Michael Downing (1958–2021)

This is a history of Daylight Saving Time -- technically it's not called Daylight Savings time -- throughout the world and most particularly in the United States. And ye gods, what a complicated history it is. I always thought the whole thing was a bit of a mess, but apparently I didn't know the half of it. Downing, however, does, and he carefully catalogs all the debates and the controversies, all the laws and the lawbreaking, all the various clock-altering measures and half-measures and show more sheer temporal chaos that people have come up with in the name of "saving" something that you can't actually change the amount of, anyway. To be honest, there were places where I found it all a little confusing, which is probably part of the point, and perhaps a little tedious, which probably wasn't. But it's not badly written, and it is extremely informative, especially in the way it clears up a few popular misconceptions about Daylight Saving Time. For one thing, it's not fair to blame the farmers. In fact, farmers were dead set against the idea from the beginning, and actually succeeded in getting the law repealed in the US for a while, sort of. It seems that cows don't pay attention to clocks, and you can't harvest your crops until the dew has dried off them, no matter what time you're pretending it is. Oh, and the idea that "saving" daylight saves energy? It may or may not actually be true. Nobody really knows, including lots of people who are positive they do, but the available data doesn't look good.

I will say that although I've never been happy with this arbitrary messing about with clocks -- to put it very mildly -- I've come out of this book actually feeling a bit better about it. Not because anything in the book made it seem like a good idea to me, but just because I now realize that it could be so very, very much worse. show less

A review of the chaos of time, and the struggle over daylight time vs sun time. The author does a good job creating a sense of havoc and chaos, and brings wit to bear to the various arguments and counterarguments in the topic of Daylight Saving Time (DST). He details some of the characters on both sides of the DST argument, and the funny, outrageous arguments being made for or against changing the clocks. He details the chaos that was time in general prior to the railroad insisting on show more standardized time, and how hard it has been to get a standard time for the country, let alone for the world. I had no idea this battle was brewing so heavily in my lifetime. The author also gets tantalizingly close to one fact that is ignored, or not believed, by nearly everyone: the concept of time, divided into hours, with noon being the moment the sun is highest in the sky, is not based in any empirical reality, but simply human convenience. Time as we battle over it doesn't actually exist outside of human minds, and it doesn't really matter what we call any given time. He also touches on, but not quite explores, the idea that there is a certain arbitrary nature to assuming you need to go to work at 9 in the morning and get off at 5, or any other human-derived schedule. Time, in short, is merely a habit. The need to agree on time is accepted in many areas, especially in our global society, and he details some of the mayhem that has ensued from the chaos of time calculations in various corners of the globe, and the struggle to get everyone to agree on what time it is. A fine book, written with humor and style, though one or two places where I noticed him mistaking whether the time was ahead or behind in a given situation. It simply confirms how difficult it can be to keep up. Highly recommended. show less

The Chapel is three stories, really: the marriage of Elizabeth and Mitchell, recently ended by Mitchell's death; Elizabeth's trip to Padua, taken as part of her mourning; and -- chiefly -- the story of Giotto's cycle of frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The genie overseeing it all is Umberto Eco, whose The Name of the Rose sits unopened on Elizabeth's bedside table.

There's a lot going on here, many balls to be kept in the air, a challenge that Downing manages, although not always show more gracefully. The principal attraction of the book was learning about the art and the history; the present-day story was not particularly engaging. show less

A very zen book about the San Francisco Zen Center. Centering around the experiences of its practitioners during the crisis in 1983, when the Abbot was discovered having an affair with one of his students, the book circles around the foundations of the Center and where people who practiced there are today. Mostly the author lets his interview subjects talk for themselves, even when they contradict each other and it's hard to make sense of what's being said. But then the author will interrupt show more with a penetrating question that gets you to focus on how far from normal life and normal expectations of the Buddhist middle way one can wander in search of enlightenment. I've long been skeptical about the usefulness of zen meditation, and nothing here made me change my mind. But I also saw why some people are genuinely attached to the practice.

You should approach this book with a blank piece of paper and a pen. A large number of important characters keep cycling through the book, which has no index. It's very difficult to keep track of who is who without taking notes. show less