bible.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

508 Natural history (Science)

Switch out an old entry for Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1--a look into the hidden anecdotes of the British Museum of Natural History.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

813 American fiction in English

813.6: Larsen, Reif. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (374 p.) -- This book is all at once a bildungsroman, an adventure tale, and a poignant look at family history and loss. All in all, a pleasant and unexpected read. The illustrations alone are worth the price of admission.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

621 Applied physics

621.3092: Cheney, Margaret: Tesla: Man Out of Time (354 p.) -- This biography is full of many interesting anecdotes and personal letters, but there are times where it deifies its subject rather than explain it. This book, however, will give you a very good understanding of his age and work.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

339 Macroeconomics and related topics



339.47: Waldfogel, Joel. Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays. (146 p.) -- Joel "Grinch" Waldfogel says that because presents become essentially de-valued by the receiver, giving to charity is the only possible solution to the problem. This book was OK; I liked the economic theory and data better than the thesis.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

A thousand thanks to the year-end sales at Half-Price Books. I just picked twelve books for this project for less than $60.

I'm a bit backed up on reviews, so here's a nice two-fer today:

985 History of Peru – Turn Right at Machu Picchu



A delightful exploration of the history of the Inca people and the ruins they left behind.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

892 Afro-Asiatic and Semitic literatures – All Whom I Have Loved



A crushingly sad tale of childhood and loss in pre-Holocaust Ukraine

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

Those last two were read just before the New Year, so that gives my 132 unique Dewey books for 2012!

I'm angling to incorporate more hefty volumes this year, so I think the total may be a little lower this time around.

546 Inorganic chemistry



Kean, Sam. The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. (346 p.; finished 4 Jan 2013) -- Kean's tour through the periodic table of elements reveals the humanity and history behind chemistry and physics.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

208 Sources (Religion)



Peters, F. E. The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. (276 p.; finished 6 Jan 2013) -- This is a really book that explores the origins, context, and connectedness of the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Quran. Great for seminary students.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

260 Christian social and ecclesiastical theory



Pinches, Charles R. A Gathering of Memories: Family, Nation, and Church in a Forgetful World (170 p.; finished 7 Jan 2013) -- An interesting book relying on the argument that memory is the cornerstone of family, nation, and church.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

794 Indoor games of skill



794.17: Standage, Tom. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (247 p.; finished 8 Jan 2013) -- An 18th-century Hungarian devises a chess-playing machine before they were cool. But it had a secret. This was an entertaining and quick read.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

This sounds really interesting! Thanks for the review.

278 Christianity and the Christian church in South America



278.08: Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, ed. On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Religion in Modern Latin America (250 p.; finished 10 Jan 2013) -- There are some days when I wonder how the hell I talked myself into this challenge. At least this book broadened my horizons.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

385 Railroad transportation



385.0973: Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 (382 p.; finished 13 Jan 2013) -- A lazy weekend and good railroad history...that's all I need. A fascinating read.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

741 Drawing and drawings



741.5941: Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. (416 p.; finished 15 Jan 2013) -- There's a reason it's the only graphic novel on Time's 100 Best Novels: it's that good. Of the many comic collections to choose from for this section, this was a real treat.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

974 History of the Northeastern United States



974.7102: Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. (325 p.; finished 20 Jan 2013)

(Blog's down today, so you get the full spiel today)

For years, Charles Gehring has been at the New York State Library, toiling away at a single task: translating the original Dutch records of the colony of New Amsterdam. In 1624, a contingent of settlers left The Netherlands to establish a permanent European presence just south of the Pilgrims who had settled just fours before. The next year, 45 more colonists arrived. They weren’t all Dutch—the atmosphere in The Netherlands was already one of religious, social, and political tolerance, so a mixture of European settlers came to the colony. Today, we now New Amsterdam by a different name, though. Today, it’s called Manhattan.

Russell Shorto, working hand in hand with Gehring, helps to tell the tale of the early days of the Dutch colony. The story is full of wonderful characters. We meet Catalina Trico and Joris Rapalje, a young married couple whose love, life, and offspring created one of the first great American lineages; Adriaen van der Donck, an ambitious lawyer who fostered a sense of community and tolerance; and Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged early draconian leader of the establishment. Their stories provide a rich history of the settlement and Shorto’s words bring them to life again.

At times, Shorto takes a little bit of imaginative liberty with what exists in the historical records, but more often than not, his descriptions of the early colony are vivid and grounded in the original stories. It’s amazing that the records have survived, given all the calamities that have eroded other document repositories. A lot of Shorto’s writing centers around how many of the documents were found and how each find helped to inform our collective understanding. And it’s the little things that are the most important sometimes. When the diary of a colonial scout is found, it gives insight into the welcoming ceremonies of the local Native Americans. An interview with a descendant of the Rapaljes in the 18th century reveals the interpersonal dynamic of the colony. And so on. It’s these windows into the daily life of Manhattan Island that make this book worth reading. If you’re a enthusiast of the American history, then this one is a treasure trove. 5 stars.

573 Specific physiological systems in animals, regional histology and physiology in animals



573.3: Walsh, John E. Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution (219 p.; finished 23 Jan 2013) -- Somehow I'm starting a collection of British scientific fraud. This one was a bit more interesting than A Rum Affair, though.

Full blog post: Lifelong Dewey

809 History, description, critical appraisal of more than two literatures



809.1: Borges, Jorge Luis. This Craft of Verse (150 p.; finished 24 Jan 2013)

Most years since 1925, Harvard University has invited an accomplished writer or artist to give a series of lectures regarding “poetry in the broadest sense.” Speakers have included T.S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Aaron Copland, and John Cage. In 1967, they chose one of my favorite writers: Jorge Luis Borges. These six lectures sat in the Harvard audio archives for 30 years before they were found and transcribed for the next generation. His series, entitled “This Craft of Verse,” illustrates not only a theory of poetry, but also Borges’s connection to his readers and the world.

Each of the six lectures takes on a different aspect of both poetry itself and Borges’s interaction with it. He deals with engagement, metaphor, translation, epicness, philosophy, and finally, his own approach to writing and poetry. He speaks (we have to keep in mind that these were lectures when they were first presented) in two minds. The first is of one who has been reading and writing for the last five decades; the second is someone who is always tentative when approaching great literature and great writing.

Even though he was 66 years old at the time, his lectures always seem to have a sense of deference to the material he talks about. He constantly mentions that his knowledge and ability are nowhere near those he has read. He laments the loss in the collective memory of so many past writers—the spanish poet Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Byron, Keats—and how these great voices still play in his mind.

Many times during this book, I imagined myself as one of the bright-eyed scholars of Harvard, sitting in the audience and receiving the wisdom of a great author. I hoped that a few people in attendance were able to get something out of his words. He says of poetry: “Meaning is not important—what is important is a certain music, a certain way of saying things. Maybe, though the music may not be there, you will feel it. Or rather, since I know you are very kind, you will invent it for me.”

There is a tremendous sense of grandfatherly love in the lectures, as if he spent his entire figuring out one small piece of the world and is trying to tell us all about it. I could read this book over and over. I consumed this book; if I could, I would have clawed at the pages for more. Borges’s language is simple but still, much like the truth, it resists simplicity. A definite five-star read.

(I actually liked posting the long-form reviews here, so I think I'll keep with it and leave the blog links alone.)

306 Culture and institutions



306.30973: Underhill, Paco. The Call of the Mall (213 p.; finished 26 Jan 2013)

For most of us, the mall has been around for as long as we can remember. But we hardly think about it that much; we just take it for granted. But Paco Underhill, on the other hand, founder of Envirosell, thinks about them all the time. His job is to meet with store executives and help run their stores better, by actually sending in his team of observers and watching how shoppers interact with the sales staff, the fixtures, and the products.

Underhill explores almost all aspects of mall sociology and economics. Underhill spends a lot of time with shoppers, listening to their advice, as well as with other consultants to gain a better understanding of the retail environment. He explores the parking lot with executives to help them understand it from the patrons’ point-of-view. He checks out the stores, the food court, the random kiosks, and even the bathrooms. He travels to malls all around the United States. Each chapter is devoted to a different part of the mall. Here are just some of his observations:

• Stores should sponsor the restrooms and make samples of their products available there (as well as where the patron can go to buy them).
• The store directories should be tabletop rather than a monolith that blocks the view of the newcomer.
• Food courts should be set up more like roadside bistros to facilitate the people-watching that naturally occurs there.
• There should be slightly more areas for men to congregate to keep them from nagging the people who dragged them there.

While there were some genuinely novel insights, most of his conclusions were rather uninspired. Although, they are the same gripes everybody has when going to the mall. Executives and mall owners seem only to want to simply squeeze money out of already existing business rather than spend a bit to encourage more spending.

He does see hope for the mall shopping landscape, however. New malls are incorporating innovative designs to appeal to a different breed of shoppers. They’re becoming more open-air, more ecologically friendly, and more integrated into the communities they support. While I’m still conflicted about the society that reveres the commercial good over the social good, it appears that we can have a balance of both and this book shows how we can get a little closer to that reality. A decent, quick read.

269 Spiritual renewal



269.20974789: Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (141 p.; finished 27 Jan 2013)

The early 1800s in America were a very interesting time. The Revolution was behind us and the population was moving inland. Most U.S. cities were concentrated around sea ports, but the vastness of the interior of the new United States was a big temptation for land speculators and budding farmers. Along with them came a new era of quasi-lawlessness and country justice. Rushing to fill this moral vacuum were local ministers and preachers fostering a sense of personal responsibility and religious living. This was the Second Great Awakening.

Paul E. Johnson’s Shopkeeper’s Millennium traces the effects of the Second Awakening in the town of Rochester, New York. By looking through the tax, census, church, and news records of the city from 1815 to 1837, he posits an interpretation of how the religious revival of 1831 changed the social, political, and economic landscape of the city. The beginning chapters recount the history of the city and how the business relationships shaped the manner by which the revival would shape Rochester’s future. After that, he details the struggle of the economic elite, the Masons, and the evangelicals Charles Finney and Josiah Bissell against the new middle class of business owners burgeoning in Rochester. Later, the evangelical movement actually split the economic elite against itself. Johnson posits that this new religious movement was the impetus behind the Whig party and that its passing signaled the end of the new party.

The sheer amount of Johnson’s research is staggering; the bibliography is worthy of the Yale history professor that he is. His reading of the events isn’t exactly riveting, however. There’s a ton of statistics combined with the feeling that this is definitely a professor’s work. Granted, a whole lot of the general public isn’t clamoring for work on local religious 19th-century history, but this could be a bit better. If you’re a Rochesterian or a American religious scholar, then this is for you. If not, that’s OK.

941 History of British Isles



941.1074092: Sinclair, David. The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History (350 p.; finished 31 Jan 2013)

I have the flu today. As the virus passes through my body, making everything hurt, issuing forth all sorts of coughing fits, I have to pause for a moment and gain a bit of perspective. As wretched as I may feel, there is no chance that I have it worse off than the people in David Sinclair’s The Land That Never Was. In 1822 and 1823, two groups of Scottish immigrants departed across the Atlantic to start a new life in Central America. The land of Poyais, as it was called, was to be a bounteous landscape, with opportunities for farmers to grow and sell many new European staples. They sold their entire livelihoods for the chance to strike out into the great unknown. There was just one catch—the nation of Poyais did not exist.

Sir Gregor MacGregor was a con man of the most sordid degree. When we wasn’t hawking his latest scheme, he spent a fair amount of time primping, preening, and punching up his own resume. There wasn’t any small event he couldn’t punch up to grandiose proportions. The sad part is, the early part of his life is regular tale of a smart man who decided to join the British army, marry a beautiful woman, and help out his nation. But his demons kept shouting down the better angels in his brain. And so, MacGregor’s impetuousness left him out of the British army and back home, sulking. When his wife died, he decided to light for South America to redefine himself. It was there that the greatest scheme of his life was launched: he would invent a country and style himself a prince.

He went back to Great Britain and convinced both the general public to buy into a bond issue for the new nation of Poyais and two groups of able-bodied citizens to help bolster the already existing colony there. When they arrived, however, there was no one around—no capital, no farms, no government, and no money. They had already exchanged all of their British currency for Poyaisian bank notes, which were now worthless. While I won’t spoil the ending, it is just and fitting. Sinclair’s telling of the MacGregor Poyais scheme is duly competent. He tries desperately to find the good in MacGregor, but early on we already know where his schemes are heading. The financial aspects of the book can be a little boring, as he describes all the bond issues and how stock trading of the day went, but they are easily balanced out by the story. An interesting and sad tale.

615 Pharmacology and therapeutics



615.856: Brock, Pope. Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (281 p.; finished 1 Feb 2013)

J.R. Brinkley (1885-1942) was a man always angling for a quick buck. But, more than that, he just wanted to be loved by everyone. He started out as a two-bit showman in a snake oil shop, but soon found out that having a medical degree was the way to really pull in the masses. After acquiring (read “buying”) a degree from a shoddy operation, he was licensed in eight states and began a quest to dupe hundreds of folks with “cures” from exotic places at his hospital in Milford, Kansas.

Then one day, a man came into his office timidly complaining of “no pep” and “wishing he had billy-goat nuts.” So, Brinkley had, as Dr. Seuss would call it, “a wonderful, awful idea,” and surgically implanted goat testicles into the man’s scrotum, claiming that it would invigorate him back to his former condition. Soon, thousands of patients came from all over the Midwest to get their virility back. It would have been bad enough if he had just stopped there. But, he started concocting hundreds of medical “solutions”—each with their own number—that people should take to ease their various ailments (these turned out to be colored water flavored with a fair amount of alcohol). Worms were treated with Prescription 94; post-appendectomy pain was cured with number 61; kidney stones needed 80, 50, and a little 64 (just to be sure, you know).

With his new-found riches, he bought a high-power radio station and blasted his message of better living through goat glands across the whole state. But, he still wasn’t finished. When the FCC shut down his Kansas station, he set another one across the Mexican border with one thousand times the transmitting power. On a clear night, his station XER could he picked up by radios in Canada. Ironically enough, for all the lies Brinkley told on the air, his stations started the careers of many famous musicians, including Gene Autry and the original Carter family. With his amassed wealth, he put himself in the race to become the governor of Kansas, using a private airplane to change the way that politicians get their message to the people. Needless to say, he quite the amount of moxie.

All while Brinkley tried to dupe millions out of their hard-earned money, Dr. Morris Fishbein, a legitimate doctor and head of the American Medical Association, continuously tried to call Brinkley out for the damage he had caused. Fishbein spent the better part of two decades doggedly exposing medical fraud and hucksterism so that the American public would see these men for the quacks that they were. The cat-and-mouse game between Fishbein and Brinkley is what makes this book fun to read. Brock’s Charlatan is very well-researched and quick-paced. I suffered a lot from the dreaded “just one more chapter” syndrome while reading this one. If you like a good back and forth tale of greed, American history, and justice, then this one is for you.

150 Psychology



150.1952: Appignanesi, Richard. Freud for Beginners. (Illustrated by Oscar Zarate). (168 p.; finished 2 Feb 2013)

This one is a very odd summation of Sigmund Freud’s life and work. Odd in the fact that it present Freud’s history as a sort of graphic novel with photo collages and hand-drawn illustrations of his case studies and theories.

The book is a fairly linear biography, with the important case studies fleshed out to show how his psychoanalytical techniques helped him to cure those particular patients. It shows that as his theories evolved, so did his writing and conception of both human history and human consciousness. Because those theories took control away from the conscious mind and gave it to the unconscious, he naturally came under a lot of criticism. Unfortunately, though, for him, his theories also became more convoluted every time he came across a case that couldn’t be handled by previous findings. The book also details the basic outline of each of his publications (with the exception of Moses and Monotheism).

Appignanesi has put out a few of these illustrated beginners manuals on various subjects, including Lenin and postmodernism. I think the inclusion of loads of illustrations along with short bursts of “textbook-y” parts makes it easier to consume the high-level information about the subject. It really helps to get away from the dusty, old college course feel that some books on psychology can have. The drawings are strange at times, and downright sexual at others, but if you’re going to illustrate Freud’s theories, there’s going be some genitalia in there somewhere. If you’re looking for dip your toe into Freudian psychology, then this one might be right up your alley. Just don’t read too much into it.

816 American letters in English



816.54: Nancy, Ted L. Letters from a Nut. (185 p.; finished 2 Feb 2013)

Ted L. Nancy’s Letters From a Nut is truly the product of a deranged mind. The premise of the book is that a guy living in Thousand Oaks, California has taken it upon himself to write a bunch of letters to actual American corporations inquiring about odd matters or seeking special accommodations or praising them for strange aspects of their service. There’s not really much more I can say by way of a summation, but here are some examples of his correspondence:

• A letter to the Bon Ami Cleanser Company asking what exactly they mean by “integrity” on their label.
• A letter to Highlights Magazine asking if they would like to include a picture of his freckles that “kinda look like Richard Gere.”
• A letter to the Portland Stage Company to find out if they would be willing to host a play about his 26-year-old dog Cinnamon
• A letter to the Ralston Purina Company praising their product in prolonging the life of his 26-year-old dog Cinnamon.
• A letter to Nordstrom’s inquiring if he can buy a mannequin that he saw that looks exactly like his recently-deceased neighbor.
• A letter to the Flamingo Hilton Hotel & Casino asking if he can be allowed to wear his lucky shrimp costume while gambling there.

And so on. The more incredible part is that he actually gets responses from almost everyone he contacts. Most of the responses are just deflections of his odd requests. Some, on the other hand, are more than willing to entertain his outrageous scenarios.

While there are times when it feels like he’s trying out different variations of the same joke to gauge the response, some of the letters actually laugh-out-loud funny. These would probably make for a cocktail party gag where people had to read them aloud to the group. It’s a quick read to maybe lighten up some of the more heady stuff that comes out these days.

520 Astronomy and allied sciences



520: Aughton, Peter. The Story of Astronomy: From Babylonian Stargazers to the Search for the Big Bang. (217 p.; finished 3 Feb 2013)

Aughton’s book goes through exactly what it purports to: you get a decently thorough history of astronomy from the Babylonians all the way to the Mars Rover project and NASA’s newest findings from the Hubble. It’s kind of hard to write a better summary than that. We get the stories of earliest calendar makers, who tried to time the heavens precisely to match the seasonal cycles of their culture (which almost always fails to conform to nice, neat numbers). The most interesting thing I kept encountering in this book was that either astronomy is often times used to solve another problem or other fields often inform the science of astronomy. Our study into the heavens is constantly intertwined with the study of ourselves and our world.

For instance, astronomy was the first field consulted when the problem of longitude needed to be solved. The stars were a great guide for figuring latitude, but longitude proved much trickier. It actually took the simple wisdom of a clock-maker (and not the stars) to put that problem to rest. Also, when quantum physics came into vogue, it hastened the conversion of astronomers into astrophysicists, which allowed for a more dynamic and intricate study of the stars.

Aughton’s writing is pretty good, but gets a bit bogged down when he discusses the finer points of Copernicus’s and Brahe’s mathematical models of the solar system. On the whole, though, it’s a great book to get introduced to the entire field of astronomy. The illustrations are top-notch and the science is pretty straightforward. All in all, a very interesting read.

378 Higher education



378.12092: Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson. (192 p.; finished 5 Feb 2013)

Years ago, when author Mitch Albom was a derelict in college, he was befriended by a wonderful sociology professor who took him under his wing. After three years of tutelage and guiding him to a honors thesis, Prof. Morrie Schwartz became more than a teacher—he became a friend.

Years passed. Albom graduated, became a sports journalist, got married, and chased after all the things he believed he should have. Then, one day, he heard a chance news story of a man who was dying. He spends his last months penning philosophical aphorisms and enjoying time with all of his friends. It was his old friend: Morrie.

Albom resolves to reignite their old friendship and visits him every Tuesday until he dies. They share their lives, their fears, and their loves with each other. Albom learns to live a more deliberate life and Morrie is able to share in the company of a dear friend.

Albom’s recounting of his favorite professor’s last days is schmaltzy but never overly so. Morrie’s truths are simple, but they’re exactly what one would expect from a man who has finally learned that life isn’t all that complicated. It’s a short book about learning, friendship, love, and dying. It seems like one those books that you come back to every five or so years to re-acquaint yourself with the simple things in life. A quick and lighthearted read.

759 Geographical, historical, areas, persons treatment



759.409034: King, Ross. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. (374 p.; finished 11 Feb 2013)

Dewey section 759 has a ton of books to choose from because it’s all about the history of painting, painters, and painting movements. Human beings have been painting since they first figured how to create pigments in caves. For every painter, there’s a unique way to painting something, but the world of 19th century France didn’t see it that way. They had strict rules for what was considered good painting and what didn’t pass muster. Ross King’s Judgment of Paris recounts the ten years that led to the first modern schism in the art world. On one side was the Salon de Paris, championed by Ernest Messonier, and the other were the Impressionists, founded by a scrappy, radical artist known as Eduard Manet.

The Judgment of Paris chronicles the parallel lives of Messonier and Manet to show how one railed against change and how the other helped to show the world a different way to look at itself. Manet’s movement started with treating everyday people as grand subjects for paintings. Up until then, the Salon de Paris standardized the techniques and subjects allowed for what was considered “high art” and the common folk were considered declasse. Manet, along with Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet, decided that, after having been rejected time and time again by the Salon de Paris, that they should establish their own Salon—the Salon des Refuses (The Salon of the Refused).

While this could be considered a tad petulent, it allowed the public to see the new movement in art. Instead of allowing line, contour, and historical grandiosity dominate the picture, the Impressionists focused on light, color, and atmosphere. Nowadays, this seems rather trivial, but in the 1860s, this was enough to cause a public outrage.

King’s writing is fun and moves along at a decent clip, much in the current style of history-as-a-novel. There are times where he gets very involved in the details of Parisian living, but its add atmosphere to help flesh out the intricate art happenings. Also, it’s a good way to get in backdoor info on the French authors Zola, Hugo, and Baudelaire. My only gripe about the book is that it needed more color illustrations. King’s descriptions are one thing, but having the paintings at hand really helps to get the history across.

Also, I used to consider myself fairly knowledgable about art and art history. Once, on a family vacation to Rome, my parent gave me my own day to plan out and go to whatever I wanted. I chose to do a walking tour of the city to find many of the public sculptures of Gian Bernini and end the day at the Vatican Pinacoteca to view Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ (it was stunning). Until this book, I had never heard of Messonier or his fight againt the Impressionist movement. I guess you really do learn something new every day.

942 History of England and Wales



942.061: Fraser, Antonia. Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot. (295 p.; finished 14 Feb 2013)

On November 5, 1605, a search party headed by Thomas Knyvet, working off information obtained from an anonymous letter sent to Baron Monteagle, checked out the area under the Parliament building in London. What they found there defined British politics and nationalism ever since. A fellow named Guy Fawkes, at first presumed to a servant man, was found guarding a pile of firewood. Under the firewood, however, was 36 barrels of gunpowder: enough to obliterate Parliament and foment a revolution. Antonia Fraser’s Faith and Treason relays the whole conspiracy of what would eventually be called the Gunpowder Plot with her usual flair and scholarship.

Fraser traces the roots of the Gunpowder Plot back to Henry VIII and his efforts to separate the Church of England from the Catholic Church. This decree left English Catholics isolated and persecuted for 65 years. Two generations of English citizens had to hide their faith. The tipping point was James I’s refusal to return the country to a Catholic state or at least adequately lay out tolerance acts for all to worship. This led to a growing movement to remove James from the throne and install a more religious monarch. The plan was to destroy Parliament and install James’s daughter Elizabeth as queen.

Sadly, the ending is already painfully clear as soon as it starts. Since England’s just now its second Elizabeth, we already know that the Plot will fail. But, the failed plot is precisely the point. Since the conspiracy was exposed just before its execution, England saved itself from a unnecessary struggle for the throne (although, they would go without a monarch from 1649 to 1660). One wonders, however, what would have become of Great Britain if the plot had succeeded. That, though, is a matter for the historical fiction writers.

The book is really well-written, it has the consistency of a thriller and the feel of a work of scholarship. This is third book of Fraser’s that I have and she never disappoints. This is an incredibly thorough investigation of the Gunpowder Plot and if this is your area of expertise, her bibliography will be invaluable to your research. A great book.

341 Law of nations



341.2309: Mires, Charlene. Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations (227 p.; finished 15 Feb 2013)

Very few people alive today remember the founding of the United Nations. Started as a small group of countries in Yalta in 1944, and chartered in 1945, the United Nations started its life as a homeless newcomer in the large arena of international diplomacy. So, one of the first things they had to accomplish was finding a headquarters. With voices from all over the globe clamoring for supremacy, the hunt was wild, furious, and even laughable at times. No place on Earth was free from political pros or cons, and Charlene Mires’s Capital of the World chronicles the twists and turns of how the UN eventually came to be housed in Manhattan, New York.

When it was first established, the United Nations started with a simple question: where will we live? They received invitations from all over the world, but since the United States had just established itself as a world superpower by contributing to an overwhelming majority of the end of World War II, they were seen by most as a very likely place for the headquarters. But, then again, where in the US should it be? It was indeed a very large country. When everything was tallied over the 2-year search, entreaties, submissions, brochures, invitations, and plans came from 248 different US cities, towns, and parks. Oddly enough, even Black Hills, South Dakota was considered a serious choice for a while. But it was a last-minute Hail Mary from Nelson Rockefeller and the donation of a $8.5 million plot of land in Manhattan that sealed its location (sorry for the spoiler).

I really enjoyed this book. It’s my first from book NetGalley (a website that facilitates the connection between professional readers and publishers) and it won’t be my last. Mires’s skill as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is readily apparent as she tracks down every available source of the great headquarters debate. The writing is fluid, precise, and exciting. The part I found quite amusing was that the initial fervor over snagging the title Capital of the World quietly morphed into antagonism from the homeowners of the cities that were eventually toured by the UN site inspectors. As Mires puts it, “while diplomats tried to emphasize the best of intentions, homeowners imagined the worst of possibilities.” The fear of an international takeover led some cities to withdraw their invitations after a while. This coupled with the absurdity of some cities reaching for the title (I’m looking at you, Claremont, OK and Sault Ste. Marie, MI) made this book really fun to read. I heartily recommend it for diplomacy and UN history buffs.

417 Dialectology and historical linguistics



417.2: Mohr, Melissa. Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing (258 p.; finished 16 Feb 2013)

This isn’t a very easy book to discuss without offending someone. The author even says so much in the introduction. Invariably, in a discussion about swear words, someone will reach their tolerance for vulgarity. Every language in the world has words that are taboo, obscene, graphic, or blasphemous. This goes beyond simple impoliteness; swear words are those that Steven Pinker says “kidnap our attention and force us to consider their unpleasant connotations.” These words steal us from our lives. The longer the period of arrest, the worse the word. Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit is a unabashed exploration of the evolution of swearing in English, from their Latin beginnings to modern slurs and expletives.

Her basic premise that, historically, swear words have fallen into two main categories: the Holy, which consists of swear words that are offensive due to their blasphemy, and the Shit, which are obscene based on their connection to unpleasant body parts or acts. A third category has arisen in recent times to include racial slurs and epithets, but unfortunately, historically, these words were considered par for the course.

As English-speaking civilizations have grown over the centuries, the two categories have traded supremacy as to which was more offensive. In the beginning, bodily obscenities were the worst, but in the Middle Ages, when Christianity exploded throughout Europe, blasphemous utterances topped the list (and bodily swear words were commonplace and even tolerated at court). The Victorian Age of the late 19th century went back to squelching the bodily, with words that even hinted at human anatomy and sexuality suppressed and relegated to the vocabulary of the unclean.

Nowadays, with a concerted effort towards global tolerance and civility, the third category of slurs are king of the slagheap of the obscene. Since there is no explicitly state-sanctioned religion nor a overarching sense of prudery, holy swear words and anatomical obscenities are partly ineffectual. It’s the words that serve to make a group of citizens second class that rankle us, including those that marginalize the disabled, the rotund, or the foreign.

Mohr’s writing is a bit lofty and, of course, thoroughly peppered with obscenities. The most interesting bits are those that trace the words back to their beginnings and how certain cultural phenomena have faded away. For instance, in the Middle Ages, invoking the Lord’s name in vain was thought to actually injure the holy body of Christ, and that swearing in this fashion was detrimental to all Christians. One wonders what linguists a millennium from now will think of our swearing and what now areas of culture will be considered obscene. This is a great book for niche linguists and explorers of spoken minutiae.

241 Christian ethics



Greenman, Jeffrey P & Timothy Larsen, eds. The Decalogue through the Centuries: From the Hebrew Scriptures to Benedict XVI (227 p.; finished 17 Feb 2013)

In every religion, there is a set of rules for everyone to follow in order to maintain good standing among the followers. Known formally as the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments (or Statements) spell out a basic code of conduct for both Jewish and Christian worshipers. They dictate that the followers should worship only one God and to do so without idols and with reverence. They hold that followers should not steal, murder, lie, cheat. They should also love and respect each other faithfully. Throughout history, the Decalogue has been seen in different lights by different religious scholars. Jeffrey P. Greenman and Timothy Larsen, in The Decalogue through the Centuries, help to gather each of these viewpoints into one resource for students of the Bible.

It would take a while to go through each contributor’s individual arguments and theses. Sufficed to say that views of the Decalogue offered are from early Jewish sources through Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Andrewes, Owen, and even the British poetess Christina Rossetti. Especially interesting for modern Christians is a chapter devoted to Pope John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s writings on the Commandments.

This was one of those books where I have to separate my opinions on what I learned from my opinion on the book’s writing. It’s a collection of essays that sprung out of a conference held at Wheaton College in 2008 on the history of the Ten Commandments. The subject matter is intriguing, but in this case, the writing is overwhelmingly dry. The problem is, that there’s really no way to make devotional history any better than this. I recommend this one for Biblical scholars only. Everyone else, stay away.

740 Drawing and decorative arts



740.973074753: Harvey, Eleanor Jones. The Civil War and American Art. (241 p.; finished 18 Feb 2013)

From November 16, 2012 to April 28, 2013, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is sponsoring an exhibit designed to showcase American artists and photographers of the 1860s and how the American Civil War changed the way they perceived and rendered the world around them in their compositons. Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator and organizer for the exhibit, details the evolution of American art through the rocky years of the war in the catalogue for The Civil War and American Art. This book is a stunning collection of paintings, photographs, and lithographs.

The Civil War, formally started by the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 by the Confederate Army, flooded the American landscape with images of battles, gunsmoke, and death. Artists on both sides of the fighting tried—each in their own way—to incorporate both their vision of the world and the action around them into their art. Harvey writes, perhaps rather hackneyed, that the war “wrought great changes in the nation’s visual culture and character.”

She catalogues multiples works from James Hope, Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, Winslow Homer, Matthew Brady, John Kensett, Alexander Gardner, and many others to see how the time they spent around the war changed their art. Most of the changes show how the artists dealt with the grim reality of the war and how news of the carnage was reflected in the general population. The works sought to capture both the brutality of the battlefield and the banality of camp life.

Of unique importance is how the fledgling field of photography earned it stripes as a new addition to the media of the art world. The few talented pioneers of war photography were able to bring a vision of the war back home to those who were so far removed from the fighting. While newspapers editors and pamphleteers could bend the truth is their recounting of the battles, the photographs were unflinching windows into an otherwise hidden world.

Harvey’s writing is good as one can get when talking about both savage fighting and elegant art. The juxtaposition of those two kept me reading fervently. She incorporates writing from Dickinson, Whitman, Twain, and Melville to help lend context to the artwork and the history. If you’re in any way a Civil War buff or an art lover, you should not miss out on this book. It is truly remarkable.

596 Chordata



596: Dinerstein, Eric. The Kingdom of Rarities (270 p.; finished 19 Feb 2013)

In the world of animals, there exists an interesting phenomena: of the millions of species on the planet, why are there so many with extremely limited population sizes? What processes lead to the limiting of animal groups? Why, for instance, is the Kirtland’s warbler so rare that an entire festival is planned around their sighting? Eric Dinerstein, a veteran of the World Wildlife Fund, travels the world to check out hotspots of animal rarity. In The Kingdom of Rarities, he posits that the animal kingdom can be divided into two groups—the Kingdom of the Common and the Kingdom of the Rare. It’s these rare species that help to drive biological research and that research is one of the many keys required to unlock the mysteries of how the world’s ecosystems function.

Dinerstein’s investigations are limited to pockets of rare vertebrates in single habitats around the world. The zoological vignettes include:

• An expedition to the Foja Mountains to discuss rarity in isolated mountain ranges. Here, bowerbirds, birds of paradise, echidnas, and tree kangaroos are studied to see how one of the last unstudied areas on Earth thrives.
• A husband and wife team studying jaguars, pumas, and saki monkeys in the Madre de Dios region of Amazonian Peru to further analysis of how large mammals help to keep the ecosystem in balance.
• A festival in Grayling, Michigan to study the Kirtland’s warbler, whose extreme habitat persnickety-ness limits population size. They only perch nest in middle-aged jack pines that grow on sandy, nutrient-poor soil that are also affected by periodic fires.
• A look at the greater one-horned rhinoceros in Nepal and how human encroachment and poaching have made a mildly rare animal even rarer.
• A hunt for the giant anteaters and maned wolves in the Cerrado rainforest in Brazil being slowly marched towards rarity by agriculture companies. Dinerstein goes on an expedition with a fellow researcher and her tracking Labrador to find animal scat (for valuable scientific data).
• The introduction of invasive species onto the Hawaiian islands (humans, farm animals, and the malaria virus) and how that led to the shift in native populations (mainly bird species).
• A look at a half-century of chemical and incendiary weapons used human conflict and its affect on the kouprey, soala, and other large mammal populations of the forests of Vietnam and Cambodia.

This book is rich in biological facts, theories, and research. As a side benefit, you get a lot of inklings of current research being done by up-and-coming biologists and doctoral students. I thought maybe it would take me two days to finish this one, but after a chapter or two, I was thrilled to devour the entire thing. The writing starts off a little stilted, but smooths itself out once he goes exploring with fellow scientists. There are parts that feel like a cliched hippie lecture about curtailing agricultural invasions of native animal populations and reveling in the pure joy of seeing a rare species, but one the whole, the book educates as well as it excites. This one reminded me a lot of Elizabeth Royte’s The Tapir’s Morning Bath in that it looks at the both the animals being researched and the scientists doing the research. A thoroughly insightful and engaging book.

027 General libraries, archives, information centers



027.477: Wiegand, Wayne A. Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956. (180 p.; finished 20 Feb 2013)

In an age where libraries are becoming more and more technical, where cybrarians are the new normal, and library services include everything from toddler’s story time to teenage game rooms to technical courses for the elderly but savvy user, it’s nice to look back at the beginnings of the institution. While libraries in America have been around since the Library Company of Philadelphia formed in 1731, patrons never really get a sense of the history of the building. Wayne Wiegand’s Main Street Public Library tries to wind back the clock and chronicle the beginnings of four typical libraries in America’s Midwest.

The book profiles four libraries: The Bryant Library in Sauk Centre, Minnesota; The Sage Library of Osage, Iowa; The Charles H. Moore Library in Lexington, Michigan; and The Rhinelander Public Library in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. These libraries share many similarities. They each started as a closed collection of books available for local shareholders in the company. When they went public, the hours were limited to a few hours each Saturday. Each library’s collection was bolstered by donations from the public, and those drives regularly brought in hundreds of volumes.

They also constantly struggled with ensuring that residents are reading “good” literature (apparently the scourge of Horatio Alger and Oliver Optic paperbacks was warping the minds of youngsters everywhere). Each was started with governance by the town’s elite, but then quickly bent to the will of the librarians (first) and the users (later). Also, there were an awful lot of Masons involved in the library councils, although that’s to be expected as both the Masons and libraries seek to increase the public good.

On the other hand, each library had their unique flair. The Bryant Library became a model for how well a small town library could perform as long as the librarian was properly trained. The Sage Branch quickly became enmeshed in the town political squabbles, leading to the rapid turnover of head librarians. The Moore location was in a prime spot to attract a lot of tourist subscriptions, which accounted for the bulk of its circulation numbers. The Rhinelander location had to contend with immigrant tensions and union workers while building their library.

On the book as a whole, there are just two issues. The first is the amount of statistics laced throughout the text constantly comparing library subscriptions, holdings, and per capita lending amounts to the ALA standards. All that data gets in the way of the story of the places. The second is that each chapter ends rather abruptly. You get into the swing of each library’s history, and then all of a sudden, 1956 rolls around and the author has nothing more to say. Also, the writing’s a bit off. It’s not bad writing; it’s just not good writing, either. It reads more like a really long journal article than a book.

On the positive side, you get a real sense of small town library metamorphosis from the antebellum years to the mid 1950s. Also of interest is a decent analysis of each library holdings, how they compared to each other, and which books caused reactions in each branch’s community. Wiegand tracks how certain acquisitions (or conspicuous non-acquisitions) were informed by the political, cultural, and social atmosphere of the nation and the community at large. I’m getting a little long-winded here, but this was a decent and very informative book. If you are in any way connected with a public library, this is a good book for you.

Nitpicking (on Kingdom of Rarities) to show I care:

Kirtland's Warblers only nest in jack-pines of the type you describe. They are less picky about where they perch (and a good thing, too, since otherwise they wouldn't be able to sit down all winter when they've migrated off their breeding habitat in Michigan!)

Seriously, the book sounds right up my alley, and I've added it to my wishlist.

Ha! You're totally right. I've edited the review above to correct the picked nit. (Poor little picky birds...)

Cheers!

639 Hunting, fishing, conservation, related technologies



639.9: Howell, Evelyn A., John A. Harrington, & Stephen B. Glass. Introduction to Restoration Ecology. (400 p.; finished 22 Feb 2013)

Alright, folks—this is a measure of my dedication to this project. Staying up until 11 PM on a perfectly good Friday night reading a textbook on restoration ecology, even though there is very little chance I’ll ever be out in nature helping to restore some abandoned wetland or forest. But now, I have the prerequisite training to least follow a conservation conversation (see what I did there?). And Howell, Harrington, and Glass’s textbook on the subject—Introduction to Restoration Ecology—is a very suitable primer for the subject.

The editors of this textbook do a very good job of guiding the student through the basics of assessing an ecological restoration, creating a thorough inventory, a master plan for the site, and planning for the future of the site with a maintenance plan. In reality, the practice of restoration ecology is much more complicated. Even a small site could require years of study before a plan can be adequately comprehensive to cover its needs. Then, resources have to be gathered to both restore the site and cover its continued maintenance.

As far as textbooks go, this one is as good as any I’ve read. Each chapter goes through each step of the restoration master plan, guiding the user through each phase and being sure to emphasize that each step informs the next as well as updates previous steps. The master plan for the restoration of a natural resource is an ever-evolving project, changing when new information is encountered or when new resources and new technologies become available. Also, the book is absolutely chock full of case studies of restored ecological sites from around the world. It’s very good to know that folks everywhere are trying to push back against humanity’s continued efforts to scorch the earth. If you’re looking to join a restoration project or trying to feel out whether a career in ecology is right for you, then I suggest thumbing through this one to get your feet wet.

347 Civil procedure and courts



347.732609: O’Connor, Sandra Day. Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated a jurist from the Arizona Court of Appeals to the US Supreme Court. For the first time in the court’s 191-year history a woman was named to fill a seat on the nation highest bench. Sandra Day O’Connor served the Supreme Court for 25 years with distinction and Honor. And now she wants to share her knowledge of the history, traditions, and personalities of the Court with us in Out of Order.

This is a simple, straightforward, short book. Each chapter starts at the beginning, with George Washington’s six judge court. From there, we get a dutiful, linear threads about the Court’s transformation over the years to a nine-seat bench, the history of the building, the lives of prominent judges, the milestone cases, and the personalities of the some of the current justices. That’s pretty much it. There’s not a lot of depth here, but the little tidbits are still fun to read. There’s also a fair amount of repetition, especially when it comes to the author’s own tenure at the court. If you’re a Supreme Court buff, then there’s nothing new here. If like me, you’re not, then read ahead. It’s a short but informative trip.

346 Private law



346.730482: Cummings, Alex Sayf. The Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century. (223 p.; finished 25 Feb 2013)

When a work is created, who owns it? In most cases, people would automatically credit the creator with ownership. The creator normally says who can reproduce the work and how. This is the domain of copyright law: just who has the right to copy a publication. This works well for a written creation, but what of a musical composition? Who owns the music, the sound? Can you own sound? These are the questions that faced the fledgling recording industry immediately after the invention of the phonograph. Alex Sayf Cumming examines the history of musical copyright law and how the recording industry coped with increased nuance in The Democracy of Sound.

Recording copyright infringement is not a new problem. The issue of musical ownership reared its head as early as 1877, when counterfeiters were secretly duplicating wax cylinders onto which the music was recorded. Opera singers of the 19th century, hoping to make a little money by repeatedly recording their arias for phonograph makers were shocked to find substandard duplications of their work on the market. Back then, though, you could easily tell the difference by simply how loud the cylinder played. Once records came into play, there was a whole new field of copyright issues.

And then Congress got involved. Interestingly, the discussions in Congress foreshadow the formation of the FRBR (Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records) standards in that they wrangled over the difference between a work, an expression, and a manifestation of a work. Their decision to err on the side of caution when wording the new Copyright Act of 1909 led to a deeper loophole for counterfeiters and bootleggers to work with when proliferating copies of original works.

The post-WWII boom in jazz fandom and recording begat a renaissance in bootlegged works. One of the more interesting problems is when bootleggers were the only people helping to perpetuate interest in forgotten artists. Collectors would bumble through urban slums, offering to pay residents for any old recordings they might have, and then later duplicate them for other enthusiasts. Should we as a culture prosecute them for saving cultural artifacts?

After that, you get your standard discussion of 1970’s bootleggers and counterfeiters with a discussions of elicit concert recording, illegal records copiers, and rare recording session junkies. Cummings’s exploration of modern music piracy is perhaps the most tedious. Wrangling with the ownership of digital music, mashups, torrents, and downloads is frustrating in the fact that most of the lawmakers legislators working in this arena weren’t born in the digital age. While this isn’t a direct indictment of their abilities, it does speak to the question of whether the law can ever catch up to the technology.

In The Democracy of Sound, we get a interesting chronicle of court decisions and laws that helped to shape modern music copyright as well as the history of music piracy in all its forms. Thankfully, Cummings tries to stay away from in-depth discussions of case law, opting for more easy to understand overviews. This doesn’t do much, however, to make the legal cases and the congressional committees any more interesting. The history of recording methods, artists, and companies from the early 20th century was far more intriguing than the nuances of copyright law. I dutifully marched through this volume, but not with glee. If you are interested in music or legal history, go ahead and give it a try.

712 Landscape architecture and design



712.09: Campbell, Gordon. The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to the Ornamental Gnome. (210 p.; finished 26 Feb 2013)

At some point during the European Renaissance (no one knows for sure when), a curious trend started. Men of religion or of means built themselves a small shack in the countryside with the barest essentials and lived out their days in solitude and reflection. The hermits could either live in the vast acreage of a nobleman or by a monastery. Their lives were devoted to prayer, reading, communing with nature, writing, or gardening. Then, England got a hold of the practice and it took on a life of its own. While it does explore the European roots of the phenomenon, Gordon Campbell’s The Hermit in the Garden mainly chronicles the rise and fall of English hermitages and how they existed in (and just outside) British society, culture, and literature.

Once Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his works and his opinion that nature should no longer be flattened to please the eye, countryside estates teemed with picturesque forests, grottos, and idyllic nooks and crannies in which to spend one’s days. Some noblemen, so encumbered by the stress of living large sought out a simpler life, which at that point meant only having one or two servants at one’s beck and call. And so, they began to construct smaller outhouses on their land to which they could retire and entertain small parties. These hermitages began popping up all over England in the 18th and 19th century.

Afterwards, some hermitages were built with the expressed purpose of hiring a local man to play the part of the hermit and entertain estate guests. These garden hermits began to take on the role of the country sage or guru in many communities. The country hermit began life as a throwback to the British druids. Many hermitages, however, were left vacant, with only local folklore detailing the identity of the hermit. Today, we celebrate the idea of the garden hermit in the form of small ceramic gnomes many people place in their flowerbeds.

This book is in many ways a guidebook to all the major and minor hermitages of England, with detailed listings, descriptions, and illustrations of hermit houses throughout the British Isles. Most of these were constructed in the Georgian Era (1714-1830), and, being constructed from wood, thatch, and other natural elements, many survive only in letters, journals, and poems. The later trend of Victorian hermitages brought the hermits out of the deep woods and into the British lawns, but by then, the trend was pretty well diminished.

Interestingly, Campbell is always telling the reader where they can go to find some of the hermitage-related documents and artifacts. While this was a little annoying at first, after time, I wanted to go to these places and experience how these hermits lived. It gives the whole thing the feel of a one-on-one lecture, and not a lofty treatise on hermits. He even doles out little jabs about how modern readers aren’t versed in classic poetry, and therefore, why he has to explain all the hermitage inscriptions. To be sure, though, this book has just about every detail there is to know about English hermitages, so be prepared for that. His bibliography and research are worthy of an Oxford publication. To anyone even slightly interested in this niche area, I highly recommend this book.

>215 NielsenGW:
This sounds really interesting! I'm not at all familiar with this aspect of the historic British culture. Pity it won't give me a new number, but I want to read it anyway at some point. Thank you for the review!

Thanks. Not wanting to re-read certain sections is the one great shame about this project. There's a ton of niche American micro-histories (973) or manufacturing company biographies (338) or societal institutional chronicles (306) or crime sagas (364) that I keep seeing and can't get to. I am, however, keeping a list of fun books for when I'm finally finished with this (some time around April 2018).

336 Public finance



336: Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. (197 p.; finished 27 Feb 2013)

My favorite thing about reading occurs when I do not understand a concept. I read a book about it and then, magically, knowledge appears. This is perhaps a clichéd notion, but it still makes me feel good about reading. By no stretch of the imagination will I be able to teach a course in economics after this one, but when I hear radio and news reports of the economic landscape, I should be able to follow them with a little more understanding. Mark Blyth’s Austerity is a book really about three related things: convoluted economic instruments and how their interrelatedness sparked the current global downturn, the history of austerity as a way to alter a country’s financial standing, and how the clarion call for austerity measures in economically weak European countries is perhaps the wrong thing to do.

Austerity is the measure by which a country endeavors to tighten its fiscal belt in order to reduce the amount of debt it’s carrying and show to the world that it is trying to become less deficit-heavy. Interestingly, there are two things happening here. One is an actual change in balance sheets in that the government has to decrease actual spending in order not to go into default. The other is a perceived change to induce other countries to trust in the future liquidity and investment possibilities of said austere state. After reading this book, I realized that economics is always a combination of these two forces—the real and the imagined.

Blyth’s history of the current financial crisis is surprisingly easy to read, even though he has to explain things like credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, and value at risk analysis. While he clearly has an agenda (and who doesn’t), his explanations have merit. Most of what happened in the real estate crisis had little to do with state spending and government debt. The only hand the government had in the downturn was the omission of rigid and exact regulation on new banking products. When banks bundled together what they thought were low-risk, low-volatility products, they actually created high-risk securities that blow up in their face.

Blyth’s parallel history of the idea of austerity is in many ways not as interesting, We get the standard Locke-Hume-Smith thread that seeks to endow every citizen with the opportunity to amass property and calls for the state to check its own immense power to remove that property from the citizen. The problem comes from the disconnect between lawmakers enacting austerity measures and how that will invariably affect the populace in a disproportionate manner. If everybody has to take a financial hit once measures are in place, it’s those who are lowest on the totem pole who will invariably feel it the most.

This book was astonishing in the amount of information it has to offer. I was fully prepared to be put to sleep by all the economic mumbo-jumbo, but following Blyth’s arguments and polemic against the use of austerity turned out to be quite interesting. The metaphors he uses for modern financial theories and instruments are apt and elegant. While this book will of course have its detractors and bring out age-old political arguments, the history of the idea is certainly worth a look—even if it’s because you’re trying to know thy enemy.

270 Historical and geographic treatment of Christianity and Christian persons; Church history



270.091732: Um, Stephen T. & Justin Buzzard. Why Cities Matter to God, the Culture, and the Church. (148 p.; finished 3 Mar 2013)

This book is precisely the reason I wanted to do the Dewey Decimal Challenge. Prior to starting, there would have been no way I would have a missive on how to (a) learn to love large cities, (b) understand their narratives, and then (c) use that knowledge to began to share your faith with other in hopes that the entire city will become a part of the Christian faith. Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard, in Why Cities Matter, help those with faith or fledgling churches to leverage an understanding of urban environments into a flourishing of religiosity, where the faithful listen actively to both their city’s and their neighbor’s narrative in order to find a common connection from which to spread the message of Christianity.

Um and Buzzard start with an analysis of how cities represent the future of humanity. Their argument is that the combination of a density of peoples and a diversity of interests are the driving forces behind the growth of cities. Without either one, you either have a low population village or a monolithic mass of citizens. Both are necessary. When a city is indeed propelled into fruition, the next step that Um and Buzzard deem necessary is the mass-multiplication of Christian faith in order to encourage the city to attain its full potential. While a decade ago I would have been visibly angry at such a text, now I’m rather Zen about the whole thing. Those who seek to convert will hardly be talked out of it and those that convert need to do so, so who am I to argue with the arrangement?

There’s a great deal of sociological references in the book, and those may be fodder for future reading. They balance this with a deep reading of the Bible, showing how the figures of Jesus and God both understand that people are at their most prolific when in an urban environment. Truthfully, I hadn’t really paid that much attention, but the Bible does have quite a few passage about cities and how population centers figure in the growth of the Christian church. Granted, this book will absolutely not be for everybody, but it was an interesting convergence of social science and religion.

735 Sculpture from 1400



735.235: Senie, Harriet. Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy. (234 p.; finished 2 Mar 2013)

Harriet Senie’s catalogue of public sculpture in the US (and a few in Europe) in Contemporary Public Sculpture is an interesting and dense gallop through the art scene of the late-twentieth century. Her timeline starts in the 1960s and discusses how the installation of public sculpture in many cities and business has helped bring art to the masses. Her history shows that modern pieces have pushed aside the traditional horse and statesmen statues of the 19th century and allowed for a freer form of artistic expression. In many cases, public sculpture has helped to better integrate urban spaces with parks and natural alcoves.

Also, her goal is help explain how public art impacts one’s senses and why it is necessary. Her premise is that art requires consumption and the best way to ensure that is to place in a very public venue. She discusses how many times the public reacted in not quite the predictable way, but for it seems like any reaction is a good one. Nowadays, it seems like people just walk right past art in their own backyard. I recognized many of the pieces in the book from my travels across the US, but now I think I’ll look harder at the urban landscape to see if I can spot more. The only detraction in this book is that the illustrations are not in color. I’m a big proponent of showing pieces as close as possible to the original.

300 Social sciences



300.723: Fink, Arlene. How to Conduct Surveys: A Step-by-Step Guide. (101 p.; finished 2 Mar 2013)

This a pretty straightforward book, so my review won’t be that long. Arlene Fink’s How to Conduct Surveys is a crash course in survey design, implementation, and analysis. She walks the reader through how best to phrase and order questions, how to monitor for validity, how to administer the survey without bias, and how to compile the results into meaningful articles. While the main people in her audience are beginning social science researchers, I found this one to be quite informative as well. It even has a whole section on which statistical tools to use based on how the data is coded. A quick and practical book.

331 Labor economics



331.761647950973: Jayaraman, Saru. Behind the Kitchen Door. (191 p.; finished 5 Mar 2013)

I am guilty of a crime. It’s mostly a crime of omission or ignorance, but it is an offense nonetheless. When I go out to a restaurant, I have never concerned myself with whether the establishment has fair management or hiring practices. I never bother to find out whether anybody working that day is sick and had to come to work for fear of losing pay or their job entirely. I hardly notice that skin color tends to get darker as you approach the back of the house. But Saru Jayaraman has. Her book Behind the Kitchen Door and her organization (the Restaurant Opportunity Centers United) try to lift the veil surrounding food service workers in order to make the entire world of outside-the-home dining sustainable for all, from the food vendors to the workers to management, and even to the customer.

Jayaraman’s crusade for restaurant workers’ rights began with September 11th. When the Windows on the World restaurant fell with everything else in the Towers, dozens of displaced restaurant workers had to wait for re-employment. When the owners built a new establishment, many of the old workers were not hired back because they “didn’t have enough experience.” Never mind that they had already worked for this employer before, some people for many years. Jayaraman, with the help of Fekkak Mamdouh, began a protest campaign and organization that helped the workers get rehired.

Then, others came for her help. They were tired of being discrimintaed against, tired of harassment, tired of unequal pay, and tired of wage gouging and tip theft by their employers. The ROC organized studies and research into which restaurants were the worst offenders and petitioned, through either civil or legal measures, for remuneration, for fair compensation, or for more transparent hiring policies to be enacted at many restaurants. In this book, we get many stories of restaurant workers who faced hurdle after hurdle to break into the industry only to face rampant inequality once they get the job.

Granted, the book tends to read like one long informercial for a non-profit organization, but the stories need telling. I’m not about to lie and say that I’ll be doing thorough investigations of a place before I eat there, but I will be a bit more attentive to the work atmosphere, noticing who’s where and how the restaurant presents its workforce. It’s hard to climb onto a high horse after so much nonchalance on the matter, but Jaramayan makes a very good case for serious reform in the food service industry, and it would least behoove us to listen to what she has to say.

230 Christianity and Christian theology



230: Blanski, Tyler. When Donkeys Talk: A Quest to Rediscover the Mystery and Wonder of Christianity. (195 p.; finished 6 Mar 2013)

I don’t really know where to begin talking about this one. There’s no broad lede I can start from to introduce a writer who’s prepared to talk about everything in the cosmos as it relates to the Christian God. Poet and theologian Tyler Blanski has a fundamentally different way of approaching his faith and his religion. When Donkeys Talk chronicles his journey through the field of theology as he comes to understand it. Along the way, we meet a few friends that help to clarify matters and few who muddy the waters.

It all starts with the Book of Numbers. In it, Balaam is riding on a donkey with the princes of Moab in defiance of a direct command from God. He twice sends angels (that only the donkey can see) to stop him and twice the donkey stops in its tracks. This irks Balaam and he beats the donkey in order to get it to move forward. When this happens a third time and Balaam strikes the donkey, God grants speech to the ass, who then berates Balaam for his belligerence. The angel now appears to both Balaam and the donkey, and Balaam begs for forgiveness.

These stories are treated with extreme skepticism by atheists and gentle laughter from Christians. They are parables, stories from which to glean life lessons. But Blanski argues differently. Blanski posits that each little miraculous occurrence in the Bible happened and that God’s ability to perform miracles is the quintessence of Christian faith. From this understanding of how God operates, he weaves an intricate tapestry of theology. He argues that when we allow for the miraculous, then the sacraments gain meaning, the Kingdom of the Lord is more easily accessible.

He frames the journey as if he were the one riding the donkey through his life, first becoming irate at occurrences that move off his intended path, but then coming to the understanding that they are all part of the plan. He incorporates elements of early Christian rituals and thought with modern science and medieval thinkers. He bounces his ideas off his many neighbors: a church deacon, a burly non-believer, a young Christian, and a red-headed ex-Jewish agnostic. One of his main arguments is that modern science and industrial thought have convinced humanity that it can understand everything (or least be composed of individuals the sum total of whose knowledge would cover everything). Everything can be explained with the laws of science. He thinks that when that happens, we incorrectly equate ourselves with God.

This book was a fun and quick read. Having published a few books before, Blanski has a good sense of timing, flow, and anecdotal humor. Granted, I don’t think I could ever be his friend; the conversations he documents in the book seem a bit contrived to me. The only irritating part is his constant belittling of scientists, calling them “residents of Atomland.” These cutesy, patronizing damnations get in the way of his real message. If you want to have a little fun with one of the faithful flock, however, then this one may be right for you.

187 Epicurean philosophy



187: Klein, Daniel. Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an old man goes on vacation. There, he takes stock of his years, drinks in old philosophies, and ruminates on what growing old means and how one can live a fulfilled life. While it may the premise of many a chicken soup book, Daniel Klein is no hack. His Travels with Epicurus is a delightful volume of essays and thoughts on all he has read, experienced, and wished. I, for one, was glad to take the journey with him.

Klein decides to spend a month on the Greek island of Hydra to regain some perspective. After spending years working for a living as a writer and a philosopher and watching his aging friends continually try to stave off old age, he has come to point where he decides to truly enjoy his station in life. While others undergo medical procedures, start new exercise regimens, or take pills to reinvigorate themselves, Klein is just fine with being old and wise. His ambulations around Hydra offer a view of life in the slow lane, where Epicurean values and modern sensibilities meet.

While modern epicureanism is all about finding grandiose gourmet experiences, Epicurus actually advocated living a simple, happy, tranquil life. There should be peace. One should be free from fear and stress. One should be surrounded by friends. While this could be absurdly stretched to mean that you should do everything possible to feel pleasure, Epicurus was more about a peaceful happiness than an absolute hedonic state. Klein spends his days on Hydra muddling through not only Epicurus’s words, but also the many philosophers that he has brought him. He blends readings from Sartre, Kant, Russell, Heidegger, Eva Hoffman, and William James with popular figures such as Sinatra, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Stephen Wright, and Federico Fellini. This blending of philosophies enhances what would have been just a simple text about Epicurus and his writing.

Two things about this book: (1) this is the book that Tuesdays with Morrie should have been, and (2) you will feel bad for reading it so fast. Klein is so effortless in his thoughts that I just zipped right through it, which is precisely the opposite intention of writing about Epicurus. You need to take time with this one. You should pause after each essay and reflect a bit (but not too much). I will definitely read it time and time again—which I belive is just about the best thing you can say about a book.

598 Aves (Birds)



598.7209721: Gallagher, Tim. Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre. (254 p.; finished 8 Mar 2013)

First, a confession: this book has no formal Dewey Decimal Classification number. As of March 8, 2013, this book does not have a full Cataloguing-In-Publication section on the copyright page nor is it listed in the catalog of the Library of Congress (my usual backup source). Tim Gallagher’s other woodpecker book—Grail Bird—which is about tracking an elusive species of woodpecker throughout the United States, is eerily similar to this one, so I used the same basic call number (598.72) and tacked on a geographic subsection. That being said, there is a case to be made for this being a general natural history book (DDC 508), but the research and the writing is specific enough to warrant classification among the birds.

Now, on to the book at hand.

Scientists the world over are continually saddened by the news of threatened and endangered species. Every time a new animal is added to the list, there is a clamor of activity to study, preserve, and bolster that animal’s population. But what if an animal were stuck the gray area between endangered and extinct? What if the last documented sighting of a particular animal was 50 years ago? How much time has to pass before it can be declared extinct? These questions and many others are considered in Tim Gallagher’s latest bird book, Imperial Dreams.

Imperial Dreams chronicles the author’s many journeys to Northern Mexico to find a living example of the imperial woodpecker (Campephilus imperialis), a bird thought to have died out some time in the last fifty years. Every decade or so, though, somebody comes forward with a sighting or a story of its continued existence. So, Cornell ornithologist Tim Gallagher, who re-discovered the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas in 2004, gathered fellow bird-lovers and scientists to go on expeditions to Mexico to finally see if the bird had truly gone extinct.

The funny thing about his journey is that we get much more about the people and the countryside than about the birds themselves. Gallaghers includes every passage from just about every source for anyone having even a slight connection to the imperial. His exhaustive research into ornithological history and criss-crossing of the Mexican countryside to track down leads is quite inspiring.

The scientific aspects of this book, however, often take a back seat to the history of Northern Mexico. It has been ravaged by gangs, drug cartels, civil unrest, logging companies, and blatant disregard for perserving natural habitats. Every story of a scientific expedition is countered with an equally chilling tale of kidnapping and violence. This gets to you after a while. His journey into the Sierra Madre is well-written and teeming with wonderful details. While I won’t spoil his findings, I will say that the journey is worth it. Any lover of birds or nature will have fun with this one.

I think you're pretty safe putting that one in the 598; it's where all of my bird books are, and as you note it's where Grail Bird (and the two other books about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker that I checked) are as well.

I will also add that your thread is doing awful things to my wishlist. I hardly need another 598 for my Dewey challenge - I have more there than any other non-fiction classification (excluding 813 and 823, and 741 with its graphic novels), but I just can't stay away from a good birding tale.

I guess that the wonderful, thrilling, and exasperating paradox of the Dewey Challenge. Once you read one section, that's it. But then, someone else comes along and finds an even better book for that section, and you're cursing yourself. My one regret so far is wasting DDC 973 on a poor compilation of half-hearted tea parties and not getting into a great volume of American history.

Mais, c'est la vie...

Well, I'm not nearly as dedicated to this challenge as you are; maybe one in three or four of my nonfiction reads qualifies, and I don't really plan to finish. (Though getting all the in-use divisions would be a nice goal!) So I have no problem going back to categories any more than I do reading fiction.

323 Civil and political rights



323.1196073076251: O’Brien, M.J. We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth’s Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired. (286 p.; finished 10 Mar 2013)

On May 28, 1963, a group of young Americans walked up to a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi and sat down. Any other day, this would have been no big deal, but this was a whites-only counter and they were not all white. In Hinds County, Mississippi, this was seen as an affront to their way of life. The Jim Crow laws were deeply ensconced in the culture, and many people thought “separate but equal” was a legitimate system that allowed for all parties to thrive with dignity. But this was not the case. M.J. O’Brien’s We Shall Not Be Moved centers around this sit-in and chronicles the civil rights movement from the perspective of those on the ground.

This book centers around a pivotal image of the civil rights movement. The three visible sit-in participants—John Salter (Native American), Joan Trumpauer (a white civil liberties activist), and Anne Moody (an African-American)—are seen sitting, waiting to be treated as equals. They are covered with ketchup, salt, sugar, mustard, and possibly blood. The white crowd surrounds them, taunting them, waiting for one of them to give them an excuse for a fight. Outside the frame, there are others at the counter under considerably more duress. The image oozes with gravitas, tension, and sadness.



O’Brien’s narrative takes us through the lives of those involved—on both sides of the issue—and how their environment and attitudes led them to the sit-in. The famed civil rights lawyer Medgar Evers, who became the NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, plays a pivotal role. From the formation of early grassroots movements to his assassination just 38 days after the sit-in, his leadership set the tone for the issue. It is also interesting to see that O’Brien also includes perspectives of policemen on duty in Jackson during the time.

What struck me most was the pure animosity that many in the South had towards integration. While I find it hard to fathom, there are still pockets on the planet where one group of people considers another group of people unworthy of basic respect, fairness, and rights. O’Brien’s book is both riveting and shameful, which is understandably the only way a book about the civil rights movement can be. I enjoyed this one, but I’m not in a hurry to read about this era again. If you’re a student of civil rights or political science, then pick this one up.

788 Wind instruments (Aerophones)



788.7165092: Whyton, Tony. Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album. (112 p.; finished 11 Mar 2013)

Recorded on December 9, 1964, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is a central work in the history of jazz music. Considered by many to be his magnum opus, this album (and probably Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue) represented the height of composition done at the time. Tony Whyton’s Beyond a Love Supreme interprets the album, the man, the context, and the philosophy of jazz in 1960s.

Whyton’s analysis of both the man and the music is very technical and at times overly complicates Coltrane’s composition. Coltrane’s infusion of spirituality with his music is fascinating all on its own. But, still, Whyton has some very good arguments to make about jazz albums and how listeners interact with the music. The most interesting one on the nature of recorded jazz and its inherent flaw. Jazz was thought to be a music form that can only be truly experienced in the moment. Many people who talk about hearing jazz bands often say “you had to be there.” When you record it, you disengage the music from the musicians and the moment. It’s immediately de-valued. But, then without recording it, how do we have a record of what was done? How do we compare one composition to another?

Whyton’s other discussions deal with the complexities of A Love Supreme, the deification of Coltrane, and the power of dichotomies in jazz. (Fun fact: There is actually a church in San Francisco that honors Saint John Coltrane.) Now, in order to really understand what Whyton is talking about here, I gave the album a listen. The best thing I can say about is that it’s certainly very inventive. Now, I’m by no stretch of the imagination an aficionado of jazz music. I mean, there’s stuff I’ve heard and liked, and stuff that just sounds like noise. This one falls somewhere in the middle. The central melodies are playful and yet deep, but the raspy drum work chipped away at my enjoyment. (Full disclosure: I’m an unabashed fan of metal music, so sitting through an entire jazz album was already a little hard for me). I’m probably being excommunicated right now by the Church of St. Coltrane, but I can live with that. The book, however, will neither increase nor decrease your relationship with the album, and Whyton’s analysis certainly has merit. Even at a thin 112 pages, it’s not light reading—so be prepared for that.

303 Social processes



303.4: Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. (322 p; finished 13 Mar 2013)

I don’t know where to begin with this one. It’s about so many different things. Well, it’s actually about everything—everything we do, we invent, we perceive--the social processes that make up the fabric of everybody’s lives. Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration concerns itself with the pace of social growth. She posits that society as a macrocosmic unit is accelerating based on a three-pronged investigation of the mechanisms that shape society: technical expansion, pace of life, and social change.

She starts with a treatise on how time is both perceived and conceived. By looking at how we as social units perceive time and how that perception has changed through history, she comes up with a unique visualization of society. In physics (a long time ago), I learned that velocity is change in position over time and what we call acceleration is actually change in velocity over time (which is actually change in position over time over time). This same principle applies to society. Social velocity is a change in a society’s position (or state) over time, so therefore social acceleration is change in state over time over time. It’s this acceleration and its meaning that Rosa seeks to define.

While all this may already be confusing, she goes further. By looking at individual accelerations in technical expansion (from 0 to Internet in 50 years), in the pace of life (most poignantly how most people have acclimated to rampant multi-tasking), and in social change (i.e., a culture’s change from conservation to progressive and back again over the course of a few years), she forces the reader to look at humanity from a 40,000 foot view. This view, while still accounting for pockets of slowness and resistance to change, is one that points to an undeniable acceleration in social processes.

What I found relieving, though, is her statement that there is no way to accelerate to infinity. The growth of human societies has boundaries in the form of natural geophysical, anthropological, and biological limitations in both the species and the universe. Her argument for social acceleration is one that both seeks to define modernism and help us see how the integration of time as a separate and discrete unit of the macrosociological model will inform our future studies.

Granted, this book isn’t for everyone. It’s a little dry in places and some of her arguments are somewhat arbitrary, but they are still interesting to ponder for a while. It’s nice, too, to be able to take a step back from reading focused, singular accounts of parts of the world and see to the whole thing as a single organism with rules, nuances, and systems. Just don’t do it for too long, though: you’ll lose perspective. A heavy but thought-provoking read.

286 Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Adventist churches



286.092: Norris, Chad. Signs, Wonders, and a Baptist Preacher: How Jesus Flipped My World Upside Down. (186 p.; finished 14 Mar 2013)

No book so far has left me more incredulous than this one. Chad Norris, a plain-spoken Baptist minister from Simpsonville, South Carolina loves his flock, his neighbors, and his Savior. He offers varied programs for all manner of the faithful at his church and even travels abroad to help the less fortunate through both good deeds and prayer services. Here’s the kicker: he also claims that through his touch and prayer, Jesus Christ actually unleashes the power of God’s love to transform the lives of others, often curing ailments (i.e., blindness and cancer), healing wounds, and casting out evils. Yeah, he’s one of those people. In Signs, Wonders, and a Baptist Preacher, Norris recounts his early years and his journey to become the leader and healer he is today.

To be fair, Norris seems like a regular person with a regular life and regular faults. He overindulges in Mexican food, loves his children unconditionally, makes impulse purchases, is compassionate towards his fellow man, and occasionally acts haphazardly at golf courses. But in his ministry, he is anything but regular. His belief in God and Jesus apparently embolden him with the ability to hear their voices and carry out their commands. Jesus, all things considered, seems to be a very helpful presence in Norris’s life. He guides him through tough battles, enables him to love others more, and even helps with everyday tasks such as locating his child’s lost pacifier and unsuccessfully stopping him from writing a duplicate mortgage payment.

Norris’s theology is gentler than most; he moves away from the traditional fire-and-brimstone, fear-based faith and preaches to folks about the loving presence of his Lord. He sees religion and living as a Christian as a lifelong quest to live much like Jesus Christ and his apostles. He continually mines the Bible (in both its original and translated forms) to understand how the first Christians interacted with those around them and how he can use their examples to spread the message of his faith. He is, thankfully, more focused on improvement than damnation.

Now, to my assessment of the book: it is well-written, humble, and even a little funny in places. My opinion on his religion aside, Norris is very charismatic and even affable at times. His skepticism concerning his own experiences and beliefs is good to see. A lesser man would believe that he alone was actually healing people. I had to be very patient with this one. I believe that he believes, and no will ever be able to take that away from him. This book will not move anyone across the spiritual divide; the faithful will gain a new appreciation for the possibilities and the wonder of their Lord and the skeptics will continue to scoff. But, if you’ve got a free afternoon and an open mind, then Norris’s humble tale will be at the very least amusing and startling to sit through.

917 Geography of and travel in North America



917.104: Richardson, Mark. Canada’s Road: A Journey on the Trans-Canada Highway from St. John’s to Victoria. (158 p.; finished 15 Mar 2013)

This seemed like such a promising idea for a book. A man, armed with a history of Canadian road-building and several previous accounts of trans-Canadian road trips and whose birthdate is the exact date of the Trans-Canada Highway’s grand opening, embarks on an epic journey across Canada to experience all the road has to offer. But, Mark Richardson’s recounting of his 57-day, 7600-kilometer trip across Canada on the 50th anniversary of the road in Canada’s Road falls flat in so many ways it hard to muster up any affection for the journey. Lucky for us as well, it’s mercifully short.

The quest started out as a joint venture between him, the CAA (like the AAA, only Canadian), and General Motors to show off both a new Camaro and roadside exploration in a blog. While many blogs have been successfully converted into books, this is not one of them. Each day (or couple of days) has a standard three-part entry. The “Then” sections detail bits and pieces from either the road’s past or past journeys across Canada. The “Now” sections are incidents and experiences he has on the trip. And the “Something Different” sections talk about places and people off the beaten path. This constant repetition get rather wearisome after 15 or 20 days of reporting. The book is simply a cut-and-paste job from the Internet (literally). There are needless references to other blog posts, Twitter contests, and whole URLs stuck in the middle of the text.

To be fair, there’s a good deal of history tucked in this slim book. We get stuff about Canadian politics and many of the previous famous road trips across Canada. The most notable is of course the first one, undertaken by Canadian “adventurer” Thomas Wilby and his American mechanic Jack Haney in 1912 in a classic REO. I would rather have read that one instead. In his A Motor Tour Through Canada, Wilby never once addresses his mechanic companion by name and never stoops to help when the car breaks down or gets stuck. For 53 days, Wilby and Haney hated each other. A volume juxtaposing Wilby’s words with Haney’s journal would have been ripe with tension and interesting moments.

There are many ways that this book could have been better organized to make for a more fluid and dynamic story. For one, it desparately needed maps of any kind. A word for travel writers out there: if you’re writing about any driving or trekking or exploration, include a map. It makes it easier for people to visualize where you are in the world. Especially if you start discussing alternate routes and differences between one highway and another. The Trans-Canada Highway has several offshoots and splitting points, but the author and the publisher just assume we can keep track of everything ourselves. In short, this is a wasted opportunity, but there’s a few stories and travel tips in here that may interest some folks out there.

730 Plastic arts and sculpture



730.92: Henderson, Harry & Albert Henderson. The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis: A Narrative Biography. (550 p.; finished 17 Mar 2013)

Mary Edmonida Lewis was born July 4, 1844 (or so she says) in Greenbush, New York (now Rensselaer). She grew up with many of the adversities befitting her station in life, but eventually went to college and became a world renowned sculptor. Her works were displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and she was even commissioned to do a bust of President Ulysses S. Grant. All of this would have remarkable had she been solely a woman in 19th century America. But she had one other major hurdle to overcome which speaks to both her perseverence and her skill—she was both Native American and African-American. Written by the father-son team of Harry and Albert Henderson, The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis is the culmination of decades of research on this long-forgotten artist.

While the details of Lewis’s life are scant, her story is still worth telling. She attended one of the first racially and gender integrated colleges in the US (Oberlin). While there, though, she was subjected to a brutal beating after she weas suspected of poisoning two other students. In spite of this, she became a sculptor’s apprentice and sold her first piece for $8 (a decent windfall in those days). From there, went to study in Rome and was brought up in the Neoclassical tradition. In the decade following the Exposition, however, the world’s interest in Neoclassic design waned and she faded into obscurity, dying in London in 1907.

This book is based primarily on Harry Henderson’s research, conducted since the 1970s. His son Albert finished the text after his Harry’s death in 2003. This one is a purely electronic text, with hyperlinked footnotes and a vast index of works. The narrative quality, I feel, immerses the reader in the story more than a regular scholarly biography would. The Hendersons integrate information from news stories and letters to make it more like a novel than a history text. Lewis’s story is all at once interesting and sad. Her life, while forgotten for a while is now making a come back among art historians and this immense work helps to secure her artistic legacy. A daunting but illuminating read.

727 Buildings for education and research purposes (Architecture)



727.6580942: Holway, Tatiana. The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created. (239 p.; finished 18 Mar 2013)

In 1837, Robert Hermann Schomburgk risked his life and his livelihood on a commission for the newly formed Royal Geographical Society. His mission was to explore the rivers and geology of the new South American colony of British Guiana and report back his findings. While fighting through waterfalls, clogged rivers, and epic swarms of mosquitoes, he encountered what he called a “vegetable wonder.” It was a water lily almost 10 feet in diameter with a giant, beautiful pink flower. He named it the Victoria lily in honor of the heir apparent to the throne at the time. The flower and its subsequent effect in revitalizing the botanical sciences in England are the subject of Tatiana Holway’s Flower of Empire.

While Schomburgk was being eaten alive in the South American jungle, British botany was experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Upper crust types were expected to keep immaculate gardens, keep up on flowering practices, and generally contribute to the beautification of the country. But, ironically, the country’s best arboreteum—the Kew Gardens—was in a major decline by the 1820s and 1830s. The first champion of the science, Sir Joseph Banks, built the Gardens into a powerhouse of research and beauty, but after his death, the gardens fell into extreme disrepair.

Once the giant water lily was first introduced to scientists in Europe, the race was on germinate a specimen from seed for public display. The flower, after all, was named after the Queen (she ascended to the throne the year the flower was discovered). In 1840, the royal family adopted the Kew Gardens as the Royal Botanical Gardens and hopes were high. So when, Sir William Hooker was tapped as the first official Director of the Gardens, we went about tidying up the joint and admitting the public with gusto again. Chief among his interests was getting the lily growing. His failed attempt to bring the lily to flower in 1847 only made him try harder and get help from the surrounding botanical community. Gone were the days of scientific isolationism. If the flower was to grow, they would need lots of help. Finally, by April 1849, a gardener employed by the Duke of Devonshire, Joseph Paxton, got the flower to show itself on British soil. The lily’s coup de grace was an exhibit in the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The technology and care needed to shepherd such a plant to fruition this far outside its natural habitat was astounding.

While Holway’s book is ostensibly about the creation of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, there is so much more here. There is a thorough history of Schomburgk’s expeditions to South America and a wealth of background on both the botanical sciences and British botanical scientists alike. While the obsession with the lily (and other plants mentioned) was not quite on par with the Dutch tulip bubble of the 1630s, it still captivated the attention of the nation, and Holway does a very good job of creating that sense throughout the book. It does get a bit long-winded when going into the minutae of botanical discovery and identification, but those bits aren’t that long to begin with. If you’re a fan of architecture or science history, then this one is for you.

938 History of Greece to 323



938: McKeown, J. C. A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization. (273 p.; finished 19 Mar 2013)

For centuries, the Greeks and their civilization were lauded by every classic scholar. Greek sculpture and architecture was considered the height of design and artistry. Western civilization itself was modeled after the Greeks’ system of politics and government. But J. C. McKeown has had enough of this blind idolatry (and to be fair, so has everybody born after 1850). He just wants to see them for who they were, even if they were just as flawed as the rest of us. His investigation into Greek literature, history, and culture has turned up some unusual findings. They were a raucous, slandering, witty, uncivilized bunch and in A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities, he sets out to show just how normal (or rather abnormal) they were.

The book is organized much like a book of quotations, which passages from translated texts arranged by theme. Under each theme, we get a litany of excerpts from Greek philosophers, historians, writers, dramatist, and even graffiti artists to show small facets of Greek thought and life. Here’s some of what’s in the volume:

• On sex: Throwing apples at someone was sign of your affection for them (Aristophanes).
• On athletics: For the first thirteen Olympic Games, there was just a single competitive event—the 200-meter sprint (Julius Africanus).
• On mathematics: Plato thought that the word “geometry” was a ridiculous name for the discipline (Epinomis).
• On animals: According to Strabo’s Geography, if you smear elephant fat all over your body, no other animal will come near you.

This book would definitely be more useful as a bathroom reader than to read straight through. It has fun and evocative facts that help to humanize the Greeks. You can dip in, pick up a few quips, and then dash on to other things. McKeown’s arrangement is straightforward and he includes a lot of illustrations of artifacts to break up the stream of excerpts. If you’re into Greek history and its various minutiae, then pick this one up. There’s bound to be at least one new thing for you to learn.

280 Denominations and sect of Christian church



280.4097309041: Coffman, Elesha J. The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline. (223 p.; finished 20 Mar 2013)

The Christian Century was founded as a Disciples of Christ devotional magazine in 1884 as a publication that sought to reconcile the American people’s faith with the rapid acceleration of technology and culture at that time. But by 1908, the magazine could not sustain itself and went into foreclosure. Luckily it was sold at auction to Chrles Clayton Morrison and he began the long journey to rehabilitating the periodical. Along the way, he helped to shepherd the spiritual world in the United States through discourse with varied voices, vocations, and visionaries and Elesha Coffman’s Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline tells the story.

Coffmans’s history of the magazine, and consequently of those who ran it, speaks to an overarching theme of general spiritualism in the United States. There has always been an undercurrent of faith and devotion in the general populace. This is often referred to as the Protestant mainline, a label which differentiates it from the fringe, fundamentalist, or evangelical groups of Christians. By shifting the focus of the magazine from devotion to conversation, Morrison sought to ensure that mainstream Americans had a place for both their faith and their social leanings. The periodical itself touted a moderate liberal base of social reform, at times including pieces from Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, and Jane Addams. The Christian Century also inaugurated an age of religious ecumenism—initiatives aimed at tying churches together to create a more unified movement—and helped to create the National Council of Churches.

Coffman’s research is undoubtably thorough, but unfortunately is not very interesting. Tracing the roots of American mainline Protestantism inherently comes with a dash of Waspishness. The history of both the magazine and the time period is choc-a-block with middle-aged white men trying to achieve great things. The whole thing comes off as rather milquetoast. It doesn’t help either that this book is the formal publication of Coffman’s doctoral dissertation from almost five years ago. This book will find an audience in students of social religiosity and perhaps of Midwestern church organizational history, but not much else.

370 Education



370: Tilleczek, Kate & H. Bruce Ferguson, eds. Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions. (247 p.; finished 21 Mar 2013)

This is another one of those books that I will trudge through and no one will get very excited about. Editors Kate Tilleczek and H. Bruce Ferguson, in Youth, Education, and Marginality, bring together a collection of essays on social reform and education to highlight the issue of youth marginalization in Canadian schools. Their goal to pair both professionals’ views with that of the children themselves to show that while both groups understand the issues, it is up to everybody else to help them overcome them.

To be fair, I don’t really have a deep understanding of the education system in Canada completely, but the twin issues of privilege and access to education were easy to relate to. In Canada, indigenous populations get the short end of the scholastic stick, with many of their schools existing as run-down shacks. Learning in squalor is no way to convey the virtues of an education. But it’s not just the indigenous that are marginalized in Canadian society. Traditional minorities—gay students, black students, special needs students, and students from poor families—also bear the burden of social ills when it comes to their education.

Tilleczek and Ferguson inclusion of artwork, poetry, and conversations from actual youth is especially poignant. Their words and pictures reflect an ongoing issue with education, which usually manifests itself in the high school years in higher drop-out rates and teen pregnancy. Their answer to these issues is an environment where teachers, administrators, parents, and even the students are part of the education process, each hoping gain a bit of equity in the fight for a better tomorrow. While I wouldn’t rush around and recommend this book to everyone I meet, I would say that was unexpectedly eye-opening.

787 Regular and bowed stringed instruments (Chordophones)



787.95092: Welsh, Mary Sue. One Woman in a Hundred: Edna Phillips and the Philadelphia Orchestra. (210 p.; finished 22 Mar 2013)

January 7, 1930 was a cold but momentous day in the world of orchestral music. Leopold Stokowski, a giant of the music scene and conductor of the now world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra, came by the apartment his old friend Carlos Salzedo to hear one of his students give an audition. Salzedo, a virtuoso at the harp, had cultivated a group of promising musicians at his studio. While there was nothing tremendously groundbreaking about auditions with Stokowski, this one was different. This was a first. Seated at the harp was Edna Phillips, soon to be the first woman to be a principal player in a major U.S. orchestra. Mary Sue Walsh’s One Woman in a Hundred gives us all the details.

Edna Phillips had only been playing the harp since she was eighteen, but she had had piano lessons before then. Her mother, sensing a good deal of potential in her daughter, sent her to the best harp teacher of the day. Salzedo immediately saw she had a unique sense of the music and an promising future ahead of her. After a few years bouncing between different companies, Salzedo heard of an opening at the famed Philadelphia Orchestra and did not hesitate to set up the audition. Phillips thought she was auditioning for the second harpist, but Stokowski had other plans.

Once she got the appointment, she was greeted with tension from both sides of the gender barrier. The all-men club of the orchestra had to adjust their behavior and the orchestra’s Women’s Committee gave her grief as a potential rabble-rouser. But she persevered and learned to play for quite possibly one of the best conductors in American music history. Stokowski was always pushing the boundaries of musical possibilities. He brought in pieces from living modernist composers (much to the chagrin to the stodgy public) and even pioneered methods for electronic recordings of the orchestra. Anybody who owns a copy of Disney’s Fantasia can hear Edna on the harp there.

Welsh’s narrative is exciting, funny, and delightful. As I was reading, each piece of classical music I had ever heard was brought to mind. I’m a big fan of Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Elgar’s Enigma Variations, so I was able to follow along competently well. Edna’s story is refreshing to hear. While she had some difficulties adjusting to the spotlight, she handled it with grace and tact. Her adventures with the orchestra through the heyday of American symphony building was a very entertaining tale. A must read for classical music buffs and lovers of the arts.

001 Knowledge



001.94: Daughtrey, Peter. Atlantis and the Silver City. (217 p.; finished 23 Mar 2013)

Just under 2,400 years ago, a Greek man named Plato sat down and wrote a tale about a mythical place from a mythical time. It was an island in the vast, unexplored ocean that housed a civilization better than anything ever seen before. The island nation was overseen by a descendant of the god Poseidon and his nine siblings. Every passageway into the mainland was decorated with marble, brass, tin, and orichcalcum, an exotic metal. They oversaw a vast empire, and all that came to an abrupt end in 9600 BCE when a “single day and night of misfortune” wiped the island off the Earth. This island was called Atlantis and Peter Daughtrey’s Atlantis and the Silver City tries to settle the debate of its truth and origin.

Daughtrey investigates the clues given in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias dialogues to pinpoint the extent and location of the Atlantean empire. His thesis is that the empire of Atlantis was once connected to the Portuguese nation, with major earthquakes, fault lines, and geological evidence pointing to Atlantis being just off the coast of the Iberian peninsula. He combs Plato’s “facts” to provide support for the region being the birthplace of the ancient lost island. His theory is that the empire once stretched across the Atlantic and encompassed parts of the five major Atlantic continents. Daughtrey also claims that the Bahamas and their geology provide further proof of the empire’s existence. While it is true that the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 speaks to the incredible potential of the area being able to swallow an island, only scant evidence exists of an entire civilization under the ocean.

This book requires without a doubt a suspension of one’s disbelief. Daughtrey’s writing is clear and fun in places and I wish him well in his research. Major discoveries are often the ones found those at the fringe of the believable. A major assumption here, however, is the veracity of Atlantis’s existence. The first account of the empire is in Plato’s writings, almost ten millennia after the supposed fall of the land. That’s a massive length of time to go without anyone mentioning it. All accounts after Plato are usually traced back to him. Now, I played along for the length of the book, but in the end, I could not dispel the ten millennia issue. And besides, some of his theories about the ancient and deep knowledge of the Atlanteans (advanced metallurgy and writing systems) are just too thin to believe. A fun but unconvincing book.

796 Athletic and outdoor sports and games



796.42092: Jones, Bill. The Ghost Runner: The Epic Journey of the Man They Couldn’t Stop. (264 p.; finished 24 Mar 2013)

He was a ghost—no number, no official listing, no limitations. John Tarrant snuck to the starting lines of hundreds of races in the 1950s and 1960s and jetted away once the starter’s pistol sounded. Race officials were always stymied when he passed; without a bib number, they didn’t know how to mark his time. His British countrymen revered him as a man who dared to stand up to the system. Even when he moved to South Africa to run against apartheid, he was still persona non grata. His past dogged him wherever he went, and no organization authorized or recognized his amazing ability on the track . Bill Jones’s The Ghost Runner is a fascinating look into the life of a man whose teenage mistakes caused a lifetime of pain and prejudice.

John Tarrant (1932-1975) lived to run. He only had one speed—full throttle. If not for a brief interlude with boxing in his late teens, he would have been one of the greatest runners in the world. He only boxed in 8 matches and earned £17 in his entire career. This seventeen pounds were the costliest of his life. Because of his professional “earnings” as a boxer, he could never get recognized as a amateur athlete, a status that was absolutely necessary to register for races and the Olympics. This seventeen pounds were the basis for a lifetime ban from amateur races. Even though Tarrant’s raw talent in running led him to eventually hold the 40-mile and 100-mile world records, he could not compete to represent his country in any amateur competition.

Tarrant’s story is both sad and monomaniacal. Bill Jones’s narrative continually harps on the organizing bodies of the day for their stubbornness. While Tarrant’s ban was lifted briefly for domestic races in the late 1950s, when he went to South Africa to train for ultra-marathons, he was subsequently banned from racing there as well. After a while, the officials stopped caring about his sneaking onto the course, but his results were never officially recognized.

The other side of this was Tarrant’s somewhat negligent treatment of his family. He moved from one low-paying job to another, each time quitting in order to schedule more training time. If he wasn’t sleeping or working, he was running, once logging 570 miles in a single month. Now, I’m a bit of a runner and this monthly distance is utterly inconceivable. His move to South Africa was without his family and they had to fend for themselves the entire time he was gone. While I can appreciate his dedication to his field, his interactions with other people could sometimes be very disheartening.

All in all, this was a very good book. Jones’s writing is fluid and exciting for the most part. He does repeat himself a bit about the seventeen pounds, but I think it drives home the point all the more. If the BAAB had just offered a bit of lenience, then Tarrant’s life would have turned out much differently indeed. A thoughtful and enjoyable book.

340 Law



340.0820973: Norgren, Jill. Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers. (212 p.; finished 25 Mar 2013)

Jill Norgren, in her upcoming book Rebels at the Bar, wants to shine a light on a forgotten corner of American history. While there are many woman law practitioners today, the mid-1800s saw the breaking of the barrier. America had come out of the Second Great Awakening with an interesting amount of education societies of which women were a large part. With newfound access to education (no thanks to men legislators and officials), they sought to work along side their male counterparts in many notable professions. This included the law. While lawyers were generally seen in the same way as we do today, well-meaning members of society thought the law to be a noble calling. Norgren’s book details the life and times of eight pioneering women in the field.

This book covers:
• Myra Bradwell—the first woman to be admitted to the Illinois bar. She founded the Chicago Legal News, a publication which compiled local and federal legal decisions.
• Lavinia Goodell—the first woman licensed to practice law in Wisconsin.
• Belva Lockwood—the first woman attorney licensed to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Clara Foltz—the first woman licensed to practice law in California.
• Mary Hall—the first woman admitted to the Connecticut bar, whose licensure led to the first judicial decision explicitly stating that women were permitted to practice law.
• Catharine McCulloch—the first woman appointed as a justice of the peace in Illinois. She was notable for conducting marriage ceremonies wherein the word “obey” was omitted from the woman’s vows.
• Lelia Robinson and Mary Greene—the first two women to be admitted to the Massachusetts bar.

While each woman led different lives, there are similar undercurrents in each of their tales. They had to fight against public opinion which held that women should stick to domestic jobs and that they could not handle the brutality of criminal court. They were almost always involved in suffrage and women’s rights movements and advocated that the inclusion of women into the legal sphere would invariably lead to a better field of practice.

Norgren’s biographies are tidy but laden with legal back-and-forth. While historically complete, they are not terribly exciting. That said, however, the tales still have much I found interesting. After reading about civil rights violations in the American South, their plight seemed eerily familiar. These women were seen as disrupting the social order, as headstrong ruffians with nothing better to do but become rabble-rousers. All they wanted was to be was seen as full-fledged members of American society with all the rights and privileges they were entitled to. Norgren was right: they were forgotten—but only for a while. A dense and enlightening book.

810 American literature in English



810: Mason, Travis V. Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay. (226 p.; finished 26 Mar 2013)

This is another one of those book where I don’t have a fun, exciting, or enticing lede. Travis V. Mason’s Ornithologies of Desire is an in-depth look at the writing of Canadian poet-critic-essayist Don McKay. But rather than a straightforward textual reading of McKay’s works, Mason uses McKay’s love of birds and ornithology to create a eco-critical lens through which to examine McKay.

Mason’s dual perspective of the bird as a natural object and a grand metaphor allows the reader a deeper understanding of McKay’s poems. While I’ve never actually read any of McKay’s work before now, I was immediately taken by his cutting language, not crude but rather precise in its examination of the poetic moment. As an avid birdwatcher, McKay was very observant of how each bird existed in nature as a single entity but still related to the whole environment. Much is the same with his poetry—each reference to a bird is chosen with exacting precision and allows for richer readings. Mason includes an appendix of every bird mentioned in McKay’s writings and where to find them (in case you were looking for something specific).

Mason also includes a rather interesting feature in this text. Every couple of chapters, there is an interlude in which a birder-critic is imagined and their relationship to McKay’s work is examined. These make for intriguing thought experiments in a sea of otherwise dense criticism. Now, a long time ago, I was an English major so I have some chops when presented with this kind of book, but it’s not for the general public. Mason’s done his homework and makes some very interesting observations about McKay’s work, from the nature of flight in poetics to McKay’s use of birdsong. Anyone who reads this for fun, however, probably needs to have both their head and their definition of fun examined. Better to go directly to McKay’s works and find something beautiful than read about someone talking about reading. If you’re a lit crit freak, though, don’t let me stop you from diving in.

932 History of Egypt to 640 AD



932.014092: Marchant, Jo. The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut’s Mummy. (245 p.; finished 27 Mar 2013)

1,300 years before the birth of Christ, one man ruled over a desert kingdom. But he wasn’t really a man. Taking the throne at age nine, Tutankhamun ended the worship of the god Aten in favor of the god Amun (hence the name) as well as directed the continuation of building projects at Karnak and Thebes. Because he was a child, most of the day-to-day decisions were handled by his powerful advisors. Ten years into his reign, he died from an unknown cause. As was customary, his body was treated with great respect, mummified, and laid to rest in a secret temple in the Valley of the Kings. And then he was forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until 1922, when Howard Carter unsealed his tomb and reintroduced him to the world. Jo Marchant’s The Shadow King is an exploration of both the life and afterlife of the legendary Egyptian leader.

One of my favorite bits of Tut lore is comes early in the book and is about Carter’s reaction upon first entering the tomb in 1922. After making his way past the pile of desert debris, his lone candle flickering in a space untouched by man for 3,200 years, a voice called back to him from the entrance. It was his employer, Lord Carnarvon, asking, “Can you see anything?” To which Carter replied, “Yes, it is wonderful.” From the discovery of King Tut’s tomb (now labeled KV62), Marchant follows every winding path of discovery, every TV special and charming popular scientist, to get a bigger picture of how society and history have viewed this boy king from a forgotten era. From preliminary examinations in dusty backrooms to high-tech scans to find genetic relations, disease markers, and life events, her journalistic adventures takes her around the world to get to the bottom of the legend. (Don’t worry, there’s still a good chronology of the supposed curse of the tomb raiders). She details each discovery as the image of Tut progresses from rich pharaoh to inbred weakling to war hero and beyond.

The weird thing is that each discovery not only tells us something about the pharaoh, but also reveals something about the discoverer as well. The ever-ostentatious Zahi Hawass, who plays a central part in almost every new discovery these days, is portrayed as a knowledgeable but self-promoting Egyptologist whose apparent certainty about his declarations on Tut lore seems to invite instant controversy from the scientific world. Overall, this book was very interesting and had a lot of cool science. The nature of the work being done to investigate King Tut’s life and death is on the cutting edge and therefore suspect to a great deal of doubt. But that’s what they said about fingerprints in the late 1800s. I hope that one day we get to the point where we can definitively reconstruct the lives of the pharaohs. But for now, the journey is where the excitement is. This is a great book for budding Egyptologists and forensic science fans. Yes, it is wonderful.

12/21/11 - Napkin math! Love it!

Uh oh, Merrikay...you've dipped your toe into the group to drop some comments. Time to go whole hog, set up a thread, and see what Deweys you've got under your belt...

(Sorry, I'm kind of a bad influence.)

226 Gospels & Acts



226.306: Smuts, P. W. Mark by the Book: A New Multidirectional Method for Understanding the Synoptic Gospels. (225 p.; finished 28 Mar 2013)

If other books on Biblical scripture were like this one, I’d read more of them. The unfortunately-named Biblical scholar P. W. Smuts, in Mark by the Book, systematically dissects each passage in the Gospel of Mark and shows not only the meaning behind a straightforward reading of the text, but how the text is informed by the Old Testament, relates to the other Gospels, and helps in reading later passages of the New Testament. This model of straight-back-sideways-forward reading constitutes the “multidirectional” part of his method. His brand of hermeneutics (interpretation of the Bible) is refreshing and deep at the same time.

Smuts chooses Mark because it was the first written, in about 60 or 70 CE, and forms the basis for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (these three constitute the Synoptic Gospels). Each chapter can be a bit repetitive in its format, but I got used to it and came to enjoy the mental exercise in relating each passage to all the other parts. As a reading aid, he includes a handy concordance of every biblical reference he uses as an appendix so you can find where he relates Mark to other books of the Bible. In a broader sense, this book is helpful for those trying to get the hang of literary criticism. Smuts demonstrates an ease with intertextual reading that is sometimes lacking in modern nonfiction. Sadly, though, this is Mr. Smuts’s only book so far. But, if he manages to get another out before I finish this quest and I need the section, I will gladly pick it up. He has a lot to teach about reading scripture.

246 -yah - I spent the whole morning on the Dewey Classification thingie link. It is too hard to resist, but I'm pretty lazy about putting up the thread - i AM going to do it tho!

ETA: Yes you are a terrible influence!

284 Protestants denominations of Continental origin and related bodies



284.1: Sasse, Hermann. Letters to Lutheran Pastors, Volume 1: 1948-1951. (approx. 600 p.; finished 31 Mar 2013)

This is a whopper of a book. It catalogues the translated letters of Hermann Sasse, a confessional Lutheran theologian, written from 1948 to 1951. At this point in his career, he had survived the National Socialist regime of World War II Germany and had been teaching religious studies for two decades at the University of Erlangen. In 1949, he moved to Adelaide to teach at the seminary at the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia. These letters detail his concerns with confessional faith, Lutheran ecumenism, and how a body of churches should teach its theological precepts to the world.

It takes a lot of will power to mow through these letters. Sasse’s philosophy is precise and pointed. He has clear objections to some rituals and theosophies that other churches use in their masses. But more so, he has a lot to say about how a person approaches their faith. He believes that everything one does in relation to religion must have meaning, depth, understanding, and precision. Without any of these, many of the acts done by the faithful are simply pantomime.

Sasse’s letters are also erudite almost to a fault. His communications with his fellow pastors frequently reference the entire history of the Lutheran schism with the Catholic Church and he isn’t afraid to lace his invectives with historical minutiae. For students of Lutheran philosophy, these letters will contain a treasure trove of information. But for everyone else, there is the danger that this collection will just be seen as the irate ramblings of a person who wants other Protestants to think like him. I can sympathize with Sasse, though, and if you believe in something hard enough, then you just might as well.

169 Analogy



169: Hofstadter, Douglas & Emmanuel Sander. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. (530 p.; finished 3 Apr 2013)

Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander’s Surfaces and Essences is written for one purpose: to make you think. It not only makes you think, it makes you think about thinking and think about language and think about the language of thinking (it’s a pretty thoughful book). The authors’ main premise is that analogy is the root of thought and language. Their definition of an analogy is an instance where a current thought, experience, or linguistic device is compared to another so that it can be fully comprehended. All thing have an analog to some other thing. Without analogy, they claim, modern thought and language fall apart. This is a very interesting proposition mainly due to the fact that we need language to define the pieces of language and therefore everything has to compared to everything else. It’s a wonderfully tight system. It also compares English language analogies to other foreign languages to help define a perspective for certain modes of thinking, which I think is a rather astute inclusion.

The problem comes, however, after reading 400 or so pages of same basic argument with each nuance painfully drawn out until there’s no more juice left to think with. Hofstadter and Sander do a good job of providing examples for each of their arguments and propositions, but they, more often than not, provide way too many examples. You don’t just get one or two—you get a good half-page’s worth. This can get tedious after a while. Now, I enjoyed just how enthusiastic the authors were about philosophy and logic, but I probably won’t pick this up again for a good long while.

332 Financial economics



332.32092: Abrahamson, Eric John. Building Home: Harold F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream. (269 p.; finished 4 Apr 2013)

That’s right, folks: this is a book about the life of an insurance salesman. Year after year, we see Hollywood glamorize the life of the intrepid peddler of policies, each movie more fantastic than the next. How can a dusty book even hope to rise to such an occasion? I jest, of course, but there was a time in America where the savings and loan associations were king, when home-building and suburbia blossomed into the epitome of the America dream. And Harold F. Ahmanson (1906-1968), the son of a Scandinavian businessman from Omaha, was on the people in the center of entire enterprise. Eric John Abrahamson’s Building Home tells his tale.

From somewhat lackluster beginnings in Nebraska, he followed the business life of his father with intense interest. Her started a brokerage account at twelve and soon learned the ins and outs of the stock market, often anticipating movements in the economy. When family health conditions forced him to move out to Los Angeles, he set up a lucrative insurance business, partnering with banks to help them insure foreclosed properties. By having his ear to both the stock and housing markets, he was able to anticipate the Great Depression and come out the other side unscathed. In his later years, he was a heavy influence on the cultural life of Los Angeles, helping to increase its presence in the science research landscape.

It actually amazed me that a book about an insurance salesman would be this interesting. Abrahamson manages to impart the complexity of the insurance market of the mid-20th century with great skill. Following each of Ahmanson’s various ventures is a veritable clinic on how to effective manage a business. From lowly agent to head of several companies and a member of corporate boards, we see the rise of the savvy businessman who understood that hard work and a lot of leg work can ultimately bring about big rewards. A seemingly mundane but engaging book.

155 Differential and developmental psychology



155.413350973: Ogata, Amy F. Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. (193 p.; finished 5 Apr 2013)

Amy Ogata’s Designing the Creative Child is an exceptionally interesting book on the development of both child psychology and playthings in America during the baby boom years following World War II. Her premise is that the massive influx of new children into the American population changed the landscape of both psychology and education. With this increased population of new subjects from which to glean information, child psychologists and developmental theorists were able to further insights into the infant and child psyche. Also, the influx of new children led to an era of vigorous school-building and education reforms, including new and inventive techniques that combined Montessori and classical models of educations. These new techniques combined with expertly designed playthings were all in an effort to cultivate the boomer child’s imagination.

While this may on the surface to be a lofty treatise for the psychology specialist, there is a lot of information here for the casual reader as well. Ogata’s history details the development and introduction of certain toys and products and how their invention complimented the new social and commercial landscape of 1950s America. Readers who were born into the baby boom generation may even remember some of the toys, television shows, and books described here. Ogata’s investigations reveal that toy designers as well as architects and artists were swept up in this era of shepherding creative children to make items that were both visually and intellectually appealing. This era of creativity-bolstering in America is contrasted against the Soviet model which the author contends was built upon the twin tenets of dogma and discipline. All in all, this book was pretty informative. Ogata’s research is clearly evident and I applaud her inclusion of numerous illustrations of toy advertisements, products designs, and school blueprints to show how the task of raising creative children in the 1950s and 1960s saturated many areas of American society. A delightfully educational book.

401 Philosophy and theory



401: Steiner, George. Real Presences. (approx. 240 p.; finished 7 Apr 2013)

George Steiner’s Real Presences is a doozy of a book. It’s short and inviting, but contains some of the most complex ideas about language and art that I have ever read. Steiner’s supposition is that while most art and literary criticism seeks to dismiss the idea of God and spirituality, it is precisely this “presence” which makes all great metaphors great. He rails against vapid academism and deliberate obscurantism. One of the things that humans human, he states, is our both our ability to visualize and enact a future-based thought and to create any and all possible combinations of language and thought. These abilities lead to transcendent thoughts, which brings one into the real presence of divine art and literature. These presences in language form the basis of spiritual thought and works. Be prepared on this one to run to a dictionary as Steiner likes to use complicated words to explicate complicated thoughts. Once you get through it, however, it is very rewarding and thought-provoking.

271 Religious congregations and orders in church history



271.02: Cron, Ian Morgan. Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale. (212 p.; finished 8 Apr 2013)

Chase Falson is a man struggling with his faith. The church he has spent years building in New England is doing well, but he can no longer muster up the same cookie-cutter sermons Sunday after Sunday. And then, when the only daughter of a reformed drug-addict dies in an innocuous bike accident, he loses his cool in front of his followers. He decides to find a new faith, a new way to Jesus and to Christianity. Ian Morgan Cron’s Chasing Francis follows his path.

The first thing you have to know about this is that it is an extended parable. None of the characters are real, but they serve as vehicles for the exploration of the history of the life and church of St. Francis of Assisi. Chase travels to Italy at the request of his Uncle Kenny’s request, a friar with an order of Franciscans near Rome. Once there, he meets the rest of the order and becomes inundated with Franciscan history and tradition. While he is reticent at first, he eventually becomes enamored with the locale and the liturgy.

Cron’s tale is, I think, a very interesting way to teach the life of St. Francis. His brand of religion was truly one of radical Christianity and simple deeds of charity. Falson’s realizations along the way are further highlighted by dips into Italian scenery and church history. Cron does a very good job of keeping the tale balanced but still informative. I would recommend this for anyone looking for a different brand of Christianity or trying to get cursory information on St. Francis himself.

133 Specific topics in parapsychology and occultism



133.430973: Davies, Owen. America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem. (226 p.; finished 9 Apr 2013)

It was a curious episode in American history. Between February 1692 and May 1693, the town of Salem, Massachusetts believed itself to be infiltrated by hordes of witches. The trials of suspected witches left dozens of lives shattered (and one man pressed to death). And then, curiously, people came to their senses. While most people believe that witch-hunting in America ended at Salem, Owen Davies’ America Bewitched follows the history of American witch trials and witchcraft from Salem to the present day.

There haven’t been high-profile witch trials in the US since Salem, but newspaper accounts and civil suits concerning supposed witches can be found all through history. There are a ton of interesting tidbits in this volume, some entrenched in folklore and some random goodies about things associated with witchcraft. Davies looks at the history of “witch-hunting” from both a sociological and a legal perspective. Laws regarding the practicing of magic, the creation of potions and hexes, and the forcible possession of people have at one time or another appeared on American books (my favorite is still the 1604 Act against Witchcraft and Conjuration).

The other interesting perspective is the social one: if, at any given time, there existed a group of “others” who had a non-ordinary gathering, ritual, or oath, then the label of witchcraft was sure to be affixed. Early Pilgrim settlers used it against other settlers, supposed heretics, and Native Americans. Native Americans used it when large swaths of their own people were waylaid by European diseases. Long-time citizens of 19th century America hurled it at immigrants and slaves. If all the parties are to be believed, apparently early America was a Wiccan nation, not a Christian one.

Even though this is an Oxford University Press book, it’s only slightly stuffy and academic. Davies’s approach to historical research is readable, well-researched, and fun to follow. You will get a lot of new American history from this one, especially on just how unnervingly stubborn a group of accusers could be. Some of the accounts of witch trials are comical, while others are just sad. Davies’s history, though, winds down with the introduction of Wicca and witches in American pop culture to end it on a lighter note. A jam-packed and enlightening book.

304 Factors affecting social behavior

304.8: Collier, Paul. Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World. (212 p.; finished 10 Apr 2013)

Paul Collier says right off the bat that he is the descendant of immigrants. In fact, a large percentage of us are. I myself am the culmination of two sets of immigrants: my father’s ancestors immigrated from France and Denmark; my mother’s from Mexico. At any given time, there is always some group of people moving from one region to another. Collier’s book Exodus investigates the phenomenon of immigration from a global sociological perspective to help get to the core of some of the issues at hand so that we can stop viewing immigration in an emotional context and place it in more of an economic one.

The issue of migration incorporates feelings of nationalism, classism, and racism. There is an unhealthy correlation between migration and the twin ideas of contamination and assimilation. Collier’s attempt at demystification leads to some interesting findings on the subject. He contends that migration is a natural byproduct of the world’s bimodal wealth distribution (a lot of rich people, a lot of poor people, not a lot of middle-income folks). Waves of global migration lead to some of the following outcomes: economic and social destabilization, multiculturalism, workforce revitalization, governmental policy change, or nationalistic uprising. This is definitely not a comprehensive list; migration could cause combinations of these or even new reactions, but Collier tries to encapsulate the world of migration is this sort of model.

This is not necessarily a “fun” book to read, but there are lot of really well-thought out ideas. When Collier decouples the idea of migration from emotion, he makes us better able to talk about it. He also understands that talking openly about the rhetoric surrounding migration carries the risk of being ostracized, but much like him, I believe that these ideas can be discussed without things getting too heated. He does not hasten to label migration as either good or bad, but rather lays out a theory for how the causes and effects of migration work on a global scale. Collier’s prose is a bit dusty, I suppose, but sociological and economic treatises tend to be that way. If you’re looking for a new perspective on a historical issue, then pick this one up.

555 Earth sciences of Asia



555.496: Searle, Mike. Colliding Continents: A Geological Exploration of the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibet. (365 p.; finished 11 Apr 2013)

120 million years ago, the Indian tectonic plate broke off from the main continental masses and began a northward trek that lasted 70 million years. Even though it was only moving 5 to 6 centimeters a year, the landmass moved into the Eurasian Plate with such force that it raised massive geologic structures. As the two plates joined and buckled, the Himalayan and Karakoram mountains were formed, the highest and most daunting peaks on the Earth. Mike Searle, 2008 winner of the Geological Society of London’s Murchison Medal, is our guide in Colliding Continents, a combination travelogue, adventure guide, and a geology textbook (though, to be fair, it’s much more the latter).

Searle walks the reader through the development and geology of the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges in technical but not overly-wrought language. The goal here is impart both a knowledge of geology and a healthy respect for the forces and science involved. The illustrations included are plentiful, wondrous, and extraordinarily educational. While nothing can take the place of actually being there, the pictures do give a sense of the grandeur of the mountains. The book is written from a first-person perspective, which is a little weird for a textbook, but it works well if you want novice learners to feel engaged with the science. There is a ton of geological knowledge here and at times I was a little lost, but I did a general feel for the field and how massive mountains ranges are formed. A dense but rewarding book.

793 Indoor games and amusements



793.93: Ewalt, David M. Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It. (253 p.; finished 12 Apr 2013)

In 1974, there was no other game on the planet like Dungeons & Dragons. Conceived as an imaginative role-playing game by Tactical Studies Rules, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s D&D was rooted not in historical fact, but in the world of fantasy, the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jack Vance, and Michael Moorcock. There was no board, just a character sheet and a lot of dice. Players were free to explore the world of the game with gentle guidance from the Dungeon Master, facing adventures, monsters, and their own imagination. David M. Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men tells of tale of TSR’s creation and how it changed both the world of gaming and the lives of those who played it.

Ewalt’s book ties together the parallel stories of the author’s adventures in gaming and the history of Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. He traces the origin of turn-based tactical games back to chess and the German game Kriegsspiel. As gamers got hungrier for a game that was markedly different from the traditional war stories, Dungeons & Dragons opened up a new world. Through each of its new editions, gamers have come and gone, but the game has essentially remained the same. Those who played in the early days never really lost their connection, and each year, new players are welcomed to go on new adventures.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Even though I’ve never played D&D, I could instantly connect with the joy that games can bring to their players. Ewalt is a self-confessed avid D&D player, having played since he was 10 years old. His enthusiasm for the game is both unbridled and infectious. He does a very good job of explaining the mechanics, lingo, and rules of the game. He takes the readers through the main campaign he’s on as well as a few side games he joins in his travels. He even joins a live-action weekend to help the reader get past the stigma associated with LARPing (he names his character Dewey, so his adventure gets a big thumbs-up from me!). All in all, this book was a lot of fun and may even convert a few holdouts to the game.

818 American miscellaneous writings in English



818.602: Roach, Mary. My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places. (160 p.; finished 13 Apr 2013)

Mary Roach is one of the most quirky, witty, and amazing writers I have ever read. For me, she ranks up there with John Hodgman, Dave Barry, and Simon Winchester. She’s so much fun, in fact, that I have for books by her planned for this quest. Her latest book, My Planet, is a collection of 62 of her columns previously written for Reader’s Digest. They explore her world—everything from dishwashers to paint chips to RV vacations to makeup and beyond.

Roach’s slant way of looking at life yields a ton more pleasure most people’s. After buying a Touchless Trashcan and finding that it open at random intervals when she passes, she theorizes that it simply wants a conversation or a hug. She wonders aloud why certain cold medicines contains both an expectorant and a cough suppressant, leaving her trapped phlegm is an endless, internal loop of despair. While at a new container store, she muses on the possibility of our civilization reaching a point where we’ll need containers for our containers. And so on.

This is a good, slim volume of funny asides. It can easily serve as a bathroom reader or a nightstand book, around when you need a few pages to divert your attention. Although, you can just as easily (much like me) devour the whole thing in 3 hours, giddily laughing along while your wife thinks you’re slowly going insane. An absolutely fun book.

> 271

What a fascinating book! I am currently taking a course on the life of St. Francis now. Of all the saints he inspired perhaps the most hagiographies in the middle ages. The vast quantities of books being written about him even now shows that his life still inspires - even some of the more unusual stuff like preaching to the birds.

Of Dice and Men! that is the best title!

Hope you caught Mary Roach on The Daily Show. Probably available at comedycentral.com or on youtube. Very fun.

I actually did -- one of the columns is on finding herself a proper web domain. She found one and posted her Daily Show "Packing For Mars" interview: http://maryroach.net/videos.html

Well I checked out the website. Thanks for posting it. Um....I got a little distracted by one of the other videos.

So many great reviews...I'm going to have to come back to finish reading them. We could probably use your thread instead of the suggestions wiki!

Thanks! You say that now, but wait until I hit the photographic metallic salt processes section. I don't think there's anything worth reading there... :)

945 History of Italy, Italian Peninsula, and adjacent islands



945.060922: Meyer, G.J. The Borgias: The Hidden History. (432 p.; finished 14 Apr 2013)

There are only a handful of family names that were pivotal in Italian Renaissance history. The Medici, the Sforzas, and maybe even the Malatestas can claim a place in this group. But one family existed alongside all of them, one family on which centuries of history has been heaped: the Borgias. Originally from Spain, the Borja family rose to prominence in the 15th century and were crucial in the election of several popes. G.J. Meyer’s new history of the family—simply titled The Borgias—is a deep and magnificent retelling of this tumultuous age.

The book covers three major figures in the Borgia family:
• Alfons de Borja (1378-1458), later elected as pontiff as Pope Callixtus III,
• Rodrigo Borgia (1431-1503), Callixtus’s nephew, appointed as a cardinal and then as Pope Alexander VI, and
• Cesare Borgia (1475-1507), son of Rodrigo and the first person to ever resign a cardinalcy

The lives of these three are a gateway into the Byzantine politics, economics, and social fabric of Renaissance Italy. And while much of the backroom machinations would seem both tragic and horrifying to anyone today, none of the corruption, bribery, and murder plots were out of place then.

One of the many commendable aspects of this book is that Meyer seeks to set the record straight about a lot of the outlandish claims made by earlier historians. His reassertion of contemporary accounts and primary sources allows for a more level-headed picture of the time. Previous writers, he claims, were more apt to emphasize the more salacious rumors and pamphlets that circulated in order paint a lurid tableau. Meyer’s history, on the other hand, while more plodding and methodical, is a rich and interesting book nonetheless. Also included are nice background chapters on related matters: a history of Milan, Florence, cardinal appointment and the Sacred College, etc. Meyer finds a useful way in integrating a lot of information without unduly interrupting the main history. No doubt ardent readers of Italian history already have this in one their library, but for those who don’t, I highly recommend it.

334 Cooperatives (economics)



334.6816640973: Knupfer, Anne Meis. Food Co-Ops in America: Communities, Consumption, and Economic Democracy. (217 p.; finished 15 Apr 2013)

A food co-operative is a grocery store that is owned collectively by its members. They pool together their resources in an attempt to ensure that their food can be bought and sold for a reasonable price to the public at large while at the same time securing profits for its owners. Even though it seems like food co-ops are a relatively new phenomenon, they have been around in American culture for quite a long time. Anne Meis Knupfer, in Food Co-ops in America, traces the American food co-operative association from its roots in the 1830s to the present day.

This book is organized rather self-evidently. There is a quick history of the early years of American co-operatives. Early co-operatives began as loose associations of local workers pooling together their resources in order to help each member out. These co-operatives tended to be established along ethnic lines or professions. It is interesting to note that before communism became so negatively defined during the McCarthy years, cooperatives gained widespread support among the public in the early 1900s. They were even using food labels years before the FDA stepped in.

Knupfer then focuses attention on individual co-operatives or areas of co-operatives to show how they shaped the political, social, and nutritional landscape of their cities. Because co-operatives were inherently a forum where each member was entitled to their own voice and vote, members of co-operatives were naturally more inclined to involve themselves in local and national politics.

While food co-ops are markedly different from CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) groups, they fall under the same general principle. Grouped resources help to decrease the burden faced by any one member of the group (this principle also works for insurance companies, but no matter). Knupfer’s discussion of American food co-operatives is by no means lively but is still interesting nonetheless. Her history provides insight into their past organization and how the both the politics of the past and the food culture of the present will shape our food-buying structures of the future.

294 Religions of Indic origin



Gyumed Khensur Lobsang Jampa. The Easy Path: Illuminating the First Panchen Lama’s Secret Instructions. (264 p.; finished 16 Apr 2013)

This is one those rare books where I had to get a lot of background information before proceeding too far. While many people at least recognize the title of Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama is a bit more obscure. It turns out that the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama function as sort of the Vice President and President of Tibetian Buddhism. Since each is the current reincarnation of the two original Lamas, each serves as the witness for the next incarnation of the other. If the current Panchen Lama dies, it is the duty of the current Dalai Lama to recognize the next one, and vice versa. (Side note: the sitting Panchen Lama has not been seen in public since 1995 as he is currently a Chinese political prisoner).

All that out of the way, this book is a detailed explanation of the teachings of the 1st Panchen Lama Khedrup Gelek Pelzang (better known as Khedrup Je) who lived from 1385 to 1438 CE. His treatise entitled The Easy Path was meant as a guide on how to attain spiritual enlightenment. This wasn’t meant as a quick route to nirvana, but a way to decrease the time from several lifetimes to a single one. When considered this way, it truly was the easy path. This rather dense guidebook teaches the Buddhist devotee how to frame and focus their meditations about the universe, death, freedom, knowledge, and even themselves.

This is definitely not the first book for anyone looking to learn about Tibetan Buddhism. Once you’ve gotten through the basic history and the original texts, then these commentaries will probably have more relevance. On the other hand, you will be completely immersed in Tibetan theology here. One of the more interesting aspects of this book is its references to all the different categorizations involved in meditation. There are the five different timelines to buddhahood, the five Mahayana paths, the ten boddhisattva grounds, the three scopes which cover the eight contemplations, the six perfections, the six faults, and so on and so forth. All this is a lot to take in, but makes for a very organized (and hyper-compartmentalized) way of looking at the universe. A tough but educational book.

and those lists? That's why i couldn't resist buying The Complete Book of Buddha's Lists by David Snyder. It simply made me giggle.

Well, I guess if you're going to contemplate the universe, then it helps to have some good checklists to ensure you got everything. :)

Yes altho we both know the greatest checklist of all is the Dewey!

557 Earth sciences of North America



557.59: Hine, Albert C. Geologic History of Florida: Major Events that Formed the Sunshine State. (217 p.; finished 17 April 2013)

Geology is fast becoming one of my favorite sciences to read about. The explosive processes, coupled with the sheer massiveness of the timescales and the delicateness of the measurements involved, makes this field ripe for storytelling. Continents bond together and then tear apart, forming new ones so that the process can repeat. Even now, Earth’s continental plates are moving toward one another and will form a new landmass over the next ten million or so years. Albert C. Hine’s Geologic History of Florida takes the reader on a tour of the entire global history of how the tiny state of Florida came to be formed and how that reshapes our understanding of this seemingly quiet landscape.

This book is set up so that each chapter details a major event or process in the formation of Florida. From its genesis as its own plate to its bonding with the North American landmass and then its subsequent formation of sinkholes, swamps, and beaches, the history of the Floridian landmass is riddled with interesting tidbits. One of them is that most people think of Florida as what is shown on a map: a grip-shaped peninsula with a thin panhandle connecting it to the mainland. But that’s only what you see above the surface. Most of the real landmass of Florida is under the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico existing as what is known as the Florida Platform. Also, the southern part of Florida once existed separately as part of the Florida-Bahama Block before settling into its current position.

Hines says that this book is meant not as a textbook, but for those who wish to teach it in a more informal setting. For the most part, he accomplishes his goal. The language isn’t terribly technical, but when it is, he provides very helpful glossaries at the end of each chapter to help us out. There are also plenty of illustrations and citations for further reading (if you are so inclined). All in all, this is a very intriguing and readable book with plenty for both the expert and the amateur alike.

582 Plants noted for specific vegetative characteristics and flowers



582.1309759: Taylor, Walter Kinglsey. Florida Wildflowers: A Comprehensive Guide. (576 p.; finished 18 Apr 2013)

This is a simple book with a lot of information. For the first time in more than a decade, a single botanist has gathered photographs and detailed all the different species of wildflowers in the state of Florida. University of Central Florida biology professor Walter Kingsley Taylor offers, in his Florida Wildflowers, a useful guide to the Sunshine State’s flowering, native beauty.

The first 75 pages of this book are devoted to detailing what kind of environments are contained in Florida. He explains the differences between the many types of forests as well as a discussion on the different kinds of swamps and marshes. This is important because certain wildflowers are only found in certain domains. The rest of book then comprises plate after plate of plant images, showing each specimen in its natural environment. The reader should easily be able to tell their partridgeberry from their palafoxes, their lopseed from their laurelcherry, and their sandweed from their snoutbeans (as a side note, the names of these plants are just as fascinating as the images).

Professor Taylor’s book is as concise as one can be when describing the myriad plant species native to a state. It is organized a pretty helpful way: plants are grouped in the area on might find them in the state, so that the casual enthusiast might not only be able to identify what’s in front of them but also easily note all the other plants in the area as well. This makes the book useful for both the amateur as well as the professional (although one might gather that the professional wouldn’t need a book at all). I can’t say that this book is entertaining or linguistically inventive, but it gets the job done. A colorful and educational book.

242 Devotional literature



242: Pura, Murray. Majestic and Wild: True Stories of Faith and Adventure in the Great Outdoors. (235 p.; finished 19 Apr 2013)

Murray Pura’s Majestic and Wild is quite possibly the most peaceful book I’ve read in a long while. This collection of religious nature essays details the daily work and spiritual life for him and his family while living in Canada over the last three decades. While originally an author of religious paperback novels, his affinity for the natural world could perhaps be his second calling. Each essay is centered around a Bible verse that helps him better understand an experience he has while out in nature. To Pura, the grandeur of the natural world is the closest way to approach the grandeur of God. Each vignette, whether it be a close encounter with an enraged bear or moose or a simple jaunt into the countryside with his dogs, offers the ability for reflection not only on the wonder of the wild but also the awesomeness of the Creator. While I may not readily agree with his theology, there is no escaping the sense of how genuinely calming and calamitous nature can be. Like a few books I’ve read before, this one is written simply and reads quick but, like many other things, resists simplicity. A quiet and pleasant book.

328 The legislative process



328.73071: MacNeil, Neil and Richard A. Baker. The American Senate: An Insider’s History. (318 p.; finished 20 Apr 2013)

Neil MacNeil and Richard Baker’s storied history of the Unites States Senate is thoroughly rich and interesting. From its inception upon the ratification of the Constitution to its current makeup, the Senate has been at the center of every major American political development. The authors detail the initial history of the legislative body, its complex interactions with both the House of Representatives and the office of the President, its investigative hearings, and how it serves as both a model of high legislative achievement and a bastion of corruption, collusion, and callousness. It does get a bit bogged down when recounting the recent history, but overall, this book contains a wealth of information. We get tidbits on Senate orientation, seniority assignments, and some of the lengths senators will go to get both votes from their constituents and their fellow legislators. A dense but informative book.

801 Philosophy and theory (literature)



801: Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. (210 p.; finished 21 Apr 2013)

John Gardner has opinions and he isn’t afraid to use them. In On Moral Fiction, he launches an invective against mediocrity and immorality in literature. Unfortunately, one almost immediately faces opposition when you throw around the term morality with respects to the arts. Gardner contends that literature, and art in general, must have both substance and a moral grounding. Without these two pieces, then the creation of the artist is nothing but vapid superficiality.

Gardner goes so far as to actually call specific authors out on their shortcomings. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Joseph Heller, and Normal Mailer should have apparently enrolled in Mr. Gardner’s seminar on remedial writing. In these authors’ works, he finds that the author in question seems to start with a moral statement and forms the story around it rather than allow the story to come a moral epiphany. Gardner believes that writing with such a design (moral first, story later) will almost certainly lead to uninteresting and didactic writing.

But Gardner’s ire is not simply reserved for authors alone; he indicts fellow critics as well. He explains that the critic has three simple tasks: to determine whether the art is moral, to explain its shortcomings, and to extol its virtues. When critics review a piece with obvious moral flaws and fail to point them out, then they have done a disservice to both their field and the public; when morality is properly upheld and they fail to ensure that everyone sees it, then they do a disservice to the artist who has worked so hard to perfect his craft.

This book was a very interesting one. It will get you thinking more about your reading. While I’m not entirely on board with the “art has to be moral” message, it did help me to maybe get a handle on why certain literature appeals to me while other writing does not. Perhaps we subconsciously register whether a work has met our moral standards or not. Or perhaps the writing is just bad. All in all, Gardner’s message is pithy and vigorous, and if you’re a writer, you should give this book a once over if only to see just where you stand. A short but demanding book.

Re: Geologic History of Florida: I am definitely going to look for this one--I also enjoy reading about geology. I just finished The Mountains of Saint Francis, about the geology of Italy, and the author mentions that, millions of years ago, Italy resembled (geologically) Florida/the Bahamas in modern times because both were areas with relatively shallow seas where limestones were being deposited in a certain way without the addition of silt and other river sediments.

Oooo...it's a shame I already have a 551 under my belt -- that one looks pretty interesting!

152 Perception, movement, emotions, and physiological drives (Psychology)



152.4: Smith, Richard H. The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature. (187 p.; finished 22 Apr 2013)

There is a feeling for which no word exists in English. Imagine you are watching your favorite football team on television and the opposing team is threatening to drive the ball down the field in order to make a winning score. Play after play, they grind it out for more yardage. On one play, the quarterback falls back in the pocket and is immediately creamed by the defensive linebacker. He whoops and hollers and congratulates himself on a great play, but then everybody notices that the quarterback still hasn’t gotten up. He’s injured and while the folks on the field all want to make sure he’s OK, you cheer in your living room. Your team will win. And it’s all because someone was hurt. You feel joy in another’s misery. This is called schadenfreude (leave it to the Germans to have a wonderful word for this) and Richard Smith’s The Joy of Pain helps us look into the psychological motivation behind this feeling.

Smith’s premise is that schadenfreude involves many different emotional and social contexts. At its root is an inequality that is established between two or more people or entities. One side is better than the other and so the worse person can either look elsewhere for a self-esteem boost or be delighted when the higher person is brought low by a painful or embarrassing experience. Smith also integrates the concepts of deserved misfortune, justice, and envy into the schadenfreude model. Because we live in a highly socialized environment, we constantly make comparisons between ourselves and the selves of others. It’s these relationships that set up the initial inklings of downward social comparison, revenge fantasies, and the current TV genre of humilitainment.

This book is meant for the popular psychology audience and for that I was grateful. There are no intricate meta-analyses of psychological studies, but Smith does offer details from many of them to highlight his theories. The author also uses a fair amount of popular culture references to frame his arguments. There’s the Tiger Woods scandal, interesting analogies using To Catch a Predator, the famous Millgram experiments, a lot of references to Homer Simpson’s and Ned Flanders’s relationship, as well as mentions of Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff. The book does not try to preach ways to mitigate this feeling, but rather seeks to explain its mechanisms, and that’s what I liked. It’s just a simple book trying to peel back the layers of a complicated feeling.

> 276

So good literature should not be didactic, but lead to a kind of moral epiphany or insight - perhaps a contradiction between ethical directives or am ambiguity in how we should behave? What about fiction that is amoral? Also, does he mention anything about the Bible?

When Gardner speaks of didacticism, he means more along the lines of being preachy or works overly laden with lectures. He believes that the morality of a given work of literature (if there is any to begin with) should flow naturally and effortlessly from the story itself and not be heavy-handed. Amoral fiction, or fiction that did not affirm righteous truths, is seen as unnecessary and mediocre.

As for the Bible, most of his polemic has its sights set on writers of the mid-20th century. He rarely references classic or ancient works. Plus, he's already set out to anger a bunch of modern authors; any reference to the quality of the Bible would send a whole new pack of critics his way.

613 Personal health and safety



Bourbeau, Andre-Francois. Wilderness Secrets Revealed: Adventures of a Survivor. (260 p.; finished 23 Apr 2013)

Andre-Francois Bourbeau is a survivor. He survived being airdropped into a Canadian forest for a month with nothing but what a random tourist was carrying around. He survived lighting his mother’s carpet after making his first friction fire (indoors). He survived leading sixteen kids on a camping trip and “accidentally” forgetting the eating utensils and flashlights. He survived being left alone in the woods with absolutely nothing but a bathing suit. In Wilderness Secrets Revealed, Bourbeau lets us in some of the survival tips and tricks he has discovered while out in nature.

Bourbeau is the first person I have ever heard of to have earned an actual Ph.D. in wilderness survival education. His main method of gathering survival skills is to remove one item of gear from his pack each time he goes out. In time, and after a lot of trial and error, you can learn to survive off what you can find in the wilderness. This proves very useful when he legitimately forgets a piece of gear on expeditions. Apparently, you can make almost anything out of birch bark (shoes, umbrellas, cooking vessels, etc.). It’s no wonder he currently holds the Guinness world record for longest voluntary survival expedition (31 days). Best survival tool in the book: He once fashioned a tiny survival knife by flattening and sharpening his jeans zipper tab.

While the stories do get a little repetitive, this book was a lot of fun and reads very quickly. You get to survive vicariously through Bourbeau’s experiences and live to tell the tale. He is clearly very excited by what he does for a living and that excitement seeps infectiously through the pages. His forays into re-enacting historical survival episodes, however, made me quite grateful for modern amenities. His survival tips give way later in the book to his philosophy both on ecology and life. Anyone with a penchant for the Great Outdoors or who watches Bear Grylls will get a kick out of this one.

That does sound like fun reading!

782 Vocal music



782.421599: Kaskowitz, Sheryl. God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song. (154 p.; finished 24 Apr 2013)

In 1917 or 1918 (nobody really knows when), a man wrote a simple song. He was an immigrant from modern Belarus. He was drafted into the US army at the age of 29 to help fight World War I. But first he was asked to boost morale by composing an all-soldier revue of song, dance, and revelry. He had already had a bit of success as a Tin Pan Alley writer and Broadway composer, so the army decided to put his talents to good use. The revue, entitled Yip Yip Yaphank, did very well and everyone enjoyed themselves, but the composer didn’t use all the songs he had written. He tucked the rest away for later.

Then, twenty years later, the song found daylight when national radio icon Kate Smith asked for a patriotic ditty to sing on the 20th anniversary of Armistice Day. The man dusted off the old composition, fiddled with it for a bit, and it soon took off. The man, as you may have already guessed by know, was Irving Berlin and the song was “God Bless America.” Sheryl Kaskowitz’s God Bless America is an in-depth look into the early history and national meaning of this iconic song and how it shaped and still shapes the American patriotic landscape.

Kaskowitz tracks the song through history, from its first appearance in the soldier revue through to Smith’s debut and its reception with the American public through its current manifestation as a throwback to simple national unity. The song, she argues, occupies a central place in our national memory and becomes prevalent in times when the nation needs to bolster its identity. In times of war and terrorism, the song frequently reconnects its singers to their national roots. The posits that this song, rather than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” more readily connects current Americans to their citizenship because it is written on more modern vernacular (apparently, the actual national anthem is too stuffy and too technical a piece to sing when you really need to sing something patriotic).

This book is interesting as well as informative. It frames an interesting debate on what exactly defines a national identity and how the use of certain song can affect that identity. Does its use in sporting venues, classrooms, and civil gatherings mean that those events are inherently nationalistic? And conversely, what does the penchant for not singing the song do for the national identity? Kaskowitz, along with delving into the history of the song, also looks into studies done about the song to understand what it means to certain people. These two parallel theses made for a very intriguing read. If you’re into music history, pick this one up.

153 Conscious mental processes and intelligence



153: Graziano, Michael S.A. Consciousness and the Social Brain. (227 p.; finished 25 Apr 2013)

How do we become aware of things? How do we become aware that we are aware? How does this awareness shape the way we think about ourselves and others? And how does this awareness become what we call “consciousness”? These are very complicated and heady questions. Psychology and neuroscience have grappled with them for years (and will continue to do so well into the future). But Michael Graziano, in Consciousness and the Social Brain, tries to parse through all the ideas and data surrounding awareness in order to come up with a viable theory that explains this basic human process.

This is not a easy book to read. You have to muscle through both the technical neuroscience bits and the linguistic gymnastics that tie together the concepts of attention, awareness, and consciousness. But once you make it through all that, though, there are a lot interesting theories concerning how the human brain actually may become aware of things and itself. One of the recurring motifs in Graziano’s theory is the idea of the “strange loop.” Imagine two mirror facing each other. They both reinforce and reflect each other, but any action made to one causes a reaction in the other. Position them better and you get a better reflection. Break one and the infinite reflection goes away. Awareness and consciousness work in much the same way. Each requires the other and therefore reinforces the other. But damage one of the areas in the brain that controls these and the other suffers.

Graziano’s inquiries and studies into awareness seem to place the mechanism responsible in both the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction. These areas contain sub-units of brain matter that interact with each other and the rest of the brain as a whole. He also integrates the processes by which a person stores information about an object or fact and how that information is then access and thought about. Combine this with the twin ideas of phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness and you begin to see just how intricate the theory can get just for a single person. This whole schema is then ramped up a level when you talk about social attention models and how we monitor the attentions and awareness of other people. All in all, Graziano does a decent job at trying to make his ideas accessible for the layman reader. While I’m not clamoring for more, this book will at least broaden your psychological horizons. Or give you a headache. Either way, it’s worth it.

I hate that I'm so afraid of missing one of your interesting reads that I to compulsively check both of your lists. but they,re so interesting!

I appreciate it (I really do), but the book for both my Club Read and my Dewey threads will be the same until I finish this challenge. I'm glad you're liking the picks, though. Cheers!

299 Other religions



299.7131: Hall, Adam C. The EarthKeeper - Undeveloping the Future: The Extraordinary Story of an Earth Conqueror Turned Preservationist Who Uncovers Our True Nature and Reveals the Creative Power of the Universe. (288 p.; finished 26 Apr 2013)

Adam C. Hall was a broken man. He angrily muscled his way through life. His temper was legendary with his business associates. His home life wasn’t much better either. His marriage to his wife Gigi was deteriorating and his three daughters sometimes ended up the targets of his erratic behavior. He thought he could find solace in drinking with buddies or rounds of golf, but he still felt empty inside. It took a long time and lot of spiritual searching, but in The EarthKeeper, he details how he was able to find peace even when he lost everything.

This book is a tale of spiritual angst and eventual salvation through the use of Native American shaman theology. While the threads of his life—his marriage, his job, his health—are all unraveling, he finds that coincidental encounters with shamanistic information help him to find peace. The first is a sketchy palm reader invited to a friend’s party. After that, he chances upon a few books to read, including The Sacred Path and A Course in Miracles, and finds that practicing yoga helps him find a center in his life. Looking to explore further, he goes on extended Vision Quests to truly get in touch with his life. Even though his marriage completely falls apart and his family moves away, he finds the motivation to continue his quest for fulfillment. Eventually, he determines that he needs to give back to the Earth by “undeveloping” areas and returning them to a more natural state.

One needs to have a very open mind before approaching this book, otherwise it will sound like a bunch of hooey and hokum. Hall goes through a tremendous amount of bad times before he learns how channel his energies into better activities. All we can hope for our fellow humans is that they find peace. Many roads lead there and each person has to travel their own path. Hall finds peace through the combination of Native American shaman ritual, yoga meditation, and a lot of self-reflection. In the end, he found what he was looking for (or rather, it found him). The more antagonistic or narrow-minded reader may find this to be a bunch of baloney, but I didn’t. I kept thinking I didn’t want to like, but instead I found myself drawn into Hall’s self-discovery. His tale reads quick and forces one to examine at least a little bit of their own life. Are you living with purpose? Are you happy? These are pretty universal questions, and I for one was glad to go along for the ride.

820 English and Old English literatures



820.9: Kaplan, Fred. Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature. (approx. 170 p.; finished 27 Apr 2013)

Anyone who has read any Victorian literature know that there is no shortage of emotion. Women faint, men become apoplectic, and everybody’s feelings are visible on their sleeves. While discussing each other’s works, authors in 19th century England began to put a name to this element—sentiment. There is no single way to define it. Fred Kaplan’s Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature does, however, try to synthesize all the various arguments surrounding this feature to give us a window into both the literature and the lives of the time.

Kaplan finally settles on a vague-ish definition of sentimentality. It is the “disposition to attribute to emotion undue importance, to be governed by emotion rather than reason, or the tendency to excessive indulgence in or an insincere display of emotion.” Sentimentality gives regular emotional display its viscerality. The truly sentimental will be irrational but still be governed by certain truths. Kaplan examines the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Fielding, and Thomas Carlyle to show how this sentimentality shows the essential goodness of humanity.

Scientific and technological development in the 1800s led to the feeling that the relative importance of humanity was shrinking in the face of the grand rule-set of the universe. Artistic sentimentality, especially that where the sentimental was also equated with the moral and the good, helped to prove that no amount of gears or microscopes could lessen our nature. The sacred tears of the title references those tears that are genuine, those that flow to show the inner feelings of those that shed them.

While it’s been a decade since I earned my degree in English, this brought back the good old days. Kaplan dives into the characters, plots, and nuances of Victorian literature to illuminate a small piece for us. He argues that the sentiment established in the writing of the day was ultimately meant to put forward the better parts of our nature, regardless of the misdeeds and mangled lives of some of the characters. Kaplan does a decent job of writing for the literary enthusiast and not just the academic. One does, however, have to be a little familiar with the works discussed for it to have full effect. A short but decent book.

791 Public performances



791.43028092: Steinem, Gloria. Marilyn: Norma Jeane. (180 p.; finished 28 Apr 2013)

Unless you live under a rock, you know who Marilyn Monroe is. She was “discovered” as a photogenic face during a media session at her job at an airplane part manufacturer in 1945. At that point, she was just Norma Jeane Dougherty. For the next seventeen years, though, she would become a symbol of American sexual appeal with the name Marilyn Monroe. She had a part in 33 movies, for which she won three different Golden Globes. But not many people know her full story. Gloria Steinem, in Marilyn, tries not only to give us a full telling of her life but also sheds some light on the enduring character traits of this iconic blonde bombshell.

To start, she was born after her father divorced her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker. Unfortunately, Gladys was mentally ill and young Norma was placed with foster parents, but after a few run-ins with her birth mother, she was made a formal ward of the state. From there, she bounced between family friends, foster homes, and other relatives until she married family friend James Dougherty. Everyone knows the story after this. She became a Hollywood model and starlet, married and divorced Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and was connected romantically with Frank Sinatra and the brothers Kennedy.

During all this, she dealt with numerous physical and psychological ailments. She tried many, many times to get pregnant during her marriages, but they all ended badly. When she did get pregnant, it was unintentional and out of wedlock and so had to get illegal abortions. She tried desperately to build the family she never had. Her social anxiety and continually bifurcated existence (between Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe) left her addled and unable to sleep properly. Her medicine cabinet was a testament to just how damaged she became over time.

Steinem’s narrative is both sad and illuminating. I had never really given Monroe any respectful thought, but its looks neither did anyone else. Actors, writers, and reporters dismissed her as the stereotypical “dumb blonde” when all she wanted to be was a decent actress. She tried to read heady novels to improve herself only to be met with derision and scorn. Even though this text was originally written 26 years ago, it reminds one of many current starlets, each trying to simultaneously appeal to the audience with their physicality and hoping they don’t get too close. It seems that the more things changes, the more they stay the same. This was indeed an eye-opening book.