Ella_Jill's DD challenge

Hello!

I'd like to join this challenge! I generally find a lot more interesting non-fiction than fiction books to read, and I also hope that this challenge will allow me to fill in the blanc spots in my education - eventually :). I don't expect to find books (let alone interesting for me books) for every DD number; so I'll set a goal for myself to read books from 90 divisions out of 99 and 750 sections out of 903. I also intend to list only the books which I have found really interesting and/or useful, except for bibliographies where it may take awhile to determine the book's overall usefulness.

Ella_Jill

000 – Computer science, information & general works

• 000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
001 Knowledge
002 The book

002.075 Outwitting history: the amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books by Aaron Lansky
Interested in pre-war Jewish culture and unable to find any Yiddish books in the 1970s America, the author began collecting them from heirs who couldn’t read then and ended up founding an organization dedicated to saving, preserving and disseminating Yiddish literature.

003 Systems
004 Data processing & computer science
005 Computer programming, programs & data

005.84 Worm: the first digital world war by Mark Bowden
An account of efforts to combat the Conficker worm in 2008-2009.

006 Special computer methods

006.74 Sams teach yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours by Dick Oliver and Molly Holzschlag
A good guide if one wants to know how to create a basic webpage from scratch or just to have an idea how web design works.

• 010 Bibliographies
010 Bibliography
011 Bibliographies

011.73 Book lust, More book lust by Nancy Pearl
Topical, mostly annotated book recommendations consisting of both fiction and non-fiction by a Seattle librarian.

012 Bibliographies of individuals
014 Bibliographies of anonymous & pseudonymous works
015 Bibliographies of works from specific places
016 Bibliographies of works on specific subjects

016.808 Fluent in fantasy: a guide to reading interests by Diana Tixier Herald
Annotated topical lists of fantasy books – can’t say that I’ve found it very useful so far, though.

017 General subject catalogs
018 Catalogs arranged by author, date, etc.
019 Dictionary catalogs

• 020 Library & information sciences
021 Library relationships
022 Administration of physical plant
023 Personnel management
025 Library operations

025.52 The book of answers: the New York Public Library telephone reference service’s most unusual and entertaining questions by Barbara Berliner with Melinda Corey and George Ochoa
Actually, not so much unusual, as probably typical questions and answers arranged thematically in 27 sections.

026 Libraries for specific subjects
027 General libraries
028 Reading & use of other information media

• 030 Encyclopedias & books of facts
030 General encyclopedic works
031 Encyclopedias in American English

031.02 The book of general ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
A mostly accurate book of Q&A on various topics with lots of surprising information

032 Encyclopedias in English
033 Encyclopedias in other Germanic languages
034 Encyclopedias in French, Occitan & Catalan
035 Encyclopedias in Italian, Romanian & related languages
036 Encyclopedias in Spanish & Portuguese
037 Encyclopedias in Slavic languages
038 Encyclopedias in Scandinavian languages
039 Encyclopedias in other languages

• 050 Magazines, journals & serials
050 General serial publications
051 Serials in American English

051 Inside People: the stories behind the stories by Judy Kessler
A look at the first twenty years of the People magazine (1974-1993) – quite amusing and elucidating in regards to how various types of media work

052 Serials in English
053 Serials in other Germanic languages
054 Serials in French, Occitan & Catalan
055 Serials in Italian, Romanian & related languages
056 Serials in Spanish & Portuguese
057 Serials in Slavic languages
058 Serials in Scandinavian languages
059 Serials in other languages

• 060 Associations, organizations & museums
060 General organizations & museum science
061 Organizations in North America
062 Organizations in British Isles; in England
063 Organizations in Central Europe; in Germany
064 Organizations in France & Monaco
065 Organizations in Italy & adjacent islands
066 Organizations in Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands
067 Organizations in Eastern Europe; in Russia
068 Organizations in other geographic areas
069 Museum science

069 Treasures of the Smithsonian by Edwards Park

• 070 News media, journalism & publishing

070.92 Nellie Bly: daredevil, reporter, feminist by Brooke Kroeger
A fairly thorough biography of Nellie Bly, it’s seriously marred by the author’s unsympathetic tone, but it’s the only non-juvenile one available.

071 Newspapers in North America
072 Newspapers in British Isles; in England
073 Newspapers in Central Europe; in Germany
074 Newspapers in France & Monaco
075 Newspapers in Italy & adjacent islands
076 Newspapers in Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands
077 Newspapers in Eastern Europe; in Russia
078 Newspapers in Scandinavia
079 Newspapers in other geographic areas

• 080 General collections
081 Collections in American English

081 Notes from a big country by Bill Bryson
Mostly humorous vignettes about the USA

082 Collections in English
083 Collections in other Germanic languages
084 Collections in French, Occitan & Catalan
085 Collections in Italian, Romanian & related languages
086 Collections in Spanish & Portuguese
087 Collections in Slavic languages
088 Collections in Scandinavian languages
089 Collections in other languages

• 090 Manuscripts & rare books
091 Manuscripts
092 Block books (books printed from engraved blocks as opposed to books printed from movable types)
093 Incunabula (books printed before 1501, from Latin for “swaddling clothes”)
094 Printed books
095 Books notable for bindings
096 Books notable for illustrations
097 Books notable for ownership or origin
098 Prohibited works, forgeries & hoaxes

098.1 100 banned books: censorship histories of world literature by Nicholas Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn Sova

099 Books notable for format

099 Miniature books: 4000 years of tiny treasures by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison

100 – Philosophy and psychology

• 100 Philosophy & psychology
101 Theory of philosophy
102 Miscellany of philosophy
103 Dictionaries of philosophy
105 Serial publications of philosophy
106 Organizations of philosophy
107 Education, research in philosophy
108 Kinds of persons in philosophy
109 Historical treatment of philosophy

• 110 Metaphysics
111 Ontology (getting to the essence of something, the study of being)
113 Cosmology (philosophy of nature)
114 Space
115 Time
116 Change
117 Structure
118 Force & energy
119 Number & quantity

• 120 Epistemology, causation, humankind
121 Epistemology (theory of knowledge and how we acquire it)
122 Causation
123 Determinism & indeterminism
124 Teleology (belief in or study of overall purpose)
126 The self
127 The unconscious & the subconscious
128 Humankind

128 The philosopher and the wolf: lessons from the wild on love, death, and happiness by Mark Rowlands
Keeping a wolf inspires the author – a professor of philosophy – to reflect on human and lupine nature.

129 Origin & destiny of individual souls

• 130 Parapsychology & occultism
131 Parapsychological and occult methods
133 Specific topics in parapsychology & occultism
135 Dreams & mysteries
137 Divinatory graphology
138 Physiognomy
139 Phrenology

• 140 Specific philosophical schools
141 Idealism & related systems

141.3 Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist movement by Ashton Nichols
This is one of the adult teaching courses which is comprised of 24 lectures on CDs (although transcripts of the lectures are available in the course guidebooks). Nichols presents the movement in its historical, social, philosophical, religious and literary context and also discusses various people influenced by the movement and its impact on the 19th and 20th centuries’ society.

142 Critical philosophy
143 Bergsonism & Intuitionism
144 Humanism & related systems
145 Sensationalism
146 Naturalism & related systems
147 Pantheism & related systems
148 Eclecticism, liberalism & traditionalism
149 Other philosophical systems

• 150 Psychology
152 Perception, movement, emotions, drives
153 Mental processes & intelligence
154 Subconscious & altered states
155 Differential & developmental psychology

155.232 Bright-sided: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

156 Comparative psychology
158 Applied psychology

158.1 How to stop worrying and start living, How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie

• 160 Logic
161 Induction
162 Deduction
165 Fallacies & sources of error
166 Syllogisms
167 Hypotheses
168 Argument & persuasion
169 Analogy

• 170 Ethics (Moral philosophy)

170 Nichomachean ethics by Aristotle

171 Ethical systems

171.5 Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill

172 Political ethics
173 Ethics of family relationships
174 Occupational ethics
175 Ethics of recreation & leisure
176 Ethics of sex & reproduction
177 Ethics of social relations
178 Ethics of consumption
179 Other ethical norms

• 180 Ancient, medieval & eastern philosophy
181 Eastern philosophy
182 Pre-Socratic Greek philosophies
183 Socratic and related philosophies
184 Platonic philosophy
185 Aristotelian philosophy
186 Skeptic and Neoplatonic philosophies
187 Epicurean philosophy
188 Stoic philosophy
189 Medieval western philosophy

• 190 Modern western philosophy

190 The moulders of Western philosophy by BBC
Brief lectures on 2 CDs on Greek philosophers, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Marx – quite enjoyable.

191 Modern western philosophy United States & Canada
192 Modern western philosophy British Isles
193 Modern western philosophy Germany & Austria
194 Modern western philosophy France
195 Modern western philosophy Italy
196 Modern western philosophy Spain & Portugal
197 Modern western philosophy Russia
198 Modern western philosophy Scandinavia
199 Modern western philosophy in other geographical areas

200 – Religion

• 200 Religion
201 Religious mythology & social theology
202 Doctrines
203 Public worship & other practices
204 Religious experience, life & practice
205 Religious ethics
206 Leaders & organization
207 Missions & religious education
208 Sources
209 Sects & reform movements

• 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
211 Concepts of god

211.4 Great infidels, What infidels have done by Robert G. Ingersoll
Ingersoll was, perhaps, the most popular 19th century American public speaker, of whom Mark Twain said that he hadn't heard anyone put words together better. Ingersoll saw his mission in enlightening the population at the time when means of mass communication had not been invented and many Americans had no access to books or college. So, despite being a highly successful and sought after lawyer, he spent most of his time on cross-country lecture tours on a wide variety of subjects, speaking always without notes and easily keeping an audience spell-bound for 3 hours. An agnostic, Ingersoll spoke especially often about religion, and many people wrote to him afterwards about a revolution a lecture of his produced in their minds. His writings are still a delight to read today, and, I must say, a treasure trove for a non-religious DD challenge taker :).

212 Existence, knowability & attributes of god
213 Creation
214 Theodicy (justifications of god’s goodness and omnipotence in the face of evil and suffering)
215 Science & religion
218 Humankind

• 220 Bible

220 On Holy Bible, What would you substitute for the Bible as a moral guide by Robert G. Ingersoll

221 Old Testament (Tanakh)
222 Historical books of Old Testament

222.1 Some mistakes of Moses by Robert G. Ingersoll

223 Poetic books of Old Testament
224 Prophetic books of Old Testament
225 New Testament
226 Gospels & Acts
227 Epistles
228 Revelation (Apocalypse)
229 Apocrypha & pseudepigrapha

• 230 Christianity and Christian theology

230 Losing faith in faith: from preacher to atheist by Dan Barker
Part autobiography, part a book about Christianity. The author describes his transformation from an evangelical Christian preacher and missionary to an equally active atheist. What makes his book particularly interesting, is that he has a degree in theology as well as experience in preaching, converting people, spiritual healing, etc., and so can speak about his former religion with some authority.

231 God
232 Jesus Christ & his family
233 Humankind
234 Salvation & grace

234.165 Shattered faith: a woman’s struggle to stop the Catholic Church from annulling her marriage by Sheila Rauch Kennedy
The author describes the process of annulment, not only as experienced by her, but also by a number of other women in this situation and their children. This book offered me an interesting perspective into a mindset and a world so different from my own.

235 Spiritual beings

235.47 The devil by Robert G. Ingersoll

236 Eschatology (death, afterlife, immortality, redemption)
238 Creeds & catechisms
239 Apologetics & polemics

• 240 Christian moral & devotional theology
241 Christian ethics
242 Devotional literature
243 Evangelistic writings for individuals
246 Use of art in Christianity
247 Church furnishings & articles
248 Christian experience, practice & life

248.4 The_ghosts by Robert G. Ingersoll

249 Christian observances in family life

• 250 Christian orders & local church

250 How to become a bishop without being religious by Charles Merrill Smith
A Protestant minister offers some tongue-in-cheek advice to those who wish to make a career in church. I found his book very entertaining, as well as educational regarding the inner workings of a mainstream Protestant church and mid-20th century American culture in general.

251 Preaching
252 Texts of sermons
253 Pastoral office & work
254 Parish administration
255 Religious congregations & orders
259 Pastoral care of families & kinds of persons

• 260 Social & ecclesiastical theology
261 Social theology
262 Ecclesiology (study of the Christian church, e.g. its origin, its destiny, its leadership)
263 Days, times & places of religious observance
264 Public worship
265 Sacraments, other rites & acts
266 Missions
267 Associations for religious work
268 Religious education
269 Spiritual renewal

• 270 History of Christianity and Christian church
271 Religious orders in church history

271 I leap over the wall by Monica Baldwin
The author, a Briton who joined a convent right before WWI and left it right after WWII, recounts her life in the convent and trying to find her place in a changed world. She remained a practicing Catholic, but reached the conclusion that she had been mistaken in her choice of vocation. I found this book interesting for its honest descriptions of life in a convent and of the changes that took place in the British society between the two world wars.

272 Persecutions in church history
273 Heresies in church history
274 Christian church in Europe
275 Christian church in Asia
276 Christian church in Africa
277 Christian church in North America
278 Christian church in South America
279 Christian church in other areas

• 280 Christian denominations & sects
281 Early church & Eastern churches
282 Roman Catholic Church
283 Anglican churches
284 Protestants of Continental origin
285 Presbyterian, Reformed & Congregational
286 Baptist, Disciples of Christ & Adventist
287 Methodist & related churches
289 Other denominations & sects

• 290 Other religions
292 Greek & Roman religion
293 Germanic religion
294 Religions of Indic origin

294.5 Cartwheels in a sari: a memoir of growing up cult by Jayanti Tamm
The author recounts her childhood and youth as a daughter of prominent members of the Sri Chimnoy cult in New York City and Connecticut. Her book presents a fascinating description of life in a cult and of the ways their cult leader presented himself to the outside world. Nor was it hard to read emotionally, for the author’s early life was not an unhappy one, some unusual aspects of it notwithstanding.

295 Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism, Parseeism)
296 Judaism
297 Islam, Babism & Bahai Faith

297 Why I am not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq
This is not a personal story, but a history and analysis of Islam.

299 Religions not provided for elsewhere

300 – Social sciences

• 300 Social sciences
301 Sociology & anthropology
302 Social interaction
303 Social processes
304 Factors affecting social behavior

304.2 The world without us by Alan Weisman

305 Social groups

305.569 Working in the shadows: a year of doing the jobs (most) Americans won't do by Gabriel Thompson
The author describes his experiences picking lettuce in Arizona, working in a poultry processing plant in Alabama and home-delivering meals for an upscale ethnic restaurant in Manhattan. What I found most surprising about his book is that although his work must have often been boring and dreary, his book never is. Thompson specializes in Hispanic immigrant issues and his book is partial towards them, but I still found it an interesting, informative and quick read, very successful at painting pictures of different worlds.

306 Culture & institutions
307 Communities

• 310 Collections of general statistics

310 How to lie with statistics by Darrel Huff
This 1954 book is still elucidating, although somewhat dated and not infallible in its own logic.

314 General statistics of Europe
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 areas

• 320 Political science

320 The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

321 Systems of governments & states

321.07 The Republic by Plato or Utopia by Thomas More

322 Relation of state to organized groups
323 Civil & political rights

323.44 On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

324 The political process

324.273 Homegrown Democrat: a few plain thoughts from the heart of America by Garrison Keillor

325 International migration & colonization
326 Slavery & emancipation
327 International relations
328 The legislative process

328.73 The sweetest club in the world: the U.S. Senate by Louis Hurst
Head of the Senate restaurant in the 1960s provides a vivid portrait of the U.S. Senate at the time.

• 330 Economics

330.973 Third world America: how our politicians are abandoning the middle class and betraying the American dream by Arianna Huffington
The author discusses the corporations/government cronyism, our outdated infrastructure, inadequate environmental protection, our students’ poor test scores in comparison with other developed countries, concluded, sadly, by a positivism sermon, i.e. it's in the power of each individual to change the world, like Martin Luther King.

331 Labor economics

331.702 The one-week job project: 1 man, 1 year, 52 jobs by Sean Aiken
The author didn’t know what he wanted to do after he graduated from college with a business degree and decided to try out different jobs for a year in return for donations to his favorite charity. His notes on each job are fairly brief (some more so than others), but I did glean some interesting pieces of information from this book.

332 Financial economics
333 Economics of land & energy

333.95 Wildlife wars: my fight to save Africa's natural treasures by Richard Leakey
An account of the head of Kenya's wildlife service of his battles with poachers and corrupt officials to save Kenya's wildlife. No bets on which turned out to be the more dangerous and hard to beat adversary. A fascinating book on what it takes to protect wildlife in an average African country.

334 Cooperatives
335 Socialism & related systems
336 Public finance
337 International economics
338 Production
339 Macroeconomics & related topics

• 340 Law
341 Law of nations
342 Constitutional & administrative law
343 Military, tax, trade & industrial law
344 Labor, social, education & cultural law
345 Criminal law
346 Private law

346 Escape from childhood by John Caldwell Holt
The author believes that children should have the exact same rights as adults because people grow up at different rates, and so it should be up to each individual when to begin voting, working, living independently, etc. A controversial, but thought-provoking book.

347 Civil procedure & courts
348 Law, regulations & cases
349 Law of specific jurisdictions & areas

349.73 Order in the court: a writer's guide to the legal system by David S. Mullally
Although this book is part of a series of guides for fiction writers in order to enable them to depict authentically various aspects of life they might be unfamiliar with, it would actually be useful to anyone who wishes to get a general idea of how the US justice system functions. The author discusses the ways the police collects evidence, how jury members are selected, describes at length two sample trials (one criminal, the other civil) and explains key legal terminology.

• 350 Public administration and military science
351 Public administration
352 General considerations of public administration
353 Specific fields of public administration
354 Administration of economy & environment
355 Military science
356 Foot forces & warfare
357 Mounted forces & warfare
358 Air & other specialized forces
359 Sea forces & warfare

• 360 Social problems & services; associations
361 General problems & social welfare in general

361.92 Jane Addams: champion of democracy by Dennis Brindell Fradin

362 Social welfare problems & services

362.41 The story of my life by Helen Keller

363 Other social problems & services

363.2 Tales from a dog catcher by Lisa Duffy-Korpics
The author recounts her experiences as an animal control officer in upstate New York. A very warm and interesting book.

364 Criminology
365 Penal & related institutions

365.42 Kids for cash: two judges, thousands of children, and a $2.8 million kickback scheme by William Ecenbarger
The author details how in 2003-2008 two Pennsylvanian judges got paid by a private juvenile detention center to keep it filled to capacity at all times, how they were protected by the entities designed to investigate judicial misconduct, and how only one of the judge’s unrelated public association with a mobster brought about their downfall.

366 Association
367 General clubs
368 Insurance
369 Miscellaneous kinds of associations

• 370 Education
371 Schools & their activities; special education

371.01 Our school: the inspiring story of two teachers, one big idea, and the school that beat the odds by Joanne Jacobs
The two teachers from the subtitle had decided to create a charter high school in San Jose, California to educate local failing students, most of them recent immigrants from Mexico, to a college acceptance. The author spent a year in the school (the school’s second), sitting in meetings and classes, tutoring students, etc, and kept in touch for several more years to write this book.
Or
371.042 Home schooling: a family’s journey by Gregory Millman and Martine Millman
The authors describe how they have been home schooling their six children, the elder three of whom are now continuing their education at first-rate colleges.
Or, for special education:
371.94 A circle of children by Mary McCracken

372 Elementary education

372 Teach like your hair's on fire: the methods and madness inside room 56 by Rafe Esquith
Or
372 Educating Esme by Esme Raji Codell
Both are imaginative, enthusiastic teachers’ accounts of teaching fifth-graders in Los Angeles and Chicago respectively. Esquith has been doing it for 25 years and has achieved world-wide recognition for his work. Codell describes her first year of teaching. As with any talented teacher, their teaching styles and methods are very different, but both books make for a fascinating read.

373 Secondary education

373 Will my name be shouted out? by Stephen O’Connor
The author describes his experiences teaching creative writing in a school in Harlem as part of a writers-in-residence program.

374 Adult education

374.22 The book group book: a thoughtful guide to forming and enjoying a stimulating book discussion group edited by Ellen Slezak
Slezak asked people to write to her about their experiences with book clubs and then selected 30 of these brief essays to print, alongside with (mostly un-annotated) reading lists in the second half of the book and comprising almost a half of this book. So not really a guide, but worth reading if one is interested in the topic.
374.22 The book club companion: a comprehensive guide to the reading experience by Diana Loevy
This one is a guide, but the well-annotated books are almost all very well-known, so people who read would have heard about them anyway. There are also un-annotated lists of books and recipes, both of which I skipped, and a number of advice columns on dealing with pets when one is hosting a book club meeting – apparently, a significant problem, from the author’s point of view.

375 Curricula
378 Higher education

378 Kicked, bitten, and scratched: life and lessons at the world's premier school for exotic animal trainers by Amy Sutherland who spent a year (as a journalist) at a college for wild animals trainers

379 Public policy issues in education

• 380 Commerce, communications & transportation
381 Commerce (Domestic trade)

381.3 Government's place in the market by Eliot Spitzer
A brief, well-reasoned, mostly comprehensible discussion of the topic

382 International commerce (Foreign trade)

382.4 For all the tea in China: how England stole the world’s favorite drink and changed history by Sarah Rose
An interesting book that describes how the East India Co. hired an adventurer botanist to smuggle tea plants and seeds out of China to be raised in Indian Himalayas and the rippling effect this venture had on economy and history in general.

383 Postal communication
384 Communications; Telecommunication

384.1 The Victorian Internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth centuryʼs on-line pioneers by Tom Standage
An interesting bit of history

385 Railroad transportation
386 Inland waterway & ferry transportation
387 Water, air, space transportation

387.544 Before the wind: the memoir of an American sea captain, 1808-1833 by Charles Tyng
The author’s descendant found his memoirs about his career on merchant ships, from ship boy to captain, and published it.

388 Transportation; Ground transportation

388.4132 Hack: stories from a Chicago cab by Dmitry Samarov

389 Metrology & standardization

• 390 Customs, etiquette & folklore
391 Costume & personal appearance
392 Customs of life cycle & domestic life
393 Death customs
394 General customs

394.12 Omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan
The author investigates the provenance of “conventional” industrial, organic industrial, pastoral industrial and personally hunted and gathered food. I’ve found it interesting and informative in general, but while its first and third sections couldn’t have been improved upon, the second and forth, in my estimate, leave much to be desired.

395 Etiquette (Manners)
398 Folklore

398.2 The enchanted world series: Fairies and elves, Water spirits published by Time-Life Books
These books contain both the tales themselves and an interesting analysis of folk beliefs.

399 Customs of war & diplomacy

400 – Language

• 400 Language
401 Philosophy & theory
402 Miscellany
403 Dictionaries & encyclopedias
404 Special topics
405 Serial publications
406 Organizations & management
407 Education, research & related topics
408 Kinds of persons treatment
409 Geographical & persons treatment

• 410 Linguistics
411 Writing systems
412 Etymology
413 Dictionaries
414 Phonology & phonetics
415 Grammar
417 Dialectology & historical linguistics

417.7 The story of human language by John McWhorter
This is one of the adult teaching courses: 36 lectures on CDs, mostly on the evolution of language. I’ve found it quite fascinating – I had taken a course on linguistics in college, and I still learned a lot from this course.

418 Standard usage & applied linguistics
419 Sign languages

• 420 English & Old English

420.9 The mother tongue by Bill Bryson

421 English writing system & phonology
422 English etymology
423 English dictionaries
425 English grammar
427 English language variations
428 Standard English usage
429 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

• 430 Germanic languages; German
431 German writing system & phonology
432 German etymology
433 German dictionaries
435 German grammar
437 German language variations
438 Standard German usage

438.24 German for dummies by Paulina Christensen
I was learning German some time ago (without grammar, just for reading purposes), and this was a good way to brush it up a bit.

439 Other Germanic languages

• 440 Romance languages; French
441 French writing system & phonology
442 French etymology
443 French dictionaries
445 French grammar
447 French language variations
448 Standard French usage

448.24 French for dummies

449 Provencal & Catalan

• 450 Italian, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic

450 La bella lingua: my love affair with Italian, the world’s most enchanting language by Dianne Hales
For 25 years Hales came to Italy every year to pursue her study of Italian language and exploration of Italian culture.

451 Italian writing system & phonology
452 Italian etymology
453 Italian dictionaries
455 Italian grammar
457 Italian language variations
458 Standard Italian usage
459 Romanian & related languages

• 460 Spanish & Portuguese languages
461 Spanish writing system & phonology
462 Spanish etymology
463 Spanish dictionaries
465 Spanish grammar

465.24 Intermediate Spanish for dummies by Gail Stein
This book is usually classed in 468, but should be here, because, unlike the basic For Dummies book, it’s all about grammar: how to conjugate Spanish verbs in various tenses and moods, when to use which tenses and moods, how to form adverbs, how to recognize the gender of nouns, etc. It’s actually an excellent book to revise Spanish grammar: it comprises exhaustive information with good exercises and an answer key. My only complaint is that it doesn’t even mention the perfect tense in its discussion of the past tenses, just the preterit and the imperfect, which I found strange.

467 Spanish language variations
468 Standard Spanish usage

468.24 Spanish for dummies by Susana Wald
I’m learning Spanish and I’ve found this book quite useful. It’s not a textbook, but it gives contemporary everyday vocabulary and, best of all, it includes a disc with 30 dialogs for listening practice.

469 Portuguese

• 470 Italic; Latin
471 Classical Latin writing & phonology
472 Classical Latin etymology & phonology
473 Classical Latin dictionaries
475 Classical Latin grammar
477 Old, Postclassical, Vulgar Latin
478 Classical Latin usage
479 Other Italic languages

• 480 Hellenic languages; Classical Greek

480 It’s Greek to me: brush up your classics by Michael Macrone
The author investigates the origin of famous expressions that have come into English from Ancient Greek and Latin

481 Classical Greek writing & phonology
482 Classical Greek etymology
483 Classical Greek dictionaries
485 Classical Greek grammar
487 Preclassical & postclassical Greek
488 Classical Greek usage
489 Other Hellenic languages

• 490 Other languages
491 East Indo-European & Celtic languages
492 Afro-Asiatic languages; Semitic languages
493 Non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages
494 Ural-Altaic, Paleosiberian & Dravidian
495 Languages of East & Southeast Asia

495.1 Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin lessons in life, love and language by Deborah Fallows
The author recounts learning Mandarin Chinese during the three years she spent in China and trying to understand the country’s culture through its language.

496 African languages
497 North American native languages
498 South American native languages
499 Austronesian & other languages

500 – Science

• 500 Natural sciences & mathematics

500 A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson

501 Philosophy & theory
502 Miscellany
503 Dictionaries & encyclopedias
505 Serial publications
506 Organizations & management
507 Education, research, related topics
508 Natural history

508.074 Dinosaurs in the attic: an excursion into the American museum of natural history by Douglas J. Preston
A very interesting book that talks about various expeditions to obtain specimens for the Museum and takes readers on a tour of the parts of the Museum unseen by the visiting public.

509 Historical, areas, persons treatment

• 510 Mathematics

510 A mathematician reads the newspaper by John Allen Paulos
A series of vignettes which analyze common newspaper stories from the perspective of mathematics, formal logic and human psychology, most of them interesting and worthwhile.

511 General principles of mathematics
512 Algebra
513 Arithmetic
514 Topology
515 Analysis
516 Geometry
518 Numerical analysis
519 Probabilities & applied mathematics

• 520 Astronomy & allied sciences

520 Horizons: exploring the universe by Michael A. Seeds
This was my college Astronomy textbook which was very good: interesting, clear and thorough. I’ve looked through many books on astronomy for laymen since, but haven’t found any with any new information.

521 Celestial mechanics
522 Techniques, equipment & materials
523 Specific celestial bodies & phenomena
525 Earth (Astronomical geography)
526 Mathematical geography
527 Celestial navigation
528 Ephemerides (tables of values that give the positions of astronomical objects in the sky at a given time)
529 Chronology

• 530 Physics
531 Classical mechanics; Solid mechanics
532 Fluid mechanics; Liquid mechanics
533 Gas mechanics
534 Sound & related vibrations
535 Light & infrared & ultraviolet phenomena
536 Heat
537 Electricity & electronics
538 Magnetism
539 Modern physics

539.72 Particle physics for non-physicists: a tour of the microcosmos by Steven Pollack
This is one of the adult teaching courses: 25 lectures on CDs or DVDs on particle physics. No previous knowledge of physics or mathematics is required (actually there’s no math in it at all). Personally, I found the author to be rather vague at times: for example, he’d mention that a physicist has figured out how to combine the theory of relativity with quantum theory in a particular area, without explaining what it means to “combine” them. Most of the time, however, he’s very lucid; so if one wants to make sense of the plethora of particles that have been discovered in the previous century, this is an excellent course.

• 540 Chemistry & allied sciences
541 Physical chemistry
542 Techniques, equipment & materials
543 Analytical chemistry
546 Inorganic chemistry

546 The disappearing spoon and other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements by Sam Kean
An exciting and easy-to-read account of discoveries in chemistry and physics, with lots of interesting stuff they don’t tell you at school, unfortunately marred sometimes by the author’s tone, but definitely worth reading.

547 Organic chemistry
548 Crystallography
549 Mineralogy

• 550 Earth sciences
551 Geology, hydrology & meteorology
552 Petrology
553 Economic geology
554 Earth sciences of Europe
555 Earth sciences of Asia
556 Earth sciences of Africa
557 Earth sciences of North America
558 Earth sciences of South America
559 Earth sciences of other areas

• 560 Paleontology; Paleozoology

560 Wonderful life: the Burgess Shale and the nature of history by Stephen Jay Gould

561 Paleobotany; fossil microorganisms
562 Fossil invertebrates
563 Fossil marine & seashore invertebrates
564 Fossil mollusks & molluscoids
565 Fossil arthropods
566 Fossil chordates
567 Fossil cold-blooded vertebrates; fossil fishes
568 Fossil birds
569 Fossil mammals

• 570 Life sciences; Biology
571 Physiology & related subjects
572 Biochemistry
573 Physiological systems of animals
575 Specific parts of & systems in plants
576 Genetics & evolution
577 Ecology
578 Natural history of organisms
579 Microorganisms, fungi & algae

• 580 Plants (Botany)
581 Specific topics in natural history
582 Plants noted for characteristics and flowers
583 Dicotyledons
584 Monocotyledons
585 Gymnosperms; conifers
586 Seedless plants
587 Vascular seedless plants

587.0972 Oaxaca journal by Oliver Sacks
The author recounts his trip to Mexico with fellow fern enthusiasts

588 Bryophytes

• 590 Animals (Zoology)

590 The book of animal ignorance: everything you think you know is wrong by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd
The authors describe various animals in the alphabetical order, with lots of interesting information thrown in, e.g., albatrosses sleep half-a-brain at a time, so they can sleep while flying; dogs can smell out cancer, outperforming state-of-the-art equipment like mammogram machines and CAT scans; and donkeys “are the only animals of their size that won’t back down when confronted by a lion. In Africa, guard donkeys are used to protect cattle.”
Or
590.73 We bought a zoo: the amazing true story of a young family, a broken down zoo, and the 200 wild animals that changed their lives forever by Benjamin Mee
The author recounts buying a dilapidated private zoo in Devon with his mother and siblings and working to bring it up to standards and make it solvent.

591 Specific topics in natural history

591.68 Last chance to see by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
The authors recount their trips to various locales to see endangered animals in their natural habitats.

592 Invertebrates

592 How do ants know when you’re having a picnic? by Joanne Settel and Nancy Baggett
Written for children, but full of fascinating information about all sorts of invertebrate animals

593 Marine & seashore invertebrates
594 Mollusks & molluscoids
595 Arthropods

595.789 Mariposa road: the first butterfly big year by Robert Michael Pyle about the author’s attempt to see as many species of butterflies in a year in the US as he could.

596 Chordates
597 Cold-blooded vertebrates; Fishes
598 Birds

598 The bluebird effect: uncommon bonds with common birds by Julie Zickefoose
This book is organized by species, as the author describes her experiences with bird rehabilitation or conservation. It’s richly illustrated with her beautiful watercolors and pencil sketches of birds. I liked it that it’s focused on ordinary birds, many of which I know and often see myself.
598.764 A hummingbird in my house: the story of Squeak by Arnette Heidcamp
The author recounts housing a hummingbird for the winter when it failed to migrate with others of its kind.

599 Mammals

599.65 The gift of the deer by Helen Hoover
The author describes a family of deer who visited their yard in northern Minnesota over a number of years. Of all the animal books I’ve ever read, this one probably produced the greatest impression on me. These deer were truly a family, in every sense of the word.
Or
599.773 White wolf: living with an arctic legend by Jim Brandenburg
The author describes studying and observing wild wolves in the Arctic, while the wolves were observing and – on one memorable occasion – exploring the biologists’ camp in their turn. However, as in the above book, it was the descriptions of wolf interactions within the pack that I found the most interesting.
Or
599.785 Summers with the bears: six seasons in the north woods by Jack Becklund
The author describes his and his wife's relationship with a dozen or so wild black bears who visited their backyard over the course of six spring-fall seasons in northern Minnesota, and one of them in particular – a female bear whom they watched grow from a yearling cub to a first-time inexperienced mother to a confident, mature adult who becomes their friend.
Or
599.976 Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters by Matt Ridley
The author chooses one gene per human chromosome to discuss. I’ve found this book very informative on how genes and human organism in general work.

600 – Technology

• 600 Technology
601 Philosophy & theory
602 Miscellany
603 Dictionaries & encyclopedias
604 Special topics
605 Serial publications
606 Organizations
607 Education, research & related topics
608 Invention & patents
609 Historical, geographic & persons treatment

• 610 Medicine & health

610.737 Paramedic: on the front lines of medicine by Peter Canning
A memoir about the author’s first year working as an ambulance paramedic in Hartford, Connecticut.

611 Human anatomy, cytology & histology

611 Your inner fish: a journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body by Neil Shubin
A fascinating book that traces the origins of limbs, hands, teeth, eyes, ears, smell receptors, and bodies themselves, with data from paleontology, embryology and genetics.

612 Human physiology
613 Personal health & safety
614 Incidence & prevention of disease
615 Pharmacology & therapeutics
616 Diseases
617 Surgery & related medical specialties

617 Complications: a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science by Atul Gawande
An insider's book about hospitals, medical practice and medical training today.

618 Gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics & geriatrics

• 620 Engineering & allied operations
621 Applied physics
622 Mining & related operations
623 Military & nautical engineering

623.45119 Bomb: the race to build – and steal – the world’s most dangerous weapon by Steve Sheinkin
Although written for young adults, it’s a decent length at 250 pages and an interesting book that examines various aspects of the race to build the atomic bomb. Personally, I disagree with the author on some of the issues, but have still found this book worthwhile.

624 Civil engineering
625 Engineering of railroads & roads
627 Hydraulic engineering
628 Sanitary & municipal engineering
629 Other branches of engineering

629.892 Loving the machine: the art and science of Japanese robots by Timothy N. Hornyak

• 630 Agriculture & related technologies

630.973 Bootstrapper: from broke to badass on a Northern Michigan farm by Mardi Jo Link
The author recounts living on a farm with her three adolescent sons after her divorce.

631 Techniques, equipment & materials
632 Plant injuries, diseases, pests
633 Field & plantation crops
634 Orchards, fruits & forestry
635 Garden crops (Horticulture)
636 Animal husbandry

636.089 Boxed set (All creatures great and small/All things bright and beautiful/All things wise and wonderful/The lord god made them all) by James Herriot

637 Processing dairy & related products
638 Insect culture
639 Hunting, fishing, conservation

639.97 A wild life: adventures of an accidental conservationist in Africa by Dick Pitman about the author’s efforts to save rhinos, cheetahs and elephants in Zimbabwe.
639.97 Kakapo rescue: saving the world's strangest parrot by Sy Montgomery
A book for teenagers which details the efforts of volunteers to save kakapos (huge flightless parrots) from extinction in New Zealand. The dedication of these individuals is really mind-blowing!

• 640 Home & family management
641 Food & drink

641.0973 Animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life by Barbara Kingsolver

642 Meals & table service
643 Housing & household equipment
644 Household utilities
645 Household furnishings
646 Sewing, clothing & personal living

646.79 The successful retirement guide by Kevin Price
One doesn’t need to be retired or anywhere near retirement to find this book useful, for it’s not about personal finances, but about books, organizations, websites, etc. related to various interests. First and foremost, it’s about how to start pursuing new interests.

647 Management of public households

647.94 Hotel Babylon: inside the extravagance and mayhem of a luxury five-star hotel by Anonymous and Imogen Edwards-Jones
A hotel manager describes 24 hours in a five-star hotel – highly entertaining

648 Housekeeping
649 Child rearing & home care of persons

649.1 Dr. Spock on parenting, Baby and child care, Dr. Spock talks with mothers by Benjamin Spock

• 650 Management & auxiliary services
651 Office services
652 Processes of written communication
653 Shorthand
657 Accounting
658 General management
659 Advertising & public relations

• 660 Chemical engineering
661 Industrial chemicals
662 Explosives, fuels & related products
663 Beverage technology
664 Food technology
665 Industrial oils, fats, waxes & gases
666 Ceramic & allied technologies
667 Cleaning, color & coating technologies
668 Technology of other organic products
669 Metallurgy

• 670 Manufacturing
671 Metalworking & primary metal products
672 Iron, steel & other iron alloys
673 Nonferrous metals
674 Lumber processing, wood products & cork
675 Leather & fur processing
676 Pulp & paper technology
677 Textiles
678 Elastomers & elastomer products
679 Other products of specific materials

• 680 Manufacture for specific uses
681 Precision instruments & other devices
682 Small forge work (Blacksmithing)
683 Hardware & household appliances
684 Furnishings & home workshops
685 Leather, fur & related products
686 Printing & related activities
687 Clothing & accessories
688 Other final products & packaging

• 690 Buildings
691 Building materials
692 Auxiliary construction practices
693 Specific materials & purposes
694 Wood construction & carpentry
695 Roof covering
696 Utilities
697 Heating, ventilating & air-conditioning
698 Detail finishing

700 – Arts and recreation

• 700 The arts; Fine & decorative arts
701 Philosophy of fine & decorative arts
702 Miscellany of fine & decorative arts
703 Dictionaries of fine & decorative arts
704 Special topics in fine & decorative arts

704.9432 Rabbits everywhere by Alicia Ezpeleta
A discussion of represantions and symbolism of rabbits in art

705 Serial publications of fine & decorative arts
706 Organizations & management
707 Education, research & related topics
708 Galleries, museums & private collections

708.21 National Portrait Gallery: a visitor’s guide by John Cooper
A really well-written book, with an interesting, lively text.

709 Historical, geographic & persons treatment

• 710 Civic & landscape art
711 Area planning
712 Landscape architecture

712.6 Great gardens of Britain by Helena Attlee
Photographs and text about 20 acclaimed British professionally-designed gardens open to the public

713 Landscape architecture of trafficways
714 Water features
715 Woody plants
716 Herbaceous plants
717 Structure in landscape architecture
718 Landscape design of cemeteries
719 Natural landscapes

• 720 Architecture
721 Architectural structure
722 Architecture to ca. 300
723 Architecture from ca. 300 to 1399
724 Architecture from 1400
725 Public structures
726 Buildings for religious purposes
727 Buildings for education & research
728 Residential & related buildings
729 Design & decoration

• 730 Plastic arts; Sculpture
731 Processes, forms & subjects of sculpture
732 Sculpture to ca. 500
733 Greek, Etruscan & Roman sculpture
734 Sculpture from ca. 500 to 1399
735 Sculpture from 1400
736 Carving & carvings
737 Numismatics & sigillography
738 Ceramic arts
739 Art metalwork

• 740 Drawing & decorative arts
741 Drawing & drawings

741.5 Hank Ketcham's complete Dennis the Menace: 1951-1952
The first year of Dennis the Menace cartoons

742 Perspective
743 Drawing & drawings by subject
745 Decorative arts
746 Textile arts
747 Interior decoration
748 Glass
749 Furniture & accessories

• 750 Painting & paintings
751 Techniques, equipment & forms
752 Color
753 Symbolism, allegory, mythology & legend
754 Genre paintings
755 Religion
757 Human figures
758 Other subjects
759 Historical, geographic, persons treatment

759.4 Manet: a visionary Impressionist by Henri Lallemand
I found the text of this book rather sketchy, but the reproductions are superb!

• 760 Graphic arts; Printmaking & prints
761 Relief processes (Block printing)
763 Lithographic processes
764 Chromolithography & serigraphy
765 Metal engraving
766 Mezzotinting, aquatinting & related processes
767 Etching & drypoint
769 Prints

• 770 Photography, photographs & computer art
771 Techniques, equipment & materials
772 Metallic salt processes
773 Pigment processes of printing
774 Holography
775 Digital photography
776 Computer art (Digital art)
778 Fields & kinds of photography

778.932 Cats in the sun by Hans Silvester

779 Photographs

• 780 Music

780.9 How to listen to and understand great music by Robert Greenberg
This is one of the adult teaching courses: 48 lectures on CDs or DVDs on the history of classical music. I might have derived more use out of it if I hadn’t been tone-deaf. While it’s untrue that tone-deaf people can’t enjoy instrumental music, it does make following the musical structure difficult. Even so, I found Greenberg’s lectures educational and interesting.

781 General principles & musical forms
782 Vocal music

782.42 Dave Barry’s book of bad songs by Dave Barry
The author had invited his readers to nominate the worst popular songs and published the results. I hadn't known most of the songs he mentions and still found his book laughing-to-tears hilarious.

783 Music for single voices; The voice
784 Instruments & instrumental ensembles
785 Ensembles with one instrument per part
786 Keyboard & other instruments
787 Stringed instruments
788 Wind instruments

• 790 Recreational & performing arts
791 Public performances

791.4372 Forever Liesl: a memoir of The Sound of Music by Charmian Carr
This is part autobiography, part a memoir of how The Sound of Music was made.
Or
791.4375 Harry Potter: film wizardry by Brian Sibley
Discusses how Harry Potter films were made (except the last one). Interesting both for HP fans and people generally curious how movies are made today (at least, if they have an enormous budget)

792 Stage presentations
793 Indoor games & amusements
794 Indoor games of skill
795 Games of chance
796 Athletic & outdoor sports & games

796.44 Chalked Up: Inside elite gymnastics' merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders, and elusive Olympic dreams by Jennifer Sey
The US national champion in gymnastics in 1986 describes her experiences in the sport. It’s not a happy book, albeit an educational one regarding the nature of sports. Some exercise may be healthy, but full-time exercise required for sports clearly is not. By the time the author won the national championship (at 16) she could barely walk without painkillers, let alone practice, and had to leave the sport without realizing her dream of making the Olympic team. Even now, 20 years later, her feet and ankles hurt with every step. However, despite the subtitle, she doesn’t really blame anybody in her book, making it clear that she herself wanted to do it, first because she enjoyed the feeling of flight, and later also because she was ambitious. She was a very good student and later had a successful career in marketing, but nothing could give her the comparable satisfaction of being “the best.”

797 Aquatic & air sports

797.122 Rowing to latitude: journeys along the Arctic's edge by Jill Fredston
The author recounts the trips she and her husband undertook along the coasts of Alaska, northern Canada, Labrador Peninsula, Greenland, Norway and Spitsbergen, as well as along the Yukon and the Mackenzie rivers, all in rowing boats.

798 Equestrian sports & animal racing

798.83 Mad dogs and an Englishwoman: travels with sled dogs in Canada's frozen north by Polly Evans
The author describes staying at a commercial dogsledding tourism operation for 11 weeks, sharing in both the work and the fun, and also following the Yukon Quest (like the Iditarod, but even tougher). Like all of Evans’s books, it combines very good and often humorous descriptions with some history thrown in and a physical challenge for the author (in this case, learning to operate a dogsledding team).

799 Fishing, hunting & shooting

799.124 Real Alaska: finding our way in the wild country by Paul Schullery
This book should really be cataloged in the 917s, for it’s about the Katmai National Park and about US National Parks in general, but there’s an extensive section on fly fishing of which the author is a fan, and it’s as close to a 799 book as I’m ever going to read, since I disapprove of hunting and am indifferent to fishing.

800 – Literature

• 800 Literature & rhetoric
801 Philosophy & theory
802 Miscellany
803 Dictionaries & encyclopedias
805 Serial publications
806 Organizations & management
807 Education, research & related topics

807 The haiku handbook: how to write, share, and teach haiku by William Higginson
Mostly a history of haiku, both in Japan and in the West, which does reach to contemporary times

808 Rhetoric & collections of literature
809 History, description & criticism

809.3876 Asimov’s galaxy: reflections on science fiction by Isaac Asimov
This is a compilation of 66 of Asimov’s editorials that appeared in his magazine in the 1980s. Interesting, as everything he wrote

• 810 American literature in English
811 American poetry in English

811.54 Book of haikus by Jack Kerouac
One the most famous haiku writers in American literature. Here are some of my favorite:
Memère says: “Planets are /Far apart, so people /Can’t bother each other.”
Resting watchfully, the cat /And the squirrel /Share the afternoon.
Birds singing /In the dark – /Rainy dawn.

812 American drama in English
813 American fiction in English

813.54 I. Asimov: a memoir by Isaac Asimov

814 American essays in English

814.3 Civil disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

815 American speeches in English

815.4 Royal Bob: the life of Robert G. Ingersoll by C. H. Cramer
And
815.4 Ingersoll: immortal infidel, selections from the writings and speeches of Robert G. Ingersoll edited by Roger E. Greeley (ISBN 0-87975-095-2)
It's a pleasure to read Ingersoll’s writings or his biography, because, besides his intellectual and oratorical gifts, he was also an unusually good-hearted person – there was hardly an issue in his day on which he didn't care to weigh in, invariably on the humanistic side. He also helped countless people, including total strangers, and was as amiable and high-principled in his private life as in his public life. It’s said that by reading books one can touch the spirit of the people of the past, but this is the first time I've ever felt this way about a book, and it proved to be a very heart-warming experience.

816 American letters in English
817 American satire & humor in English

817.4 Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain

818 American miscellaneous writings in English

818.3 Walden by Henry David Thoreau

• 820 English & Old English literatures
821 English poetry

821.7 The prelude by William Wordsworth

822 English drama

822.33 To meet Will Shakespeare by Frank Ernest Hill
One doesn’t have to be a fan of Shakespeare to enjoy this book, for it not only describes his life and works, but also presents a broad and fascinating portrayal of life in England at the time. What surprised me the most was the extremely high quality of ordinary schools and people’s attitude toward plague epidemics: Shakespeare didn’t even bother to leave London when it happened; if the theaters were ordered closed, he simply stayed home and worked (wrote new plays) – like we react to a heavy snowfall.

823 English fiction

823.7 Jane Austen for dummies by Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
In general, I think there’s an overabundance of books on Jane Austen for the general reader, but I did enjoy this one. The most surprising bit of information I found in it was that during World War I army doctors “prescribed” Austen’s novels to shell-shocked soldiers, and that Redyard Kipling read them aloud to his wife after their son was killed in that war. And to think that today many people think of them as “girly,” and among Austen’s fans today women indeed far outnumber men.

824 English essays

824.912 A collection of essays by George Orwell

825 English speeches
826 English letters
827 English satire & humor
828 English miscellaneous writings
829 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

829.3 Beowulf

• 830 Literatures of Germanic languages
831 German poetry
832 German drama
833 German fiction
834 German essays
835 German speeches
836 German letters
837 German satire & humor
838 German miscellaneous writings
839 Other Germanic literatures (i.e. in languages related to German)

• 840 Literatures of Romance languages
841 French poetry
842 French drama

842.8 Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

843 French fiction

843.912 Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

844 French essays
845 French speeches
846 French letters
847 French satire & humor
848 French miscellaneous writings
849 Occitan & Catalan literatures

• 850 Italian, Romanian & related literatures
851 Italian poetry
852 Italian drama
853 Italian fiction
854 Italian essays
855 Italian speeches
856 Italian letters
857 Italian satire & humor
858 Italian miscellaneous writings
859 Romanian & related literatures

• 860 Spanish & Portuguese literatures
861 Spanish poetry
862 Spanish drama
863 Spanish fiction
864 Spanish essays
865 Spanish speeches
866 Spanish letters
867 Spanish satire & humor
868 Spanish miscellaneous writings
869 Portuguese literature

• 870 Italic literatures; Latin literature
871 Latin poetry
872 Latin dramatic poetry & drama
873 Latin epic poetry & fiction
874 Latin lyric poetry
875 Latin speeches
876 Latin letters
877 Latin satire & humor
878 Latin miscellaneous writings
879 Literatures of other Italic languages

• 880 Hellenic literatures; Classical Greek
881 Classical Greek poetry
882 Classical Greek drama
883 Classical Greek epic poetry & fiction
884 Classical Greek lyric poetry
885 Classical Greek speeches
886 Classical Greek letters
887 Classical Greek satire & humor
888 Classical Greek miscellaneous writings
889 Modern Greek literature

• 890 Literatures of other languages
891 East Indo-European & Celtic literatures

891.733 War and peace by Lev Tolstoy

892 Afro-Asiatic literatures; Semitic literature
893 Non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic literatures
894 Ural-Altaic, Paleosiberian & Dravidian literatures
895 Literatures of East & Southeast Asia

895.6108 Haiku of old Japan selected by Liberty Campbell

896 African literatures
897 North American native literatures
898 South American native literatures
899 Austronesian & other literatures

900 – History & geography

901 Philosophy & theory
902 Miscellany

902.07 Non campus mentis by Anders Henriksson
A hilarious collection of blunders of high school and college students in their history papers

903 Dictionaries & encyclopedias
904 Collected accounts of events
905 Serial publications
906 Organizations & management
907 Education, research & related topics
909 World history

• 910 Geography & travel

910.4 The royal road to romance by Richard Halliburton
The author describes his adventures gallivanting around the globe without money in the 1920s.
910.9 Women travelers: a century of trailblazing adventures 1850-1950 by Alexandra Lapierre
This is a book about female explorers with a chapter devoted to each. Interestingly, they spent many years in most inhospitable climates in jungles or deserts, and yet many of them lived very long lives, into late 80s or 90s. Many of them weren’t wealthy, but they all found ways not only to survive but to organize one expedition after another, and almost all made significant contributions to archeology or natural science, without any college education. I found this book inspirational because there wasn’t anything in most of these women’s circumstances that was exceptional, and yet they all managed to carve out exceptional lives for themselves.

911 Historical geography
912 Atlases, charts, maps & plans
913 Geography of & travel in ancient world
914 Geography of & travel in Europe

914.1 Notes from a small island by Bill Bryson about Great Britain
914.6 It's not about the tapas: a Spanish adventure on two wheels by Polly Evans about the author’s extensive journey through Spain on a bicycle.

915 Geography of & travel in Asia

915 In the footsteps of Marco Polo: a companion to the public television film by Denis Belliveau and Francis O'Donnell
The authors describe their overland duplication of Marco Polo's journey from Venice to China and back which took them across 20 countries in 2 years. I found this book more interesting than the film to which it supposedly serves as a companion.
915.1 Fried eggs with chopsticks: one woman's hilarious adventure into a country and a culture not her own by Polly Evans
The author describes her extensive journey through China, traveling the way locals do and visiting areas unfrequented by foreigners.
915.7 Through Siberia by accident, Silverland by Dervla Murphy
At the age of 73 Murphy decided to go bicycling in Siberia (in 2001). Two accidents she suffered there interfered with her plans, and she traveled by bus and boat instead, but the book hasn’t suffered for it. She has described places few people visit in an interesting way, helped in part by an unusual (by western standards) hospitality of the local people. Her books are also entirely free from prejudice most western writers exhibit towards Russia, as a result of their exposure to Cold War propaganda during their formative years – a rarity in my reading experience.
915.91 Touch the dragon: a Thai journal by Karen Connelly
The author, a Canadian, describes the year she spent in Thailand as a high school exchange student in 1986-87. It’s a remarkably well-written, informative and thoughtful book, especially considering that she reconstructed most of it from her teenage journals and letters.

916 Geography of & travel in Africa

916 Dark Star Safari: overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux

917 Geography of & travel in North America

917 Granny D: walking across America in my 90th year by Doris Haddock
The author recounts her 14-months long walking trip from Los Angeles to Washington, DC to attract attention to the need for a campaign finance reform. She was always accompanied by younger relatives or friends for various parts of the journey, but, yes, she has walked across the entire continent on foot at the age of 89. Part a travel book, part memoir, part a political discussion. Great sense of humor.
917.4 A walk in the woods: rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson

918 Geography of & travel in South America

918 How to walk a puma and other things I learned while stumbling through South America by Peter Allison about the still wild and dangerous places on that continent.
918.1 A Parisian in Brazil by Adele Toussaint-Samson about 19th century Brazil

919 Geography of & travel in other areas

919.3 Kiwis might fly by Polly Evans about the author’s extensive journey around New Zealand on a motorcycle
919.4 In a sunburned country by Bill Bryson about Australia

• 920 Biography, genealogy, insignia
929 Genealogy, names & insignia

• 930 History of ancient world to ca. 499

930.1 Frauds, myths and mysteries: science and pseudoscience in archaeology by Kenneth L. Feder
The author, a professor of anthropology, debunks various historical myths, like the possibility of the existence of Atlantis or ancient pre-Viking voyages from the Old World to the New, by making comparisons with cultures that really existed and expeditions that did happen and showing what constitutes credible archeological evidence and how persistent such evidence is. A small expedition may have passed through Florida several centuries ago, and it’s still possible to find physical evidence of their passing! He also shows, through concrete examples, how unreliable the evidence of “witnesses” is and how little credence can be given to it in the absence of more material proof.

931 China to 420
932 Egypt to 640
933 Palestine to 70
934 India to 647
935 Mesopotamia & Iranian Plateau to 637
936 Europe north & west of Italy to ca 499

936.2 If stones could speak: unlocking the secrets of Stonehenge by Marc Aronson
This is a book for young adults, but of high quality, describing most recent research on Stonehenge.

937 Italy & adjacent territories to 476

937 The immense majesty: a history of Rome and the Roman Empire by Thomas W. Africa

938 Greece to 323

938 Ancient Greece by Thomas Martin

939 Other parts of ancient world to ca. 640

• 940 History of Europe

940.3 The war to end all wars: World War I by Russell Freedman
940.421 Truce: the day the soldiers stopped fighting by Jim Murphy
This is a book for young adults, but sophisticated enough for any age, about various opposing military units in World War I which decided to stop fighting on Christmas Day in 1914, sang carols to each other across the trenches, and even went so far as to climb out of the trenches, exchange food and souvenirs for each others’ kids and even in some instances celebrate together. Needless to say, the military commanders were quite unhappy about this fraternizing with the enemy, had it stopped as soon as they could and made sure nothing like it happened next year. A few units apparently tried, but heavy losses suffered by both sides during the elapsed year, as much as the orders, made the efforts nowhere as widespread as in the first year. The author also gives a wider picture of the war, such as pointing out that while new powerful weapons had just been invented, no adequate defenses had evolved to match them, which accounted for so many dead, in addition to weather conditions and influenza epidemics.

941 British Isles

941.009 Royal panoply: brief lives of the English monarchs by Carolly Erickson
Far from being a coffee table or a dry reference book, this book describes British monarchs from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II in a very honest and memorable way.

942 England & Wales

942.014 Alfred the Great by P. J. Helm
942.021 1066: the year of the conquest by David Howarth
A highly readable, albeit a highly partial account.
942.07 England in the age of Hogarth by Derek Jarrett
A sweeping, well-analyzed and vivid portrait of England in the 18th century.

943 Central Europe; Germany

943.7 From Africa to Bukova by Pearl Harris
An account of a woman who, together with her husband, immigrated from South Africa to a village in the Czech Republic, at 57 and 67 respectively.

944 France & Monaco

944.89 Life in a postcard: escape to the French Pyrenees by Rosemary Bailey
The author and her husband, freelance British writers, bought a ruined monastery in Catalan France, eventually converted it to a home and settled to raise their son there. A bit too much about the house and the author’s reconstruction of what life was like there in the past, but many interesting details about the region too, which sounds interesting, filled as it is half with local residents and half with settlers from elsewhere in France and the world in general.

945 Italian Peninsula & adjacent islands

945.62 North of Naples, south of Rome by Paolo Tullio
The author was born in a fairly typical Italian valley whose location is indicated in the titled. He grew up in England and then settled down in Ireland with his Irish wife, but every summer, both as a kid and as an adult, he came back to his native valley, together with his family. His book about life in Italy is very insightful and well-analyzed. It’s exactly the case when being fluent in the language, having many relatives and friends in the area, and visiting the place regularly for sizable periods of time have given him familiarity with it, while living mostly elsewhere has given him a wider perspective.

946 Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands

946.754 Snowball oranges: a winter’s tale on a Spanish isle by Peter Kerr
The author and his wife sold their barley and bullocks farm in Scotland and bought an orange farm in Majorca. Hilarious book, but I don’t know how much of it is true and how much was invented for entertainment.

947 Eastern Europe; Russia
948 Scandinavia

948.506 Fly fishing the river of second chances by Jennifer Olsson
The author, a fly fishing guide from Montana, describes life in a Swedish village where her second husband is from. Quite a charming book and exceptionally well-written

949 Other parts of Europe

• 950 History of Asia; Far East

950 Adventures on the ancient Silk Road by Priscilla Galloway with Dawn Hunter
A young adult book, really well-written and illustrated, about 3 men who in different times traveled along the Silk Road: a 7th century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Juan-zhang) who went to India to copy the originals of Buddhist scriptures, Genghis Khan and Marco Polo. Naturally, I found the first section the most interesting since I had never heard about this monk, but the other two sections are also very good.

951 China & adjacent areas
952 Japan
953 Arabian Peninsula & adjacent areas
954 South Asia; India
955 Iran

955.054 Persepolis: the story of a childhood by Marjane Satrapi

956 Middle East (Near East)

956.94 Home to stay: one American family's chronicle of miracles and struggles in contemporary Israel by Daniel Gordis
An American Israeli's memorable and thoughtful account of life in Israel during the first years after he had moved there with his family in 1998.

957 Siberia (Asiatic Russia)

957.7 Tent life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia by George Kennan
When the first attempt to lay a telegraph cable under the Atlantic had failed, it was proposed to build an overland line to Europe via Alaska, Bering’s Straits and Siberia. There already was a line from the mouth of the Amur river to Europe, and so the Russo-American Telegraph Company needed the build the line along the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. To this end, an exploring party was sent to Siberia in 1865-1867, consisting of several individuals eager for an adventure, of whom the author was one. The second successful attempt to lay the cable under the Atlantic made this project obsolete, but Kennan’s book is no less interesting for it.

958 Central Asia
959 Southeast Asia

• 960 History of Africa

960.07 Not out of Africa: how Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history by Mary Lefkowitz
The author discusses how the desire of some Ancient Egyptians to show that Ancient Greek culture was more indebted to theirs than it really was, coupled with some Ancient Greeks’ lack of understanding of Ancient Egyptian language and religion as well as their own desire to show that their culture had sprung from a more ancient one and thus was more ancient itself, led to erroneous information being passed down in some Ancient Greek treatises; how the stories grew in the telling as centuries passed by, down to a Greek from the late Roman Empire era writing a manuscript purporting to be a translation from an Ancient Egyptian philosophical manuscript composed “at the beginning of time,” which was rediscovered by Europeans during the Renaissance, taken at its face value and inspired a religion of its own which by the 17th century became the Masonic movement. Lefkowitz tells how an 18th century classical scholar wrote a historical novel about Ancient Egypt based on the ancient erroneous or forged sources and on his own ideas about an enlightened state, which gained enormous popularity in Europe and continued to be believed by a fair number of Masons and educated Blacks even after Champollion’s decipherment of Ancient Egyptians’ scripts showed what their civilization was really like. Apparently, these tales found a fertile soil in today’s Afrocentric movement, as there are professors who teach their students that all Ancient Greek philosophers first studied in Ancient Egypt, and as for Aristotle, he simply plagiarized his multifaceted books from the Library of Alexandria, forget that it was founded after his death. And apparently there are accredited universities in the US that allow their professors to teach such “history,” because “each of us has a different but equally valid view of history,” as the dean of Lefkowitz’ college (Wellesley) explained to her. It was this changing view of “academic freedom” that prompted the author to write this book.

961 Tunisia & Libya
962 Egypt & Sudan

962.05 Now they call me infidel: why I renounced jihad for America, Israel, and the war on terror by Nonie Darwish
The author describes her childhood and youth in Egypt, her move to the USA and the Muslim culture in general. I found her description of Egyptian history, life and culture from the 1960s onto the present and of the current Muslim culture in the USA interesting, even if personally I thought her view of the USA a bit too rosy.

963 Ethiopia & Eritrea
964 Northwest African coast & offshore islands
965 Algeria
966 West Africa & offshore islands
967 Central Africa & offshore islands

967.73 Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The author describes her experiences growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya and her move to the Netherlands where she was eventually elected to parliament. Incidentally, I found her description of life in the Netherlands as fascinating as those of Africa and Saudi Arabia. Still, I think it’s right to class her book in the history Somalia, both because that’s where most of it takes place and because of her father’s involvement with its politics and her witnessing the Somalian Civil War.

968 Southern Africa

968.83 Twenty chickens for a saddle: the story of an African childhood by Robyn Scott
The author recounts her childhood in Botswana, in an eccentric but functional family. Both her sets of grandparents lived there, her parents had grown up and met there and then returned there with 3 young kids in tow after a hiatus in Britain and New Zealand. Her book is very well-written and presents a captivating description of daily life in Botswana, as well as a wider view of the country, its history and current issues.

969 South Indian Ocean islands

• 970 History of North America
971 Canada
972 Middle America; Mexico
973 United States

973.3 Benjamin Franklin: an American life by Walter Isaacson
973.7 The mysterious Private Thompson: the double life of Sarah Emma Edmonds, Civil War soldier by Laura Leedy Gansler
A biography of a female Union soldier in disguise, this book also presents a vivid general picture of the early period of the war.

974 Northeastern United States
975 Southeastern United States

975.9 Dream state: eight generations of swamp lawyers, conquistadors, Confederate daughters, banana Republicans, and other Florida wildlife by Diane Roberts
A history of the state, often illustrated with stories about the author’s numerous ancestors

976 South central United States
977 North central United States
978 Western United States

978.362 Lakota woman by Mary Crow Dog
The author recounts growing up on a reservation in South Dakota in the 1960s, her participation in the Native American movement, including siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, and her subsequent life. What I particularly liked about this book is that, despite the author’s political activities and clearly stated views, she presents a very honest description of both her culture and herself.
978.803 Nothing daunted: the unexpected education of two society girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden
The author describes the experiences of her grandmother and her best friend growing up in Auburn, NY, studying in Smith College, going to Europe on a grand tour, and teaching for a year in the country in Colorado in the early 20th century, as well as paints a wide picture of life in the northwest at the time.

979 Great Basin & Pacific Slope region

979.803 The impossible rescue: the true story of an amazing Arctic adventure by Martin W. Sandler
The author recounts the 1897-1898 overland expedition which required its members to walk two thousand miles in Alaska in winter in order to rescue stranded whalers. It’s written for young adults, but is quite detailed.

• 980 History of South America
981 Brazil
982 Argentina
983 Chile
984 Bolivia
985 Peru
986 Colombia & Ecuador
987 Venezuela
988 Guiana
989 Paraguay & Uruguay

• 990 History of other areas
993 New Zealand

993 Slipping into Paradise: why I live in New Zealand by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
The author explains that he uses the word “paradise” in the sense of unspoiled and uncrowded beautiful land, rather than an utopia. He readily acknowledges New Zealand’s drawbacks, such as high suicide and child abuse rates, the paucity of its intellectual and cultural life, and ethnic prejudices (not that they are necessarily unique to New Zealand), but goes on to say that it’s still his preferred country to live in because of its abundant natural beauty, lots of warmth and sunshine, and the general democratic spirit of the place (e.g. the minister of foreign affairs agreed to stop by the author’s house to answer questions for this book). I found the book quite dogmatic at times and a bit dragging at others (is there a species of tree in New Zealand the author did not feel bound to mention?), but mostly informative and interesting.

994 Australia

994.008 A cargo of women by Babette Smith
The author follows the journey of a hundred convicted women to Australia in 1829 and the subsequent lives of a dozen or so which she could trace. By then the conditions for transported convicts had changed considerably: they weren’t held in confinement once they had reached Australia and just had to check in with authorities on a regular basis at first, and so they actually had a chance to make a fresh start. Results varied, as some were luckier than others.

995 Melanesia; New Guinea

995.103 Child of the jungle: the true story of a girl caught between two worlds by Sabine Kuegler
The author, a German, recounts growing up among a Stone Age people, the Fayu, in the west New Guinea in Indonesia, with her linguist/missionary father and nurse mother and her subsequent attempts to adjust to modern life in Europe. I found her descriptions in turns enchanting, humorous and poignant, as well as very informative and thoughtful.

996 Other parts of Pacific; Polynesia
997 Atlantic Ocean islands
998 Arctic islands & Antarctica
999 Extraterrestrial worlds

Currently I've read books from 47 divisions out of 99 (goal 90) and 104 sections out of 903 (goal 750).

I have inserted underscores into several titles to prevent the system from linking to wrong titles.

I wonder how one can change fonts in the text of one's message - at least to have bold and italics? I've found that all formatting disappears during copying and pasting from MS Word, and pressing Ctrl+b or +i serves other functions. Thank you!

Ella_Jill

An interesting assortment of books!

Re bold and italics, see post #3 here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/104943.

Welcome and good luck! You'll find that this will be a lifetime project and you'll discover a lot of interesting books to fill in your numbers.

Thank you very much!

You're ahead of me already!

Nice to see all that Ingersoll up there. I added Some Mistakes of Moses to my TBR list after hearing how much Twain thought of it, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Welcome to the challenge! I hope you enjoy it. Definitely a lifetime project....

Thank you for your welcome!

16>
Yes, Ingersoll's writings are always a pleasure to read! I'm so grateful to the good folks at the Secular Web who've put up his entire oeuvre on their site, since it's so hard to find his works in print.

I’ve read The book of general ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson for 031. I must say that it turned out to be quite difficult to find such a general Q&A type of book that is wholly accurate. I’ve looked through half a dozen of them and tried to read several, but found that while they were mostly correct, they also contained partially or wholly wrong answers, including on easily verifiable facts. I haven’t found this book to be fully accurate either, but it proved to be the best of its kind from what the two public libraries nearest to me have to offer. Of course, I haven’t checked all the information in it, but I did try to check the most surprising answers. Here are some of the most interesting facts I’ve gleaned from this book.

Contrary to what I had assumed, not all of Antarctica is covered with snow and ice. There are areas there called the Dry Valleys which haven’t seen any precipitation whatsoever for 2 million years, due to winds reaching 200 mph which evaporate all moisture from the air. NASA tested their equipment for a Mars probe there.

All the plague epidemics that came to Europe from Asia started with a Mongolian species of marmots which is particularly susceptible to this bacteria. They give the disease to fleas which give it to rats which give it to humans. Actually, just a year ago there was a case of a Chinese road construction worker who shot, cooked and ate a marmot, soon felt ill and was rushed to the hospital where he died from plague – not being a local he didn’t know about the dangers of marmots. What most surprised me is that apparently nobody there is calling for the wholesale extermination of marmots. Here, in the US, the far more harmless wolves, coyotes and black bears are treated like public enemies, and in China and Mongolia apparently people are content just to try to be careful with the animals that can give them the plague!

The first steam engine in the world was invented by an Alexandrian called Heron or Hero in 62 CE. His contemporaries viewed it as an amusing, but useless novelty. (He also discovered the formulas to calculate the area of a triangle and other 2- and 3-dimensional figures).

The telephone was apparently invented by an Italian-American Antonio Meucci in 1860. He couldn’t afford to pay for a definitive patent and filed a one-year renewable notice of an impending patent, but later on, badly injured when a ferry’s boiler exploded and living on charity, he couldn’t afford even to renew that. He sent sketches and working models to the Western Union telegraph company, but didn’t get a response from them and was later told that they had been lost. When Bell, who had shared a laboratory with him, filed a patent for a telephone, Meucci sued, and fraud charges were initiated against Bell, but then Meucci died and the lawsuit was dropped. In 2002 a vote in the US House of Representatives declared Meucci the inventor of the telephone. (However, this book says that the vote took place in 2004, and implies that Bell worked in the Western Union lab where Meucci sent his documents and from where they “mysteriously disappeared.”)

Penicillin was first discovered by a French army doctor Ernest Duchesne in 1897. He saw Arab stable boys deliberately trying to cultivate mold on saddles, and they explained that it helps cure horses’ sores. Duchesne conducted research, identified the mold as Penicillum glaucum, and used it to cure typhoid in guinea pigs and kill colonies of E.coli. He wrote a report to Institut Pasteur which ignored it (Pasteur himself had died 2 years previously). Military duties prevented Duchesne from promoting his discoveries more vigorously, and then he died at 28 from tuberculosis – an illness later cured with antibiotics! When Alexander Fleming had rediscovered penicillin in 1928, his findings were also ignored till World War II started, and the pressing need for antibacterial drugs prompted Ernst Chain and Howard Florey to work to isolate the active compound within the mold (which Fleming had been unable to do). Production of penicillin began in 1942; in 1945 Fleming, Chain and Florey received the Nobel Prize. In 1949 Duchesne was honored posthumously, but remained in obscurity.

There are 3,000-4,700 tigers in India and 12,000 tigers kept as private pets in the USA, with 4,000 living in captivity in Texas alone (both in zoos and as pets), and 500 tigers, lions and other big cats “in private ownership” just in the Houston area. Apparently, the success of zoo and circus breeding programs has brought the price of tigers down to $1,000 per cub which has placed them within reach of an average American pet owner! Only 17 states don’t allow private ownership of tigers. But on the bright side of things, if tigers become extinct in the wild (as the authors expect they will), there’ll be enough stock in the US to restore them to the jungles once/if people wise up.

And speaking of humans’ impact on the planet, the single largest man-made structure is now a rubbish dump in Staten Island, NY, which trumps by volume the Great Wall of China and at its peak was higher than the Statue of Liberty by more than 80 feet. It was closed in 2001 and is “being flattened and landscaped into parkland and a wildlife facility.” (The dump’s area is 4.6 square miles, and it’s called Fresh Kills, after the Dutch word kil for “small river.”)

In ecological good news, it looks like cotton clothes may be replaced by nettle ones in the not-so-far future. Nettles don’t require the massive watering that cotton does and can grow in any climate and without pesticides. Apparently, nettles were widely used to make cloth in Europe before the 16th century, when they were eclipsed by cotton because cotton was easier to harvest and spin, but today’s technology has evolved enough to make fibers from nettles without too much trouble.

If some species of ribbon worms get fragmented into small pieces, each piece becomes a new worm, and a species of freshwater flatworm regenerates into two full-sized worms if split lengthwise or crosswise. And speaking of curious methods of reproduction, I knew that hens can lay eggs without roosters, albeit unfertilized eggs from which no chicks will emerge, but now I’ve learnt that there are turkeys which lay eggs and have chicks without males. Apparently, usually unfertilized eggs have only half the chromosomes (from the mother) and don’t develop into chicks, but in some turkeys the chromosomes in such a case sometimes double themselves, and then a chick does develop. Turkeys which have such a proclivity have been bred to the point that it has become their stable characteristic. The resulting chicks are only half-clones of their mothers, because they’ve only got a half of their mothers’ genes (multiplied by two). In fact, they are all (infertile) males, because in turkeys it’s the males who have the same gender chromosomes (ZZ).

The authors of this book also claim that the first modern Olympics took place in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, in 1850, under the initiative of a surgeon William Penny Brookes, and quickly attracted athletes from all over the country. In 1865, Brookes helped establish the National Olympian Association which held its first Olympic Games in 1866 at the Crystal Palace in London, but his attempts to organize an international Olympian Festival in Athens in 1881 failed. In 1889, he invited Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the organizer of an International Congress on Physical Education, to see the Games in Much Wenlock and thus inspired him to start a global Olympic movement. Much of this is confirmed in the 2010 edition of Britannica and elsewhere, although in 1859 the first international Olympic Games were held in Athens, while all the Games organized by Brookes were of national character. (The 1896 Athens Olympics was the first one organized by IOC, and thus the first official one.)

Lloyd and Mitchinson further maintain that America was really named after Richard Ameryck from Bristol who was the chief investor of John Cabot’s second transatlantic voyage because there’s a reference to the continent in the Bristol calendar of that year where the name America was first used; no copies of this calendar survived, but “there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents.” However, there’s no bibliography in this book, and personally I couldn’t find any confirmation of this. So whether Martin Waldseemüller was mistaken in attributing the name to Vespucci on his map – the first one ever to use it – remains to be seen.

They also write that Aristarchus of Samos, born in 310 BCE, was the first person to embrace the heliocentric system, which he did, and that “he also calculated the relative sizes and distances of the earth, moon, and sun,” which he also did, except that his calculations were (very) incorrect, which they don’t mention.

There’s also a curious statement in this book that “the fumes from your car’s exhaust (when combined with sunlight) create far more ozone than anything on the beach.” I didn’t know what to make of this, since all the references to car exhaust and ozone I could find on the Internet implied the opposite relationship, as one would expect.

Still, inaccuracies in this book seem to be rare, and I did learn lots of interesting information from it which I wouldn’t have been likely to find out otherwise.

I’d also like to apologize for such an extremely long post. Since the book touches upon so many different subjects, it’s difficult to summarize it briefly. I’ve really just scratched the surface of it :).

Your summary was fascinating and I now have another wishlist book. Are you planning to do it as a review?

Yes. I've been rather lazy about reviewing books that I've read and enjoyed, but I'd like to do it more often.

Thank you!

Interesting list! Good luck with the challenge.

I’ve read the book Dinosaurs in the attic: an excursion into the American Museum of Natural History by Douglas J. Preston for 069, but then I began to wonder why it’s classed there and not in the 500s, when all the books on art museums, for example, are in the 700s. So I checked in the Dewey schedules, and read for 069.95 “class here specific museums not limited to a specific discipline or subject…. Class museums devoted to specific disciplines or subjects with the discipline or subject, plus notation 074 from Table 1, e.g. natural history museums 508.074.” However, even the CIP for this book lists the 069.95 number! So I had to count this book for 508 and read something else for 069 – Treasures of the Smithsonian by Edwards Park (yes, his first name is Edwards, not Edward – it’s not a typo). (This discovery prompted me to check and correct some other numbers on my list.)

In general, I’ve found Dinosaurs more interesting and informative than Treasures, since Preston is obviously a more talented writer of the two. He has a better sense of what might interest the general public (for example, he includes thrilling accounts of major specimen-gathering expeditions, while Park merely mentions one), but the fact is that he can make anything he writes about sound interesting, even the history of the founding of the museum or the process of reducing a corpse to a skeleton. His book is divided into three parts. In the first (fairly short) part he discusses the founding of the museum, in the second he describes the expeditions organized by the museum, and in the third he takes the reader on a tour of the museum, including the parts unseen by the general public. By the end of the book, I had learned quite a lot about how anthropologists, biologists and paleontologists work, and the museum’s collections had become much more meaningful to me. I understand that Park faced a considerably more daunting task, having to describe what are in essence 13 different institutions, of which the museum of natural history is only one. Still, his plan of mixing the exhibits from different museums in most chapters, in accordance with some kind of personal idiosyncrasy rather than going museum by museum, doesn’t help one get a sense of any one of them. In general, the word “personal” is unavoidable when describing his book. He talks quite a lot about the feelings exhibits evoke for him and even admits to including this or that material based on a purely personal appeal. In short, while I had learned practically nothing about Preston from his book, except that he’s obviously a very good writer, and a great deal about all the key personalities associated with the AMNH who’ve made it one of the premier natural history museums in the world, in case of Park’s book this situation is reversed. Still, I can’t say that reading Treasures was a waste of time: the illustrations are superb, and I did find out about many American artists I hadn’t known about before.

I’ve also just finished the book Bright-sided: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich (155.232) which I thoroughly enjoyed. She discusses how our culture has branded any sad, critical, angry or even skeptical reaction as being “negative” and demands at least outward demonstration of optimism and calm, if not outright enthusiasm at the new supposed “opportunities,” from everybody, from overworked employees to the unemployed and cancer patients, forcing people to fight their natural moods when they need energy for more important things. She further shows how data gets misrepresented by the self-help industry, now joined by a growing number of churches and even the American Psychological Association, to show upbeat attitude’s positive effects on health and success in life. The author also describes how people get deluded by motivational speakers, pastors and best-selling how-to-improve-your-life books into spending beyond their means and making risky investments, by being told that visualizing what we want will bring it to us because the universe operates like a “mail-in department store.” Nor does any of this help make us actually happier, even before the real world comes knocking, since there’s a huge difference between the natural happiness and optimism that are based on reality and the forced cheerfulness that one must constantly fight to maintain in the face of unhappy circumstances. Reading this book, I thought about Americans making lying the worst deadly sin and yet turning “Hello! How are you?” into a standard greeting.

I’ve also finished listening to Teaching Company’s lectures on linguistics The story of human language by John McWhorter (417.7) which I enjoyed as well. I took a course on linguistics in college, but still learned a ton from these lectures. McWhorter describes how languages acquire grammar when words which originally meant something gradually turn into suffixes, prefixes and particles; how languages tend to become increasingly and unnecessarily complex if not checked by vast waves of new arrivals or spreading literacy which tends to slow down any language change; how new languages are born and how languages die (in the same stages, happening in the opposite order); and discusses the enormous variety of languages out there. McWhorter, unfortunately, does seem to have a bias in favor of oral languages which he often refers to as “natural” and “real” languages, while “the Oxford Standard Dictionary and the prose of Milton are historical curiosities, departures from the ‘natural,’ similar to dogs that bring in the newspaper.” Of course, the major difference here is that no dog starts bringing in the newspaper on its own accord, no matter how many times it sees its humans reading it, while writing systems and literatures arose independently in vastly different cultures over 5,000 years of human history. McWhorter himself once slips out of his PC stance when he writes the following introduction to Lecture 18 in his course guidebook: “Written languages do have certain what you might call advantages over oral languages. Sometimes you’re not supposed to say this too loud, like many things that are true, but a written language has a larger and richer vocabulary than a solely oral language. And in many ways, it has a more elaborate kind of syntax and other ways of arranging its words to convey meaning.” Once again, I couldn’t help smiling wryly over the contradiction between our society’s outward insistence on always telling the truth and the fact that “many things that are true” “you’re not supposed to say… too loud” and even more over the awkward phrasing of this paragraph – of written language, no less. Why “do have certain what you might call advantages” rather than simply “do have certain advantages”? And why “a more elaborate kind of syntax” instead of simply “a more elaborate syntax”? As a linguist, McWhorter can’t be unaware of these filler words in his sentences; it feels like he’s trying to apologize for once letting slip something somebody somewhere may not be happy to hear by manifesting his discomfort over having to admit this fact. His bias towards oral languages seems to lead him to overemphasize the difference between the written and spoken language, for instance, by claiming that some features of spoken American English generally considered ungrammatical, such as the use of double negatives, substitution of “who” for “whom,” or constructs like “Bill and me” are much more widespread than I personally have observed them to be in real life, apparently to be able to claim that universality should bring these practices legitimacy (Hey, no one really talks “correctly” outside of the classroom!). And since he exaggerates this gap with English, I don’t know how much I can trust him when he makes similar claims for other languages, e.g. that the difference between Standard Arabic used in print and media and spoken Arabic (different in each country) is so great that it’s practically like different mutually-unintelligible languages, or that ever since the Middle Ages everybody in France has been dropping “ne” in negative phrases in conversation, leaving only the “pas,” and that “French people on all levels of society” have been saying “on” with 3rd person singular instead of “nous” with 1st person plural for “we” for centuries. On the whole, however, I quite enjoyed these lectures. McWhorter has a very engaging presentation style and certainly knows how to keep his audience interested.

I’ve also just read a book called Harry Potter: film wizardry by Brian Sibley (791.4375) about the making of all the Harry Potter films, except the last one which hadn’t been released when this book was published. I’ve found it interesting not only from the standpoint of a HP fan, but also as a window into the modern movie-making process in general (at least, if they have a huge budget). The two things that especially struck me when reading this book was how much actors are apparently expected to put up with, and how much time, effort and money gets spent on unnecessary props or even props the audience doesn’t get to see. But I really enjoyed this book – it’s informative and beautifully done. I already have a book in 791, but decided to add this one as an alternative.

And I’ve also decided to add The war to end all wars: World War I by Russell Freedman (940.3) as an alternative. It’s written for school kids, but it’s a decent length (170 pages), and it’s ideal for someone like me who wants to know the basics about WWI, but doesn’t have the heart to read a detailed, lengthy account of it. It’s a well-written, interesting and impartial account. It does, however, subscribe to the general view that the Treaty of Versailles sawed the seeds for WWII by imposing impossible demands on Germany. Since all then second-world countries – Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and the Soviet Union – developed aggressive military dictatorships, whatever their ideologies and side in WWI, I think the Treaty of Versailles was not the primary reason behind the Nazis’ coming to power in Germany and WWII in general.

Again, I must apologize for a lengthy post. This time the problem is not with summation, but with too many books to describe. But if you don’t mind, you can read my full-length reviews of these books on my review page :). (For some reason, when I tried linking to it, it linked to a new topic page instead.)

great list, thoughtful post.

23: Your comparison of Dinosaurs in the Attic and Treasures of the Smithsonian is quite useful. Thanks. I'm now keen to learn about the "process of reducing a corpse to a skeleton", and I'm always awed by how much work of how many people is necessary to produce things we take for granted. The mixing of Smithsonian museums along with evoked personal feelings would be irritating.

>23 Ella_Jill:
The incorrect CIP entry is at least understandable, although it's funny that it contradicts the exact example in the schedule. The weirdest one I've ever scene is the CIP for The Big Sort. It's a book about how Americans are increasing clustering themselves in homogenous groups of their own choosing. The CIP lists it as a 005 - computer programming, programs, and data, which is where my local branch had it. Your post reminded me of it so I went to check that I remembered it correctly and they eventually figured it out and have reclassified into the 300s.

Thanks for the review. I'm looking forward to reading Dinosaurs in the Attic.

just found your thread and added many books to my wishlist based on your reviews. Thanks for your thorough comments

Thank you very much for your comments!

I have just read Nellie Bly: daredevil, reporter, feminist by Brooke Kroeger (070.92) and an abridged version of Nellie Bly’s Book: around the world in 72 days edited by Ira Peck (910.41).

This abridged book is a decent length at 117 pages and definitely worth reading if one can’t locate the unabridged version, as happened to me (no library in my state has it – even this abridged version I had to obtain via interlibrary loan). The book is lively, and even though the necessity for speed made some sections of it – especially on Europe where transportation was more efficient – unavoidably brief, there’s still plenty of fascinating descriptions in it. I really enjoyed it, but amn’t going to add it to my list since I already have 2 unabridged books in 910.

Bly’s whole life was a fascinating one. Finding herself without the means to support herself or to finish her education at a teachers’ college, she wrote an angry, but well-reasoned retort to an article by a local journalist who decried women who tried to enter “the men’s sphere,” i.e. who tried to provide for themselves instead of looking for a man who’d provide for them. Bly’s letter won a job offer from the newspaper – and a life-long friendship of the journalist whose article had so incensed her. However, bored with covering “women’s interest” topics, she took off to Mexico and proceeded to write articles from there. Seeing no improved prospects upon her return, Bly soon moved to New York where she eventually landed a job in the most popular newspaper, despite all the publishers’ initial assurances that they had more than enough journalists in general and female journalists in particular. Bly proceeded to write highly successful expose articles, reporting on conditions in an insane asylum and paper box factories, or unscrupulous practices of employment agencies and of Albany politicians, but not wholly eschewing lighter topics, such as writing about learning to fence or about female medical students – a sort of “women’s interest” article she apparently didn’t mind doing. Her articles brought her a national renown and popularity even before her trip around the world.

Bly was surprisingly multi-talented. When she inherited a factory, she learned how every machine in it worked and then designed improved ones (she ended up holding 25 patents) and quadrupled its business. But unfortunately, she didn’t pay anywhere as much attention to the financial side of the company's operation as to the technological one, and ended up being swindled by accountants who embezzled her into bankruptcy. Amazingly, banks cashed obviously forged checks, with one amount crossed out and another written on top of it or with acid stains in the relevant fields, and then came together demanding that Bly pay them back the amount they had cashed – and the courts upheld their claims! A friend warned her that “‘there is a great prejudice against you in the atmosphere of the federal court in Brooklyn,’” several lawyers recommended to her by her friends refused to take up her case, while the forgers had no problem getting top-notch representation, and when a judge ruled in Bly’s favor, he “suddenly came under investigation by the grievance committee of the Brooklyn Bar Association on complaints against him in 15 cases.... The complainants were led by the attorneys for Bly’s creditors.”

Faced with the necessity to make a living again, Bly returned to journalism, going to Europe to cover World War I and to help organize relief for soldiers’ widows and orphans, and then returning to her old newspaper in New York after the war. In this latter part of her career she often wrote advice articles based on the numerous letters she received from readers. However, Bly’s active and compassionate nature couldn’t limit itself to advice alone, and she often helped people get healthcare and find jobs and affordable childcare, and turned her home into a temporary home for abandoned children for whom she was finding adoptive families. She didn’t slow down the pace of her life even when she found herself getting in and out of hospital; Bly died at 57 from bronchopneumonia complicated by heart disease.

Nellie Bly’s life was a full, varied and admirable one, but unfortunately this biography’s tone marred my enjoyment of it considerably. The author writes in the introduction to her book that Bly was her inspiration for becoming a journalist herself and that it took her a lot of effort to do research for a full biography when she learned that none existed, except for children. Therefore, the snide tone Brooke Kroeger maintains throughout her book took me completely by surprise. She misses no opportunity to criticize or belittle Bly and seems almost to take pleasure in recounting Bly's misfortunes (at great length – the chapter on bankruptcy is 60 pages long). To give but a couple of a myriad of examples, Kroeger’s only comment regarding the banks’ most likely having hired lawyers for Bly’s embezzlers is, “There was nothing illegal about the banks’ interceding. In fact, it would have made good business sense.” When writing about Bly’s charitable activities, Kroeger finds it necessary to tell readers that Bly’s “need to feel vital and important was certainly part of” her motivation and that focusing on other people’s troubles must have helped her forget her own. “In any event, it enhanced the image of ‘angel of mercy’ she had been so busy cultivating with reports of her many good deeds.” Well, if everybody fulfilled their need to feel vital and important, forget their troubles and have a positive self-image by immersing themselves in real and practical humanitarian work, there would have been no need for such work. Kroeger mentions repeatedly in her book that the journalists’ professional publication hardly ever mentioned Bly’s work because of jealousy her success and fame arose in her colleagues, and it seems to me that Kroeger herself is not immune to this feeling - at any rate, I can't come up with any other explanation for her attitude. I’ve long wanted to read a biography of Nellie Bly because I thought it would be an interesting read, but her life story proved to be so much more. I came away from this book with a considerable respect and admiration for Bly, since the facts speak for themselves, despite the author’s tone – but if this hadn’t been the only biography of Bly, I would have preferred to read another book.

I’ve also read How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff for 310, and I must say I have mixed feelings about this book too :). I’ve found it interesting and useful, as many of the techniques he talks about seem still common today. For instance, there was recently an article in the Time magazine that men and women do equal amount of work today, because while women do more at home, men stay longer at work. Before reading Huff’s book I might have taken this article at face value, but now I immediately thought that all that it really shows is that men in the survey said they spend x number of hours on housework and childcare, not that they necessarily do so (and besides, the fact that a person spends a given number of hours at work doesn’t mean that all of it is spent on work). Or when I went to the website What’s On My Food which shows the amounts of different harmful chemicals found in various kinds of food by USDA labs, I saw that they took far fewer samples of organic versus “conventional” samples of the same kinds of foods (e.g. 708 samples of conventional apples versus 10 samples of organic ones; bananas: 717 vs. 26; butter: 181 vs. 15; potatoes: 716 vs. 8). Surely the number of samples will likely affect the maximum amount of harmful chemicals found in one sample which is listed in the table, and thus the average (also listed in the table). And what kind of serious study can be made based on 8-10 samples anyway? But at least they were honest enough to reveal how few organic samples they took, and not in small print either.

However, I’ve found Huff’s own logic not infallible either. For instance, he writes: “Dr. Kinsey’s samples of the population… are far from random ones and may not be particularly representative, but they are enormous samples by comparison with anything done in this field before and his figures must be accepted as revealing and important if not necessarily on the nose.” Talk about changing the subject! I haven’t read Dr. Kinsey’s book, and so can’t comment on the book itself, but if his samples “are far from random ones” what does it matter how many of them he collected? What if I contacted an enormous number of Yale grads who are members of yacht clubs and based my report on average Yale grads’ earnings on their responses? Would anyone say that my report “must be accepted as revealing and important if not necessarily on the nose”?

In his illustration of “post hoc” logic Huff criticizes those who decided that the high correlation between smoking in college students and their grades means that a regular nicotine intake must have a bad effect on young people’s intellectual capabilities. Instead, Huff suggests that it’s “a good deal more probable” that a third factor is at work here: “Can it be that the sociable sort of fellow who takes his books less than seriously is also likely to smoke more?” Well, I’m not a doctor, but it seems probable enough to me that toxins of any kind don’t help scholastic productivity, while Huff’s suggestion is just laughable. Drinking is what people do socially (unless they’re alcoholics), but smokers smoke regardless of whether they’re alone or in company; in fact, I would guess that they probably smoke more when working or studying alone, especially when under stress to solve a thorny problem, prepare for a test or finish a paper before a deadline, than when relaxing at a party.

Further on, Huff takes issue with This Week magazine’s conclusion that women who go to college are much less likely to attract a man since only 65% of middle-aged female college graduates turned out to be married, as opposed to 83% of middle-aged women in general. Huff declares that there’s no correlation between the conclusion and the data, that it’s just a guess, and then offers his own better-informed opinion: “Indeed there is one piece of evidence suggesting that a propensity for old-maidenhood may lead to going to college. Dr. Kinsey seems to have found some correlation between sexuality and education.” Lol! Huff, eager to find abuse of statistical logic everywhere, seems to turn a blind eye to Dr. Kinsey’s writings. And I gather that Kinsey found this “correlation” only in females. Personally, I’d have thought it more likely that a significant number of men back then weren’t interested in marrying highly-educated women. But why guess when there’s statistics? Huff’s book was published in 1954; so women who were middle-aged then must graduated from college in the 1920s and 30s. Infoplease gives the following data for the median age of women at marriage: 1920 – 21.2, 1930 – 21.3, and 1940 – 21.5 (as opposed to over 24 for men). So clearly, most women then married either after high school, or in the next few years in which case they left college without graduating if they happened to be attending one. In short, it’s not that the single BA women didn’t marry because they graduated from college – they graduated because they hadn’t gotten married.

In another instance Huff writes, “An article in Look magazine says, in connection with Mongolism, that ‘one study shows that in 2,800 cases over half of the mothers were 35 or over.’ Getting any meaning from this depends upon your knowing something about the ages at which women in general produce babies. Few of us know things like that.” Frankly, I hardly knew what to make out of this statement. It seems obvious that women having children after 35 would be a small minority in the 1950s, but if data is required, then according to Infoplease, women of 35 and over accounted for about 10.63% of births in 1950 and about 11.15% in 1955. So if their children accounted for over 50% of cases of Mongolism, whatever that is, it sure shows a strong correlation between the condition and the mother’s age (and would logically show an even stronger one if the father’s age was also taken into account).

So on the whole, it was an interesting book that gave me some food for thought, but for someone concerned with enlightening the population about the misuse of statistics, Huff seems strangely careless with data and conclusions himself.

I have read three more books: Omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan (394.12), Nothing daunted: the unexpected education of two society girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden (978.803) and Third world America: how our politicians are abandoning the middle class and betraying the American dream by Arianna Huffington (330.973).

In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan investigates the provenance of “conventional” industrial, organic industrial, pastoral industrial and personally hunted and gathered food. I’ve found it interesting and informative in general, but while its first and third sections couldn’t have been improved upon, the second and forth, in my opinion, leave much to be desired. He’s very good at showing how Nixon’s perversion of Roosevelt’s regulations, which nobody has changed since, leads to farmers growing as much corn as they can, regardless of the price, going into debt and flooding the market with such cheap corn that the food industry stuffs it into everything and feeds it to cattle instead of hay which does nothing good to the cattle or those who eat it. Then the author goes to an industrial organic facility and reports that they also hold cows in feedlots and feed them corn, albeit organic corn, and they don’t administer them antibiotics. But here’s the catch! Pollan says that “conventionally” raised cows have to be given antibiotics because otherwise they’ll die from illnesses resulting from overcrowding and unnatural diet. So how come the cows raised in feedlots on organic corn don’t need antibiotics? Pollan doesn’t say, choosing instead to repeat again, again and again how industrial organic companies also spend limited and polluting resources on shipping their products all over the world – as if otherwise readers might have imagined that organic food from California or Mexico shows up in New England via magic carpet. In fact, I got the feeling that Pollan wasn’t interested in informing readers about their choices, but rather in writing a propaganda piece about “pastoral organic” farming. He does do an excellent job describing a farm where cattle, grass, corn, chickens and pigs all exist in a natural ecosystem, and where one family, plus several interns, produce tens of thousands of pounds of each kind of meat or dozens of eggs per season. However, the fact that he visits only one such farm and that he finds absolutely nothing to criticize there – this whole section reads like a paean – makes me wonder if there’s more to the relationship than he discloses. Then Pollan tries his hand hunting wild descendants of domestic pigs in California and, well…. First he obsesses a lot over the ethics of eating animals at all, down to wondering if bullocks in slaughterhouses have time to realize they’re about to get killed, expressing concern for those which have to be re-stunned, and e-mailing Peter Singer to seek his approval to eat humanely killed animals. And then he goes hunting; experiences a higher sense of awareness which he likens to using narcotics; disdainfully dismisses people who enjoy outdoors without killing animals who live there as “tourists” who “achieve no such immersion or connection”; runs after animals with a gun after missing and spooking them; and shows no concern if a wounded animal has to be shot twice or escapes altogether. In short, all his preoccupation with ethics and compassion fly out the window because he finds that he enjoys the process – and he doesn’t even notice it! So for me, this book was a roller coaster of extremes, in terms of the information it provided.

The author of Nothing Daunted describes the experiences of her grandmother and her grandmother’s best friend growing up in Auburn, NY; studying in Smith College; going to Europe on a grand tour; and teaching for a year in the country in Colorado in the early 20th century. So it’s not just about how two society girls learned to live on a homestead on the western side of the Rockies accessible only by four-legged transport, but the focus is on that county which may serve as a mirror for what life was like then in the northwest. Those who like unhurried descriptions of how life used to be will enjoy this book.

Arianna Huffington, author of Third World America, discusses the corporations/government cronyism (nothing new there, although I think the story of the increasing disenfranchisement of the vast majority of our people, from administration to administration, can’t be told often enough), our outdated infrastructure (new, at least to me), inadequate environmental protection (the specifics of how companies avoid environmental responsibility, beyond bribery campaign donations or putting their own people in office, were new to me), our students’ poor test scores in comparison with other developed countries (nothing new, and IMO the things she talks about are not really the contributing factors), concluded by, sadly, a positivism sermon, i.e. it’s in the power of each individual to change the world, like Martin Luther King. Worth reading for the useful parts.

29: Good description of Omnivore's Dilemma. I read it... a few years ago?... and concluded that I can't in good conscience eat anything. I had a different reaction to the shipping of organic products; of course they don't arrive by magic carpet, but I hadn't much considered specifics of the process. And I see him less as either hypocritical or disdainful, and more as an observer of his own thoughts and experiences: when immersed in this situation he thinks this, when immersed in that situation he thinks that. As if these are somewhat virtual realities. Again, a few years ago. Didn't change my habits, because there was no clear decision to be made (and I went veggie 35 years ago). The ecosystem farm was quite interesting for the science of it. There was mention of another such farm in a New Yorker article about artificial meat.

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Regarding Michael Pollan, I wouldn't have minded if he'd mentioned the environmental costs of food transportation once, but he did it multiple times, instead of providing information I can't deduce on my own. I agree that his book provides a stunning example of how one's perception can change in a different environment, but what I found most startling was his failure to acknowledge the change, even long after the experience when he was editing the book - unless, of course, he believes that whatever makes him feel good is good, a conclusion I couldn't fully shake off, especially since the excitement he felt during the hunt permanently changed his ideas of what constitutes acceptable treatment of animals. And I felt that he put down non-hunting nature lovers as people who don't experience as close a connection to nature as hunters.

I also didn't change any of my habits after reading this book, since the new information I got out of it was mostly of academic nature, but maybe if I'd read it five years ago when it was published, it would have been different, for I definitely avoid "conventional" food much more now than I used to (I'm not a vegetarian, though).

I’ve finished Ashton Nichols’ adult teaching course on Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist movement (141.3), which is comprised of 24 lectures on CDs (although transcripts of the lectures are available in the guidebooks and I chose to read them rather than listen to them). Nichols presents the movement in its historical, social, philosophical, religious and literary context and also discusses various people influenced by the movement and its impact on the 19th and 20th centuries’ society. He presents Transcendentalism as a reaction against both the puritanical Calvinist religion and the materialistic (humanistic) secular philosophy of Locke and Hume, and explains in detail how it flowed from a number of sources, namely English Romanticism, German idealist philosophy, and Unitarian and eastern religions. Nichols discusses both major Transcendentalist figures and people who aren’t as widely known today, such as Dr. William Ellery Channing, his nephew of the same name, Theodore Parker and Moncure Conway, as well as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman who were influenced by Transcendentalism, and, somewhat less justifiably, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, since they were neither part of the movement nor directly influenced by it, even if they shared a number of political goals with Transcendentalists. I was an English major in college and studied all these writers in a number of courses, but still have come across some interesting, new (for me) points in these lectures, although naturally most new information I’ve gained from this course was about the non-literary figures, about most of whom I’d hardly known anything.

I’ve also read Not out of Africa: how Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history by Mary Lefkowitz (960.07). I don’t mind when some specific words that some people find insulting are eschewed in favor of more acceptable ones, as long as this doesn’t lead to previously published works being edited to conform to current social standards, but when outright lies, such as that Ancient Greeks “stole” their philosophy from Ancient Egyptians, are being taught in nationally-accredited universities in the name of academic freedom and raising self-esteem of minority students, I think tolerance goes way too far. Apparently Lefkowitz – a Classics professor at Wellesley College – felt the same way when the dean of the college explained to her that it was acceptable to teach such “history” because “each of us had a different but equally valid view of history.” In this book Lefkowitz discusses the roots of the misconception regarding the true origins of Ancient Greek philosophy and knowledge in general, and these roots go surprisingly far into antiquity.

The author shows how the desire of some Ancient Egyptians to show that Ancient Greek culture was more indebted to theirs than it really was, coupled with some Ancient Greeks’ lack of understanding of Ancient Egyptian language and religion and their own desire to show that their culture had sprung from a more ancient one and thus was more ancient itself, led to erroneous information being passed down in some Ancient Greek treatises. She details how the stories grew in the telling as centuries passed by, with more and more details being added on by subsequent writers, until we finally have an anonymous Greek from the late Roman Empire era writing a manuscript which he presented as a translation from an Ancient Egyptian philosophical manuscript composed “at the beginning of time.” This manuscript was rediscovered by Europeans during the Renaissance, taken at its face value and inspired a religion of its own which by the 17th century became the Masonic movement. Lefkowitz describes how an 18th century classical scholar wrote a historical novel about Ancient Egypt based on the ancient erroneous or forged sources and on his own ideas about a perfect enlightened state, and how this novel gained enormous popularity in Europe and continued to be believed by a fair number of Masons and educated Blacks even after Champollion’s decipherment of Ancient Egyptians’ scripts showed what their civilization was really like. Apparently, these tales found a fertile soil in today’s Afrocentric movement, as there are professors who teach their students that all Ancient Greek philosophers first studied in Ancient Egypt, and as for Aristotle, he simply plagiarized his multifaceted books from the Library of Alexandria, forget that it was founded after his death.

Now, I have no idea how widespread such teachings are in American colleges, but I first learned about this book from a guest essayist’s article in a totally mainstream city newspaper back in 1996 when Lefkowitz’s book was published. The essayist decried a number of books which “criticized Africa,” including this one, and urged people to “honor the mother continent.” My immediate reaction was to jot down all the titles and authors, intending to read them eventually – and I do feel rather ashamed that it sometimes takes me this long to get to books I plan to read. But the fact that this book could be criticized by a contributor to a respectable newspaper for failing to honor a continent makes me feel that it should be read.

I’ve also read Fly fishing the river of second chances by Jennifer Olsson (948.506). The author describes how she became a fly fishing guide in Montana, but most of the book is about the Swedish village where her second husband is from (they spend summers there and winters in Montana now). She writes extremely well, and her book manages to be both warm and realistic, as well as informational. She’s also unusually broad-minded. For example, instead of lamenting the paucity of choices in the stores of rural Sweden in comparison to what she was used to in Bozeman, Olsson decided that it saves time wasted on pondering trivial, nonessential options for more important things. She had written another book before this one (Cast again: tales of a fly-fishing guide) which I haven’t read, and so I think it likely that she was thinking of writing this book even as she was living it, so to speak, which may have led her to sample traditional rural Swedish pastimes like picking berries in the bog in the middle of the mosquito season, tasting fermented herring and accompanying a team of village men on a weekend moose hunt. (She herself didn’t shoot, but reported that while she felt sorry for a killed calf, when a magnificent bull moose came into view the next day, she mentally wished the hunter to “get it!” Personally, it reminded me of Bill Bryson’s words that moose are stupid about human hunters and that killing one is like killing a cow, because this particular moose first ran away from them after being spooked, but then he suddenly changed direction and began running towards them.) Still, this was only one chapter out of 30+, and on the whole I greatly enjoyed this book.

And speaking of Bryson, I’ve decided to list his Notes from a big country for 081. Much of what my local libraries have in this number are compilations of newspaper columns by various journalists, which is what Notes originally were, and I find Bryson’s columns more entertaining and of more lasting value than most. Most libraries put Notes from a big country in 917.3, but it’s not a travel book, and although it is exclusively about the USA, so are all such books in 081, because their authors lived in America and wrote for Americans – they just don’t put this fact explicitly on the covers of their books.

I have read Asimov’s galaxy: reflections on science fiction by Isaac Asimov (809.3876), A mathematician reads the newspaper by John Allen Paulos (510) and From Africa to Bukova by Pearl Harris (943.7).

Asimov’s galaxy is a compilation of 66 of his editorials that appeared in his magazine in the 1980s, which are interesting, as everything he wrote. Since these were written as separate stand-alone pieces, there’s no specific common theme. He reflects on various aspects of science fiction, literature in general, magazine publishing and lives of authors. One recurrent topic is the gradual gaining of respectability by science fiction during Asimov’s lifetime, from parents forbidding their kids to read it as “trash” to it being studied in schools. I haven’t read any prewar American science fiction, so I can’t really comment on this change, but from Asimov’s description of its magazines which “had ragged edges, blaring titles, and garish covers,” it doesn’t sound like something on the level of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.

What particularly struck me when reading this book was how much trouble Asimov undertook for his fans’ sake. For instance, he mentions that people routinely sent him their copies of his books to sign, without any return postage, which they apparently expected him to mail back to them at his own expense – which he did! Other people presented him with scraps of paper torn out of a notebooks to sign at meetings with writers – which he also did. Schoolkids who hadn’t even read any of his books sent him letters with some generic questions because their English teachers gave them such an assignment. Asimov had answered more than 700 of such questionnaires till he’d finally had enough. I must say I had never imagined him having such angelic patience.

A mathematician reads the newspaper is a series of vignettes which analyze common newspaper stories from the perspective of mathematics, formal logic and human psychology, most of them interesting and worthwhile, although a few meander back and forth, only to deliver commonplace conclusions not particularly related to mathematics.

One of the things I learned from this book is the notion of conditional probability. E.g., “the conditional probability that someone is wealthy given that he or she is a cardiologist is very high. The converse conditional probability that someone is a cardiologist given that he or she is wealthy is very low.” This seems obvious, but somehow I’ve never realized before that this also means that although the probability of an innocent person’s fingerprints matching a sample from a crime scene may be one in a million, the probability that a person whose fingerprints do produce a match is nonetheless innocent may still be two in three. However, when Paulos writes that the same is true of DNA samples, I was less prepared to take it at face value. I can well imagine fingerprints to be “a bit hazy and subject to interpretation,” but I have always assumed the data from DNA samples to be precise. (It’s just an assumption, though. I’m not a biologist and don’t have any experience with such samples.)

I agree with Paulos that when journalists use numbers far removed from most people’s everyday life they should “compare them with quantities that are more viscerally appreciated. For example, estimates of the cost of the savings-and-loan bailout have ranged up to $500 billion (including interest payments over time). This translates into $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States (again, over time)…. Or… $500 billion could buy a transcontinental gold bar weighing about 5.5 pounds a foot.” We could “stretch this gold bar into a rainbow extending from Capitol Hill 1,500 miles up, above the Midwestern prairies and over the Phoenix headquarters of Charles Keating’s failed savings-and-loan empire…. It would take a decade to spend $500 billion at $1,585 a second.” (This book was published in 1995.) However, the author points out in another chapter that a linear measure of a number makes it appear large, while a volume measure of the same number makes it seem small: “although a single tower of nickels stretching from sea level to the height of Mount Everest would contain more than 4 million coins, you can easily verify that this pile would fit comfortably into a cubical box about 6 feet to a side.” This seems hard to believe, but my calculations did confirm it.

Paulos also writes that what’s important is not how many seats a party has in a legislative chamber or what percent of stock somebody owns in a company, but how often that number can be crucial in a vote, which depends on how many other parties/stockholders there are and how many seats/stocks each of them has. That’s probably obvious to businesspersons or people who live in multiparty state systems, but it’s just not something I ever thought about. Similarly, the author discusses that what’s important to politicians is not how many of their constituents are for and how many are against a particular measure, but how many will make a voting choice based on the candidate’s position on this issue. For instance, if the majority of the electorate is for stricter gun control, but among those against it, far more feel so strongly about it that they will vote against any candidate in favor of tighter gun control, a “prudent politician” won’t tackle the issue.

Although not particularly related to mathematics, I think Paulos makes a relevant point when he says:

…reporters naturally gravitate to where the news is made, and on the federal level that place is Washington, D.C. On the state and local levels, the news comes from the state legislature and City Hall, respectively. Business, being decentralized, is largely invisible. (This is why the $12 million salary of the head of Equitable Life Insurance, for example, is seldom mentioned, even though it just about covers the salary of the entire U.S. Senate – 100 salaries at $138,000 each.) More conspicuous are those businesses synonymous with their locales: Wall Street, Hollywood, Detroit. No longer synonymous with beer, my hometown of Milwaukee almost never makes the national news unless a particularly grisly crime or some natural disaster takes place there; the same holds for most other American cities.

There’s been more attention devoted to private businesses recently, thanks to them getting government bail-outs, I think largely Paulos’s observation is still current. Personally, I disapprove of the reporters’ habit of congregating in the government offices at all, or of regular press conferences. I don’t think it’s important what politicians say, only what they do, and that’s a matter of public record. (Not to mention, that covering a government entity favorably is often a prerequisite for access to its officials.) So I agree with Paulous that newspapers and TV channels would have done us a better service if they fanned out their reporters across the country to actually gather some news instead of lazily writing down whatever platitudes and excuses politicians and government PR staff hand down to them. Nor should foreign news be confined to elections, wars, coups, riots and natural disasters. And, yes, I’ve heard that newspapers don’t have money to keep regular oversee correspondents anymore, but I don’t think keeping them in Washington is any cheaper, and I agree with Paulous that there are too many of them in Washington.

On the other hand, I disagree with him when he writes that environmental hazards, such as “benzene in Perrier water, pesticide residues on vegetables, Alar on apples, asbestos in schools, and chemicals in soil, water and air” are greatly overrated: “Although some of the countless contaminations we hear about may warrant action and justify fear, most are sensationalizing what are essentially trivial hazards.” He suggests “a warning in the same spirit” that reads, “apple seeds contain easily detectable amounts of cyanide, a chemical known to be harmful to humans.” But like the journalists whose work he bemoans in his book, he neglects to point out that a) people normally don’t eat apple seeds when they eat apples; b) apple seeds have tough protective shells to allow them to pass through birds’ and rodents’ stomachs undigested and be ready to germinate; and c) if people actually chewed on as great a volume of apple seeds as the volume of water they drink, they would get poisoned. Personally, I think there’s not anywhere enough emphasis on safe food, water and air, partly because most studies don’t take into account the effect of continual exposure to industrial chemicals over decades and generations, let alone a continual exposure to a combination of countless such chemicals in various combinations. So I was disappointed by the author’s repeated undermining of environmental concerns in this book. However, for the most part, it proved an interesting and useful book.

In From Africa to Bukova Pearl Harris writes about her and her husband’s move from South Africa to a village in the Czech Republic, when they were 57 and 67 respectively, because of the rise of violent crime in South Africa. (They first thought of the UK, being British by descent, and then of the USA and Canada, but all these countries were too expensive for them. Mr. Harris’s mother was born in the UK, and so he could obtain a British passport which allowed him to live and work in any EU country, including the Czech Republic.) This book was evidently self-published, and its language is less polished than that of similar books I’ve read. However, it’s not badly written either, and it is informative. Moreover, it’s hard to find books about the Czech Republic, or any other Central European country, for that matter, aside from history books. I would like to read at least one history book to complement personal memoirs, but what I find most interesting in books about different places are descriptions of what life is like there now, preferably from people who actually live/d there rather than just visited. However, it seems that Central Europeans seldom write about their own countries – or else their books are not getting translated and published here, and Britons and Americans don’t rush to buy dilapidated old houses in Central Europe in order to convert them to their retirement homes. Incidentally, although the house which the Harrises had bought also had its problems, the author covers the matter in several sentences – unlike some professionally published books I could mention.

It’s a pleasant book to read, as the author clearly enjoys her new country, despite having never experienced freezing temperatures before and not knowing the language, even six years after the move when this book was written. She writes charmingly about the friends they’ve made there, Czech traditions, and a vast natural wooded area dotted with carp ponds and small villages, which is interspersed with cycling paths:

Mushrooms and wild berries grow in abundance in these lush forests and are there for the picking, as are apples, pears, plums and cherries along the main roads. These fruit trees were planted during the communist era, to be enjoyed by the people, as they still are today. Wildlife, such as deer, hares, foxes and squirrels may be spotted in the forests, with partridges, pheasants, wild duck and swans a common sight on numerous lakes.

Pearl Harris was also clearly impressed by the Czech efficient and highly competent health care service which is “virtually free for a small monthly premium”:

We were both amused and impressed by the treatment meted out to a mere fracture patient in Casualty here. Besides the orthopedic surgeon, two other doctors, ten nurses and four radiographers were all dancing attendance around Ian. We recalled our stints in the Casualty departments of South African hospitals, where a patient with such a relatively minor injury as a fractured limb would be way down the list, all the stab wounds, gunshot wounds and motor vehicles accidents naturally getting priority treatment.

Not only that, but when it transpired that Mr. Harris’s hands and wrists were too weak to allow him to move on crutches, he was allowed to stay in the hospital’s After-Care unit for eight weeks, for free. While there he was given daily physiotherapy; doctors of various other specialties also treated him for various complaints; and nurses “respond immediately to a patient’s bell.” By contrast, the Harrises later met a Czech engineer who worked for a year in South Africa. One day there he was “hijacked and stabbed in the back while driving home from work, but managed to get out his pistol and kill the two hijackers at point-blank range.” However, when he got into the hospital – with a knife sticking out of his back – nobody paid any attention to him because he was able to walk under his own steam! Ironically, The Harrises who moved to Bukova to escape crime, actually experienced a (minor) burglary there. When they notified the police, the whole staff of the local police station spent a whole day writing up the report, and their burglary made it to the front page of the regional newspaper!

That’s not to say that the author liked everything in her adopted country, but personally I found it difficult to taker most of her criticisms seriously. For instance, she complains that the government offices don’t open till their official opening time of 8AM, even if there are people who have arrived earlier and are waiting outside, that the staff there speaks only Czech, and that it took her several visits there to obtain her local documents, some of these visits involving a long wait in queue. These tragic experiences lead her to call the office a “chamber of horrors” and compare its staff to the Gestapo. Personally I also didn’t like her complaints whenever she encountered any Czech person who didn’t speak English (or spoke it with a strong accent), or her approval of those who did speak it to her satisfaction (how paternalistic can one get?), or her complaints about how difficult Czech language and pronunciation is (because English has the easiest and most straightforward pronunciation system in the world). I also wasn’t quite sure what to make out of her statement that “a rather sad… after-effect of Communism… is that the majority of people now are atheists. Christmas Day is therefore not considered a religious holiday by most.” Well, what on earth is sad about this? It just serves to reinforce the stereotype that religious people are not content to believe as they wish and practice their beliefs themselves, but want everybody else to believe as they do. And I found ironic the author’s statement that “despite… the absence of widespread religious fervor, the Czech Republic is full of Good Samaritans,” considering that she’d left South Africa – a country where over 80% of the population profess religious belief – because of its rampant violent crime. Still, with these relatively minor exceptions, it was an interesting and pleasant book, definitely worth reading.

A few more books to add to my list:

Paolo Tullio, author of North of Naples, south of Rome (945.62) was born in a fairly typical Italian valley whose location is indicated in the title. He grew up in England and then settled down in Ireland with his Irish wife, but every summer, both as a kid and as an adult, he came back to his native valley, together with his family. His book about life in Italy is very insightful and well-analyzed. It’s exactly the case when being fluent in the language, having many relatives and friends in the area, and visiting the place regularly for lengthy periods of time have given him familiarity with it, while living mostly elsewhere has given him a wider perspective.

The author examines the interplay of cultural and ethnic characteristics, discussing how parents’ constant praise helps children grow up into confident adults – but also ones dependent on others’ approbation, hence slavish adherence to fashion, exploited by companies who see to it that trends change often. Tullio also thinks it explains Italians’ love of socializing: in his valley nobody spends any evenings at home, and while the Irish look for deserted beaches and secluded picnic spots, the Italians want to be where all the people are. Constant large-scale socializing goes hand in hand with gargantuan meals. It’s clear from the author’s descriptions that even when Italians go skiing, they consume far more calories than they burn. Close social ties also lead to long balance sheets of favors received and rendered back. And if it’s somebody for whom one can’t do a favor in return, like a high official? One gives him a bride. Tullio writes with hope about the Clean Hands campaign which took place in 1992-1994 when this book was written. Since the end of World War II, the country had been ruled by the Christian Democratic Party whose main claim for electorate’s support was that it held the Communist Party at bay. It also helped that they were allied both with the Catholic Church which lent it its moral support and the Sicilian mafia and its Neapolitan counterpart, the Camorra, which helped it in “policing its friends and enemies.” However, when the Communist Party was no longer a threat and the moral authority and influence of the Church had eroded, the people had finally had it with both the mafia and the corrupt officials. Large-scale investigations of corruption took place, prominent politicians and CEOs went to jail, and major political parties disintegrated. This book was written during the apogee of the Clean Hands campaign and ends its discussion of it on a hopeful note, but I looked it up in Wikipedia and found out that, although Berlusconi’s attempt to curtail anti-corruption investigations after his first election in 1994 failed due to widespread public indignation,

After Silvio Berlusconi's victory in 2001, the gradual campaign against judges reached the point where it is not only openly acceptable to criticize judges for having carried out Mani pulite (Cleans hands in Italian), but it has become increasingly difficult to broadcast opinions favorable to Milan's pool (where the anti-corruption investigations started). This is an impressive 180° cultural turn from 1992, when no politician was believed and no judge was contested, in which Berlusconi's power in media has undoubtedly played an important role.

Perhaps, however, Paolo Tullio wasn’t overly surprised by this disappointing turn of events, since he was well aware how difficult it is to change the well-entrenched system, because theirs was a trickle-down sort of corruption: the politicians may have stolen fortunes, but ordinary citizens often paid a pittance for taxes and generally found it easy to circumvent any regulation they wanted to. Everybody was for cleaning up corruption, as long as this didn’t interfere with their own way of life.

What I found most interesting in Tullio’s book was his description of higher education in Italy. College admissions aren’t competitive there because there’s a belief that everybody who qualifies is entitled to being educated in college of their choice. Naturally this led to an overabundance of specialists, a problem which was solved in the past by using one’s connections to get a job, if one was lucky enough to have them (the detail with which the author describes this process makes it seem that he believes this practice to be unique to Italy). However, later on, a fairer solution was found in making the courses of study so difficult that only about as many new specialists as were needed each year could finish up their programs and graduate. This solution may not be perfect either, but I think it’s a far better approach than the college admission process in the USA, because then people are limited by their abilities only, and everybody can go as far as their talents allow.

This book had a few sections which I personally found a bit slow, such as ones devoted to food and domestic architecture, but overall I found it a very interesting book.

I’ve also read a couple of books about book clubs (374.22). I used to be surprised by people’s willingness to belong to such clubs, because one of the things I didn’t like about formal education was having no choice in reading materials (I often wished we could choose from a list at least). So I wondered what kind of people would want to spend their free time reading what somebody else has chosen for them, and these books have provided me with the answer: the kind of people who like to read what everyone else wants to read.

The book group book: a thoughtful guide to forming and enjoying a stimulating book discussion group edited by Ellen Slezak is not really a guide. Slezak asked people to write to her about their experiences with book clubs and then selected 30 of these brief essays, alongside with (mostly un-annotated) reading lists in the second half of the book which comprise almost half of the book. I was surprised to learn that there are book clubs in the US which have existed for many decades, some for a century or so. Most of them a general-purpose, while others have some kind of focus, but still the vast majority of the book lists are fairly interchangeable.

The book club companion: a comprehensive guide to the reading experience by Diana Loevy is actually a guide, but the well-annotated books are almost all very well-known, so people who read would have heard about them anyway. On the other hand, Loevy’s descriptions are so beguiling that I was persuaded to take a look at a few books I had decided to pass up when I had first heard of them. There are also un-annotated lists of books and recipes, both of which I skipped, and a number of advice columns on dealing with pets when one is hosting a book club meeting – apparently, a significant problem, from the author’s point of view. She also thinks it’ll make the occasion more special if the host decorated or provided food or music in theme with the book, or if the club sometimes met at a location tied in with the contents of the book, and she offers advice in this respect as well.

I have also started reading books in The enchanted world series published by Time Life Books (398.2) and have just finished one of them, on Fairies and elves. The book includes both actual tales and analysis of how such stories and believes arouse which I found interesting. For instance, it says that in the old days when people lacked understanding of how the physical world functioned and found it rather chaotic, they tried to organize and control it by naming, classifying, and setting boundaries, both literally, by parceling up land, and more symbolically, by parceling up time into seasons or hours, as well as dividing people into clans. This probably helped them cope psychologically, to some degree, but it also apparently made them feel that the “in-between” times and places and newly met, unrelated people were necessarily suspect:

Mortal time and mortal space were seamed with cracks that served as doorways to places where human rules were meaningless.... The streams that marked the territory, the shores of sea, the fords of rivers, the crossroads, the fences, walls and thresholds… being neither one place nor another, served as portals to the world of Faerie.... In Wales it was said that a ghost sat on every stile (sets of steps that allow people to climb over boundary fences…).

And the times when such places were most dangerous – or alluring, depending on one’s nature – were, of course, the in-between times: dawn and dusk, noon and midnight which marked the middle of day or night, and “nights between the seasons – October 31, or Samain Eve (later called Allhallows Eve), and April 30, Beltane Eve (later called May Day Eve),” as well as solstices. These were the times when “mortal rules” were believed to be suspended, the boundaries between “mortal” and “spirit” worlds were lifted, and chaos reigned: witches flew on their broomsticks, troops of fairies traveled freely and future was revealed.

Furthermore, according to this book, people used to divide the day into 24 hours, 12 of day and 12 of night, but since day and night are rarely of equal length, this meant that in winter an hour during the day could last only 30 minutes, measured by the local church’s bells. Since people then didn’t understand why the length of day and night changes with the seasons, they believed that time itself was far from solid and instead stretched and shrank continually. The authors of this book think that this could give rise to the belief that there could be places where time stops altogether or proceeds at a different rate than elsewhere, so that a person who had spent a day there could come back home and find that a century had passed.

This book also traces the development of the folklore associated with fairies. First, when there weren’t many people in Europe, fairies were believed to be tall, beautiful, accomplished and rich. However, as people spread, multiplied, and cleared away the forests for their fields, fairies were believed to have retreated underground, which – very gradually and over countless generations – led to their size being greatly diminished, till they became miniature. As their fortunes continued to dwindle further, they also lost their beauty and riches – they now had to trick humans into seeing them as glamorous – as well as their fecundity – the stories about changelings come from this time. Since people then didn’t understand the nature of internal diseases, it was easy for them to see illness as “wasting” resulting from an unfortunate encounter with a stranger who was really but a fairy in disguise, and even more unfortunate, if not downright imprudent, exchange of words or – the mother of all imprudences – food and drink with him. Of course, the most frequent victims of sudden illnesses were very small children who didn’t wander around and meet strangers, but who could have been stolen and exchanged for elderly fairies who were glad to be pampered by human mothers in their last days and willingly tricked people to see them as infants. What else could explain why the so recently healthy child had become as rickety as an old person and seemed on the verge of death way ahead of his or her time? Unfortunately, the common “solutions” to make the fairy leave and get one’s child back often involved making the fairy’s existence as uncomfortable as possible, which could only worsen the poor child’s condition, if not downright kill him or her.

As for the morals of fairies, it seems to have differed a lot from story to story. In some tales recountered in this book, fairies are noble beings who live in an enchanted world in every sense of the word. They come to the help of the undefended, and an encounter with them is a boon for any mortal. In other stories, fairies treat different people according to their deserts. And in still others, they trick all and sundry for their amusement or use them for their purposes. I guess this illustrates the allure and also fear of the unfamiliar – a bit like we think today of sentient extra-terrestrials, if they exist. Then again, who says that fairies should be all of a kind? Perhaps, like people, they can use their powers very differently.

All in all, I’ve found this an interesting book.

I have also noticed that it's been half a year since I joined this challenge, and so I decided to take a look at my progress. When I started I had read books from 47 divisions out of 99 (goal 90) and 104 sections out of 903 (goal 750). Now I've read books from 57 divisions and 122 sections. So I have read only 18 books from new numbers, including 10 from new classes. This is very modest indeed, and it now begins to seem to me, too, that this will be a lifelong challenge. Then again, my reading lists have always been long, and after I joined LT, with its similar libraries lists and automatic and members' recommendations, and then discovered this challenge and read other members DDC lists, my own reading list became so long that it will probably take several lifetimes to read through it. So a challenge that can be completed in just one lifetime looks doable in comparison. :)

I've read Life in a postcard: escape to the French Pyrenees by Rosemary Bailey (944.89).

The author, who grew up in the suburbs, dreamed of living in the country with cats and children. Her husband, of rural origins, loved living in London and New York, sans cats or kids. She won on all counts. Bailey and her husband, both freelance British writers, bought a ruined monastery in southern French Pyrenees, which featured a seriously leaking roof, crumbling walls, dozens of rat nests, and an army of mice, and converted it to a home in the course of eleven years, as they were raising their son there.

I had thought before that Catalans only live in Spain, but it turned out that they live in this part of France too (well, it used to be Spanish till sometime in the 17th century). So the local residents speak Catalan to each other and French (with an accent) to outsiders. In schools the language of instruction is French, but Catalan is also studied, along with Catalan history (the author’s son told her about the founder of Catalonia called Wilfred the Hairy). However, only about half of the inhabitants are of local origins, the rest having come there from elsewhere in France or the rest of the world, mainly Europe. Many of these people are eccentrics who couldn’t fit in in traditional cultures in their native land. By the author’s descriptions, the village near their monastery and surrounding hills certainly seem to have a disproportional number of artists and potters. A fair number of the French settlers there are hippies, called “sixty-eighters” in France, and their descendants, who live off the land, sometimes choosing to settle in abandoned stone shacks in the mountains, without any modern conveniences. Some locals grumble about so many outsiders, but the village wouldn’t have survived without them, especially since many of the locals don’t live there in winter.

So it comes as somewhat of a surprise when the author writes about the locals who did live in their village year-round: “I think for them we were like creatures from another planet. The idea of England was unimaginable to them.” She adds about the farmer who was renting their peach orchard that “the story of his fistfight with the neighboring horse farmer is still recounted with great relish. He explained his long-running argument with the mayor of the village over grazing rights for his horses on the mountain pastures. ‘We’re like a dog and a cat,’ Jacques remarked gleefully. It all sounded very medieval to me.” By the end of the book Bailey remarks again: “The more we hear the more medieval the village still sounds, with people squabbling over fences and boundaries, fighting in the bar and stealing chickens.” The other three books by Anglophone expats about various European countries that I’ve recently read also all happen to be about rural areas, but this is the only one that communicates the feeling of the chasm between the author and the local inhabitants. In all the others, the villagers seemed as modern as the newcomers.

On the other hand, Bailey can be partial to her new home village too. For instance, she describes London as polluted and dirty, citing it as one of the reasons she chose to leave it, but then she writes that in this Pyrenean village people don’t clean up their dogs’ poo and chuck old cars and refrigerators into the river where they slowly rust away. Personally, I didn’t find London dirty on my visit there; there was certainly no dog poo in the streets or rusting cars and refrigerators in the Thames.

One of the few things that raised my eyebrows in this book was one of the author’s praises to the region’s diversity which described the people at a benefit party thusly: “The mixture of people, to me, was glorious. All ages and several nationalities…. Teetotalers and pot-smokers, fascists and feminists…” I have no idea what she was thinking about when she wrote the last pair. Perhaps, she was getting carried away with her glorious feelings, but I bet she wouldn’t have written “child molesters and preschoolers.”

On the whole, this book contains a bit too much of the author’s reconstruction of what life was like there in the past and about her house, at least for someone with my level of interest in other people’s property, but there are many interesting details about life in this region, as well as comparisons with Britain which I found interesting.

Wow, you have written some great reviews. Have you read any of Slavenka Draculic's work? If you're looking for books about Central/Eastern Europe that are more like memoirs, you might like her. The one I've read is Balkan Express, but I think she wrote some others as well.

I agree with you about not wanting to read books that others picked, but I do have a book club! We vote on books from a list of suggestions submitted by anyone who wants to submit something (secret ballot), and everyone has an absolute veto, so that no one has to read something they really don't want to read.

Thank you very much for your comments!

I generally enjoy reading memoirs about life in different places. I was looking for a book about Central Europe specifically because I needed something for 943 and didn’t have anything at home, other than history books. I do have several books on the Balkans at home, which I haven’t read yet and which seem interesting.

I think your book club’s idea to give each member veto powers is excellent, but I don’t often find fiction I enjoy and am seldom interested in personal memoirs, as opposed to memoirs about places, time, work, etc. However, one of the libraries in my area now has a book club which reads non-personal non-fiction from time to time, and I join their meetings on such occasions.

Three more books to add:

Great gardens of Britain by Helena Attlee (712.6) contains photographs and text about 20 acclaimed British professionally-designed gardens open to the public. I was surprised that there are places in the UK where one can grow tropical or desert plants outdoors. One such garden is on an island to the west of Cornwell, where summers are long and winters mild (although walls, trees and hedges are needed to protect fragile plants from high wind). The other is in Northern Ireland, on a peninsula which is washed by the Gulf Stream. Some gardens have various symbolic, philosophical or mythological messages communicated via plants, statues and buildings. One is made for children to play among water fountains, rope bridges and tree houses. I’m not the person best suited to appreciate this type of book, for I enjoy the unaltered natural landscape the most, but I found this book informative, and, of course, there are plenty of beautiful pictures.

Hotel Babylon: inside the extravagance and mayhem of a luxury five-star hotel by Anonymous and Imogen Edwards-Jones (647.94) describes 24 hours in a five-star hotel in London. The anonymous author was a manager of such a hotel when the book was published, but it’s written from the point of view of a receptionist. The staff are fictionalized, but the author claims that all the incidents described had really happened, albeit not in one day. He also tells stories about celebrities observed by him or his colleagues in various London hotels. This book is highly entertaining, but a few of the tales related are rather vulgar, and there was a point in the beginning of the book when I wondered whether to continue reading it or chuck it into the wastebasket. I decided to give it another try, partly because it’s hard to find anything interesting for this number, and was glad I did, for it does improve soon after.

The best part of the book, besides its humor and general entertaining value, is that the author doesn’t spare anyone: guests, hotel administration, its staff, or even himself. It’s a real behind the scenes look. Often it’s not a pretty picture, and it wouldn’t have made such an enjoyable read if it hadn’t been so hilarious. Guests who have to be rich to pay for accommodations there steal all sorts of things, from hotel bathrobes and KitKat from the minibar, painstakingly filling the plastic package with something to make it appear full, to artwork and refrigerators. However, the hotel grossly overcharges the guests on everything, from rooms to continental breakfasts which aren’t complimentary at all and mineral water in the minibar. It also overbooks, just in case someone cancels, which apparently happens often, and so guests who paid for an extra day to be allowed to check in early may not find their room available when they arrive (lying that the person who currently occupies the room couldn’t leave on time due to food poisoning works; lying that the room is unavailable due to sudden plumbing problems doesn’t). The sound insulation is apparently nil – the author says he can hear an orchestra of snores of various timbres when he walks along the corridors at night – and if somebody has a night-long wild party in his room, but orders enough food and drink through room service, the staff just sends the neighbors ear-plugs if they complain. Rats, mice and cockroaches defy all attempts to eradicate them. In short, it’s seems much pleasanter to read about than to experience. My personal favorite tidbit was about rich Arab businessmen who apparently routinely smuggle live sheep into their suits and butcher them there, leaving blood all over the floor, but nobody minds because they tip the staff in Cartier watches and diamond earrings.

Working there doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience either. It’s stressful and seldom rewarding. (The author mentions being thanked by a guest for being upgraded from a room to a suite, due to overbooking, to which he replied, “My pleasure,” adding to the readers that it really was a pleasure because usually they only get the grief.) Long hours take a toll of relationships. At one point, seeing an oil millionaire from Texas deciding which of the two prostitutes to take up to his room, the author says he finds the scene depressing, adding that it’s probably because it reminds him that they’re “all prostitutes in the luxury hotel business,” kowtowing to every whim of the rich. So why do people choose to work there? The only thing I could think of, from reading this book, is money, for they make quite a lot in tips. (Employees who don’t get tips are practically all immigrants who don’t speak even conversational English and are often illegal to boot – hotels “turn a blind eye to doctored passports” and “see nothing wrong in sending someone’s wages into an account under a totally different name.”) But, perhaps, it’s deeper than that, because the author says that he decided at the age of six that he wanted to work in a hotel and apparently never changed his mind, but he doesn’t elaborate on what attracted him to this work then or now. He opens the curtain behind the operation of a luxury hotel and the experience of working there, but chooses to draw it over his more personal sentiments.

But whatever working or staying in such a hotel is like, the book is very enjoyable, informative and well-written. I decided that I’d like to read more books like this about other work environments, and then I found out that the professional co-author of this book (Imogen Edwards-Jones) wrote similar books after this one, in partnership with other anonymous sources. The one about a hospital ER was favorably reviewed on LT by an ER doctor. However, I subsequently found out that most of her books are very rare in the US, for whatever reason. Perhaps, the industries involved didn’t like the exposure. One reviewer on Amazon.con wrote that it’s best not to read the book on air travel shortly before taking a plane.

French for dummies (448.24) had been seating on my shelf for a while. I really know French, but I haven’t read anything in it for ages, and so this book was useful in refreshing my memory. Despite McWhorter’s claims in The story of human language lectures, it never suggests that French people drop the “ne” in the negative sentences in conversation, leaving only the “pas” after the verb. However, it concurs with him that the impersonal pronoun “on” – something like “one” in English – is often used instead of “nous” (“we”). Sometimes the examples make sense to me, but sometimes they don’t. “One can park here” makes sense in a general way, because if we can park here, so can everybody, but “one needs change” sounds bizarre to me. Just because we need change, doesn’t mean that everybody has run out of coins. And this book had news for me, too. It insists that the endings like “er,” “ez” and “é” and the word “et” (“and”) are pronounced like “ay” in “day” instead of like “a” in that word. None of my French professors in college, including those who were actually French, made it into a diphthong!

I’ve read 100 banned books: censorship histories of world literature (098.1) by Nicholas Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn Sova. The authors divide the books under discussion in four groups: literature suppressed on political, religious, sexual and social grounds, with 25 books per category. The authors provide summaries and censorship histories of each book. The vast majority of the books they discuss are very well-known; they were written and censored in various places and times, although there’s a more detailed focus on the censorship in the USA.

By censorship the authors mean a wide variety of activities, from the book being prohibited outright and all its copies seized by the government, to its removal from a specific public library, to a failure on the part of some library to buy it or some list of recommended books to include it, to its removal from a specific school library or a specific high school’s required reading list. From my point of view, although I suppose it’s possible to describe all the above activities as censorship, at least technically, they really represent very different situations, requiring different approaches. Banning a book outright is obviously censorship and a violation of the right of free speech (protected in the USA by the 1st Amendment). Nevertheless, I found out that up to 1970 there existed anti-obscenity laws in the US, which were sometimes used to suppress books for political reasons, if they gave sensors the excuse of using some profane words or some vague sexual references – but this is now all in the past. There have also been some attempts in the US and the UK to suppress non-fiction books critical of the government and/or the national intelligence agencies specifically, using the pretext of national security where none was really violated, but in all the cases cited in this book the courts sided with the writers.

However, I don’t think that most of the other situations are really violations of free speech, which protects writers’ right to publish their books, but doesn’t make it anybody’s duty to buy, read or study them. Yes, I know, it can be said that if a book can’t be found in bookstores or libraries, this de facto silences the writer. But it seems to me that there is a difference between the government, a religious organization or some society of concerned citizens pressuring bookstores and libraries from buying the book, and different bookstores and libraries deciding on their own not to buy the book. The former is definitely a violation of free speech, but the latter is something bookstores and libraries do all the time, for a variety of reasons, usually commercial, but occasionally also possibly PR-related, and it appears to me that it is their right to do so. Public libraries in particular have limited budgets and generally tend to buy whatever their patrons would read. A public librarian once told me that the dirtier the book is the more popular it is with their patrons, and so they buy plenty of pornography in everything but name, but I know it for a fact that such tastes don’t prevail in all communities. And what of a person whose preferences are different from the majority in his/her town? Well, what of a person who lives in a small town and wants to read complicated science or philosophy books that the local public library isn’t going to buy (to say nothing of the expensive art books)? I think that as long as one can buy the book online or order it through interlibrary loan from another library, one doesn’t really have legitimate ground to complain. And if all the chain and independent bookstores and all the public libraries throughout the country decide on their own initiative not to carry a book, I’d guess that in the majority of cases it says something about the book. (I’m not wholly excluding the possibility of corporate pressure that affects distribution and placement in catalogs, although this situation wasn’t discussed in this book, but I think such cases must be rare.)

With school curriculum we enter even murkier waters. I must admit that I personally am probably more sensitive to books which are emotionally hard to read than most people. For instance, a few years ago I tried to read All Quiet on the Western Front, but found that I couldn’t do so, even though it was obvious to me that the novel is a literary masterpiece. If I had been a student somewhere and forced to read it for a non-elective class, I would have considered it an emotional abuse. For this reason, I believe that school districts, teachers and college professors should exercise great sensitivity when they make reading choices for other people and not base it just on their own feelings – or assume that if somebody is unduly affected by the book, they will necessarily speak up. Personally, I think the best solution would have been for the school districts to make very extensive lists from which teachers could delete anything they didn’t want to teach (why force them to teach something they don’t like?) and then instruct students to pick a requisite number of books from the resulting list according to their own tastes and interests. Then one could ensure that books of literary value are studied in schools, and at the same time not impose undue suffering on anybody. Of course, this wouldn’t stop the complaints, because the teacher would still have to discuss all the books he/she has kept on the list and, according to this book, for example, as late as 1982 parents complained about the use of The Scarlet Letter in schools because it deals with adultery, an illegitimate child and a minister involved in fornication. I’m sure these parents would have objected even to a teacher discussing a book which depicts actions and characters they disapprove of, even if their kids didn’t have to read them. Personally, I think the only answer to such parents is home-schooling because it’s impossible to place every parent in charge of curriculum in a school setting, but I don’t think this suggestion would have flown in court. ;)

In general, I found this an informative book. The first two sections were more interesting to me, because the books under discussion were uniformly interesting. I’ve learned about some books I might read in the future, as well as about some other well-known books that I’m not going to read, but will now have a general idea about. The books in the other two sections were more varied in quality, and I had already read those I would have found interesting.

I’ve read It’s Greek to me: brush up your classics by Michael Macrone. It examines the origin of famous expressions that have come into English from Ancient Greek and Latin. OCLC and most libraries put it in the 420s, but the library I got it from has it in 480, so I think I can do the same. Its introduction says “more than just a book of word origins, this is a complete tour through the literature, life, and lively expressions of ancient days.” Personally I wouldn’t call it a complete tour through the literature and life of Greece and Rome, but it does talk rather more about the literature and life of Greece and Rome than about the English language per se.

One of the most interesting pieces of information I’ve picked up from this book is that, according to the author, Plato wrote in Republic about a shepherd called Gyges who once witnessed an earthquake which made an opening in the earth. When Gyges descended into this opening he found an ancient grave with a body which had nothing but a golden ring on it. Gyges took the ring and later discovered that it let him become invisible at will.

He goes to court, seduces the queen, conspires to kill the king, and takes over the kingdom.... Gyges, according to Socrates, merely behaves as any man would if given the same power, whether he had been just of unjust before. Socrates concludes that men are just only when they must be, and are unjust whenever they can safely be.... Gyges’ ring is a distant relative of "the cap of Hades" or "helmet of Pluto," mentioned in Homer’s Iliad (Book 5), which Athena borrows so that she might, by virtue of its powers of invisibility, evade the war god Ares.

Naturally I immediately thought of Tolkien, although, curiously, Macrone doesn’t mention him and cites all this to discuss the origin of the phrase, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” which was coined by the historian Lord Acton in 1887. Strangely, although I’ve read Republic I don’t remember this particular tale from it – although it must be there, because I remember the Western Civilization professor asking us what we’d do with the power of invisibility. None of us could come up with anything more corrupt than sneaking into concerts and athletic events and traveling for free, and he thought us insincere – quite unfairly.

Among other interesting pieces I came across, it turned out that “Nothing is said that has not been said before” was said for the first time in 160 BCE at least, while the phrase “e pluribus unum” was first used by Virgil to describe a peasant making a salad.

However, I didn’t check any of Macrone’s facts, and on one of them I do know him to be incorrect. He writes that the Julian calendar “is similar to our own, except for the fact that March, rather than January, was the first month of the year. (January wasn’t promoted until Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed its precedence in 1582…
....).” In actuality, January 1 was the New Year Day in Julian calendar, but when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire the New Year festival was banned as a pagan holiday, and in 576 the Catholic Congress officially dismissed the January 1 date as the beginning of the new year. During the Middle Ages different countries began the new year at different dates, while the traditional New Year and Winter Solstice customs became associated with Christmas. Gregory XIII restored January 1 as the New Year Day in his calendar. (Caesar wasn’t the first to pick it either – it was first celebrated in Rome in 153 BCE.)

This book has amusing illustrations, though. See pictures illustrating Plato’s cave and Mars turning from a local god of agriculture (which is why the first month of spring was named after him, according to Macrone) into a god of war below.

http://www.librarything.com/pic/274320

http://www.librarything.com/pic/274323

The illustrations are by Tom Lulevitch. I hope it's not against copyright laws to post pictures from inside the book, as opposed to a cover.

I tried posting the pictures themselves via HTML code (img src), but for some reason this didn't work; so I've posted links to them in my profile's junk drawer.

I’ve read Miniature books: 4000 years of tiny treasures by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison (099). I found it quite interesting. It covers handwritten and illustrated manuscripts (turns out there are still people doing that), printed miniature books on a variety of subjects, books with mother-of-pearl and other fancy covers, hand-bound books of self-made paper, books for children, books made for a traveling library in the age before e-books, and various unusually shaped curiosity books. The authors say that the cut-off size for miniature books is usually considered to be 3 inches, and so most of them are easily readable, although, human nature being what it is, of course, there’s been a competition over the ages as to who could produce the smallest book which resulted in a number of books which can only be read with a magnifying glass included in the case with the book (which sort of defeats the purpose of striving for compactness, in my opinion).

I'm glad it was enjoyable -- that same book is the one I have slated for 099 as well.

It looks like you're reading some great books in difficult categories. I hope you're adding them to the suggestions wiki :)

I've read Inside People: the stories behind the stories by Judy Kessler (051). It provides a look at the first twenty years of the People magazine (1974-1993). I've found it quite amusing and elucidating in regards to how various types of media work.

Now I've read something from every division in the zeroes class. It's my first class, and I never thought it would be the zeroes!

Congrats! That's a milestone I definitely won't hit for a while.

I've read For all the tea in China: how England stole the world’s favorite drink and changed history by Sarah Rose (382.4). It's an interesting book that describes how the East India Co. hired an adventurer botanist to smuggle tea plants and seeds out of China to be raised in Indian Himalayas and the rippling effect this venture had on economy and history in general.

I’ve read Snowball oranges: a winter’s tale on a Spanish isle by Peter Kerr (946.754).

Imagine that you’re on vacation in an unfamiliar place. You drive along a rural lane and see a car with a “for sale” sign in somebody’s driveway. You stop and asking the owner about the car. She tells you that it belongs to her father who can no longer drive, and so she’s selling it for him. You know nothing about cars. However, after you’ve walked around the car, opened its door and sat inside it for a moment, you decide to buy it, without so much as a look under the hood or a test drive, let alone showing the car to the mechanic, because you like how it looks. In the next couple of months everything that costs a lot to replace in a car needs to be replaced.

You think nobody in his right mind would do such a thing? Well, the author of this book claims to have done something even more risky. While on vacation in Majorca, he and his wife drove along a rural road, saw a “for sale” sign on a farmhouse, stopped and were given a whirlwind tour of the house’s rooms by the old owner’s daughter, and decided to buy it because they liked how the house looked and the surrounding view. They sold their farm in Scotland where they had been raising barley and bullocks, and bought the house in Majorca with the surrounding orange farmland – without asking anyone with the knowledge of houses to look at the house or anyone with the knowledge of fruit to look at the orchard, and, of course, without making any inquiries whatsoever as to how much they could expect to make on this farm. After they had moved in, the author inspected the house and decided that “although the old place looked a bit neglected, there didn’t seem to be any major defects at all. Certainly, it could have done with a lick of paint here and there, there were a few cracks in the plasterwork to make good, some broken floor tiles to be replaced, and a couple of window shutters to be fixed, but nothing too serious…. The main thing was that the house had a really friendly feeling about it.” In the ensuing couple of months, they had to replace the stove, the laundry machine, and the boiler, as well as to undergo a complete electrical overhaul. They also learned that the seller had used his position in the local government to circumvent public health laws when modern plumbing had been installed in the house, and that they could get for a kilo of oranges a little more than the price of one orange in Britain. However, after the first two months the author thought that the worst tribulations were behind them, and as for the money, they “didn’t seem to need much money to get by and live very well in Majorca, anyway.”

After I’ve read this book, I looked up its author on the Internet and found out (on his website) that he participated in a successful Scottish jazz band and then was a successful record producer; so it looks like the barley and bollocks farm had never played a major part in his income anyway. This explains a great deal about his Majorcan escapade, but somehow he never mentions it in the book. I also learnt that after this book he wrote three more books about his family’s life in Majorca, one about Scotland, and several fiction books. So I can well see how he manages to look at his misfortunes with a humorous eye – which he does throughout this book. It’s very funny and entertaining. My only problem with it is that I don’t know how much of it is non-fiction and how much is fiction. Some specific descriptions just don’t strike me as plausible, and I strongly suspect that he exaggerated and even invented various episodes to make his book more amusing. It mostly reads like a script for a stand-up comedy act, which is fine if one looks for entertainment, but not if one looks for information about life in other places.

I've read The Victorian Internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth centuryʼs on-line pioneers by Tom Standage (384.1) reccomended by Lorax on DDC Wikie. It's an interesting bit of history. I didn't know that before the electric telegraph there was a very widespread optical telegraph in Europe, or that it was so hard for electric telegraph pioneers to convince British and US governments that the new invention could be useful. (The 1st US line, between Washington, DC and Baltimore, was at first mostly used for best chess players from both cities to have matches across distance.) This book covers both the technical development of the telegraph and how it transformed society when information could suddenly travel much faster: the author traces the increased pace of life to the beginning of widespread use of the telegraph.

HA! Nice to see that on any given day there at least two people reading books on telephony. I just posted about Ammon Shea's history of the Phone Book. When I eventually finish this challenge, Victorian Internet is high on my "to buy" list.

>49 NielsenGW:

Yes, if you're interested in communications technology, it's an interesting and entertaining book.

I've just read Government's place in the market by Eliot Spitzer (381.3) and Rabbits everywhere by Alicia Ezpeleta (704.9432).

The former is a very brief discussion of the topic. It's very well-reasoned and mostly well-explained, with some unexpected humorous passages thrown in. I only wished that in addition to this brief book, he'd published a more extensive edition that discusses in some detail all the legislature enacted in the US and in Europe after the crisis.

The latter book covers rabbit representions and symbolism in art. I was rather surprised to learn that in the same culture rabbits could be symbols of contradictory qualities, such as cleverness and foolishness, cowardice and bravery, chastity and sexuality. I've seen a number of books on cats in art before, but never about rabbits.

I’ve read Oaxaca journal by Oliver Sacks (587.0972) recommended by Carlym on DDC Wiki. In this book, the author, a member of the New York chapter of the American Fern Society, recounts his trip to Mexico with fellow fern aficionados to see various species of ferns and the country as a whole. One doesn’t have to be a fern or a plant enthusiast to enjoy this book, for Sacks’s approach is general enough. He explains what he finds so interesting about ferns and describes various species he gets to see in Oaxaca, but doesn’t overload the reader with botanical information and spends enough time on other topics.

What I found the most interesting and attractive in this book is the author’s admiration of the amateur explorers of the mid-19th century for whom the spirit of the camaraderie far overwhelmed whatever competitiveness they might have felt towards each other and his description of a similar atmosphere in the fern society to which he belongs: “everyone – so long as they love ferns – is welcome to the group, even if they are quite inexperienced. ‘The veriest greenhorn and the highest authority have always been on an equal footing as members,’ as the Society’s president wrote on its fortieth anniversary.”
What I found the most strange in this book was the author’s unquestioned quoting of a fellow traveler, a curator of ferns at the New York Botanical Gardens, on modern agricultural methods:

By the end of the nineteenth century, it was becoming clear that a nitrogen crisis was pending, that one had to have more ammonia or nitrates available if an exponentially expanding human population was not to starve…. Now, of course, Robbin shrugs, the world is awash in synthetic fertilizers, and thousands of surplus tons of them drain into lakes, rivers, and seas, disturbing the planet’s nitrogen cycle and causing huge overgrows of algae and whatnot…. (Discussion of attempts to breed corn with nitrogen-fixing bacteria follows.) With genetic engineering, Robbin added, it might even be possible to bypass the bacteria and insert the gene for the nitrogen-fixing enzyme into the plants themselves.

I was very surprised, to say the least, to see overgrows of algae mentioned as the main negative impact of synthetic fertilizers, and genetic engineering depicted as a unilateral good (!), especially considering the author’s background in biology and chemistry.

In regards to the descriptions of the country itself, I’ve found this book to be quite charming. I’ve even enjoyed reading about markets and specialty shops, although I actually hate shopping of any kind. It’s one of these cases, when I didn’t wish I could be there myself, but found it pleasant to read about – just as with fern tourism.

The author also writes about various archeological sites they visited, along with their guide’s (very brief) descriptions of the civilizations which had lived there and Mexican history in general. Of these, the remarks on post-independence Mexican history were of more interest to me, since I knew practically nothing about it. According to Sacks, “independence was finally achieved in 1821, only to usher in several decades of chaos, under a succession of ineffective rulers…. Then a brief halcyon period, just five years, between 1867 and 1872, under the benign rule of Benito Juarez…. He fought for democracy as well as independence from European rule. A few years after the death of Juarez came the accession of Porfirio Diaz, a despot who ruled Mexico for 35 years…. (He) organized roads and industries, bridges, buildings. The country… moved into step with the rest of the modernized world, but at a terrible human cost: there was virtual enslavement in factories and on haciendas, huge corruption and profiteering.” The latter tradition apparently continues unabated today, as Sacks writes that the police in Mexico readily accept bribes, are in cohorts with the drug mafias, and are feared as much as the criminals; the church “passively supports a corrupt government”; and there’s an “extreme inequity of income.” Sacks also mentions that during their stay in Oaxaca, there was “a civil war, a revolt, in the state of Chiapas, quite close by,” resulting in “stopping and often searching of vehicles and far-from-gentle questioning and searching of passengers” becoming “increasingly common in Oaxaca.” However, the author doesn’t elaborate on either the causes or the extent of this civil war/rebellion. I sure wish he’d been more curious about the goings-on in the country while he was staying in it.

What I didn’t appreciate was the frequently present ideological "PC" slant on everything. “The garbage in the streets, the negligent filth in the hills... are moral residues of colonialism, reflecting the people’s sense that the streets, the cities, the lands, and no longer theirs,” the author quotes their guide with a straight face, forget that colonialism ended almost two centuries ago. And here’s Sacks himself: “My memory suddenly jolts, goes back to… the beggars outside, poverty-stricken, demoralized…. The enormity of our crime, the tragedy, overwhelms me. One sees why Columbus and Cortes are execrated, by some, as villains. Can one reconstruct an identity which was so ruthlessly, so systematically, undermined and destroyed? And what would it mean to even try? The old pre-Columbian languages still exist and are widely spoken, perhaps, by a fifth of the population. The basic foods are unchanged…. Christianity… is still in some ways only a thin veneer. The art and architecture of the past is everywhere visible.” What on earth do Columbus and Cortes have to do with an extreme inequity of income five centuries later? It's ironic that the author finds it difficult to understand how sophisticated astronomical skills which allowed the Aztecs to devise a precise calendar could co-exist with a belief in a correlation between eclipses and events on earth (although such beliefs were more common than not in ancient civilizations), but personally I find his own belief in a correlation between colonialism that ended two centuries ago and garbage in the streets and economic inequality in Mexico today no more logical and even, perhaps, harder to explain. I suppose I should have gotten long used to this particular strand of ideology by now, but somehow I haven't. I guess it's the fact that each successive epoch so unquestioningly believes that it owns the monopoly on truth and moral high ground, as if there's no tomorrow, that I find so irksome, as well as the eternal wide swings of the pendulum, with long stops at the extremes and never in a balance. However, this is something that's almost unavoidable in modern books, just like it's hard to find an old book in which the old, now displaced, ideology doesn't raise its head somewhere. On the whole, I've found this book charming and relaxing. I've jotted down the authors' names and titles of the 19th century explorers' books that had inspired Sacks and looked up pictures of various ferns online. Besides, it's hard to find an interesting 587 book for a non-fern person :).

I'm glad you liked Oaxaca Journal!

I’ve read Loving the machine: the art and science of Japanese robots by Timothy N. Hornyak (629.892). The author provides the history of robot-making in Japan, from medieval craftsmen making dolls with clockwork mechanisms that could serve tea, draw hieroglyphs and enact mythological scenes at festivals, to Japan becoming the first country to embrace industrial robots in the 1960s, to scientists building robots today in imitation of human and animal forms. These robots are aware of their surroundings, thanks to their cameras and sensors; they can move, avoiding obstacles; they know when people enter the room and can maintain eye-contact with them; they hear and process questions and give directions in several languages; they connect wirelessly to the Internet and read aloud the news, weather forecast and people’s e-mail upon request; they take pictures and send them to people’s e-mail accounts or cell phones; they remember faces, voices and information from previous encounters; they dance and play musical recordings; they can even read music and play musical instruments; they play mental games with people and/or house-sit, alerting their owners when they detect motion or providing them with views of any room via wireless connections when desired; and they also know when their batteries are running low and can go and recharge themselves at an electric outlet, without human intervention. Robots of various degrees of sophistication are being built in Japan by multinational companies, small businesses, dedicated lifelong amateurs and pre-teen schoolchildren. The author explains the greater interest and appreciation of robots on the part of the Japanese by their Shinto religion which says that everything, even some manmade objects, can have spirits, and the manga with robot heroes that many people there have grown up reading: “Scientists, engineers, government officials, and the legions of specialists who invest massive amounts of time and money on research into robots are propelled by the desire to create the imagined robot hero, friend, partner and laborer of their childhood fantasies.”

However, despite all the efforts, true AI isn’t anywhere on the horizon: “‘Two seconds or ten seconds of confusion (as to whether it’s a robot or a human) is possible, but a whole day is impossible.... We can improve the appearance.... But behavior and AI technology are quite a different matter. Perfect dialog, for example, is impossible, and will remain so, even one hundred years from now.’” The author doesn’t elaborate on this, but the problem clearly lies in the fact that no matter how sophisticated and natural a robot’s behavior looks, it really just follows its preprogrammed algorithm. For example, if a robot isn’t programmed to jump over obstacles, it will never do so, even if it can jump. Even animals and very young children can and do make independent decisions, but robots can’t, and therein lies the difference between a being and a thing. And, of course, no matter how many phrases in how many languages a robot may be programmed to respond to appropriately, it never has the slightest idea what is being said to it or what it is saying itself. As Descartes said, “I think, therefore, I am,” and robots don’t think. And even if that hurdle were overcome, there’ll still be the issue of emotions. Roboticists can program a humanoid robot to smile when a person enters the room or a metal dog to become inactive or to mimic a sulking posture when ignored, but everybody knows that they don’t really feel any emotions, anymore than a desktop computer or a telephone, and that’s another area where even animals and babies easily outstrip the most sophisticated machines.

Then again, given contemporary equating of seamlessly following protocol with being professional, emotionless and unthinking machines will undoubtedly prove very profitable, once algorithms are developed to allow them to deal with more and more varied and complicated scenarios. Personally, I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I think that humans should be allowed to act like humans, including showing emotions and deviating from the rules. But on the other hand, I was glad when my phone company installed an automated pay system instead of making customer service representatives process payments. I find dealing with the automated system much more pleasant, because it doesn’t try to sell me any additional services – or get annoyed when I consistently decline the offers. And anyone who’s worked with somebody who complains that there’s never anything interesting on TV and then proceeds to describe – in detail – all the uninteresting stuff she’s “had” to watch anyway, can probably see the advantage of working with a “professional” machine. :)

Still, although I didn’t grow up reading about robots, a huge part of me wishes that there weren’t such a huge gap between how machines operate and how organisms think.

This book inspired me to look up videos of robots online. Here are links to the filmstrips I've found the most interesting:

Medieval Japanese clockwork moving figures (karakuri):
http://vimeo.com/24412432
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqd4MqtFduA

18th century clockwork clavichord-playing doll created in Germany for Marie Antoinette:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=75CXFwgslsY&feature=endscreen

Modern Japanese qrio robots dancing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGtxPmcsXfg&feature=related

Wabot-2 plays the piano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHMQuo_DsNU
Toyota robot plays the violin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=klzSN2giygY&NR=1

Human-looking robots talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOqfrM8aiOQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbFFs4DHWys&feature=related
(In the last film, I can't tell how seamless the dialog is, since I don't know Japanese, but it looks very natural, except for the parting wave on the robot's part.)

I’ve also read How do ants know when you’re having a picnic? by Joanne Settel and Nancy Baggett (592). It turned out to be a children’s book, but my local library has it in the adult dept, and I’ve learned plenty of fascinating information from it. It’s also a convenient book for this number, for despite the title, it covers all sorts of invertebrates, not just ants.

I’ve read Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin lessons in life, love and language by Deborah Fallows (495.1). In this book, Fallows recounts learning Mandarin Chinese during the three years she spent in China and trying to understand the country’s culture through its language. I’ve found it a quick and interesting read. I would recommend it to anybody who’s looking for something other than a textbook to fill this number. You’ll definitely learn something about the Chinese language and life in China, but there’s no heavy-duty linguistics here.

I’ve also reread National Portrait Gallery: a visitor’s guide by John Cooper. There’s considerably more text here than is usual for such books, and it’s quite lively and engaging. I often buy guidebooks after visiting museums, but usually end up using them as visual mementos of the trip, leafing through them occasionally, but seldom actually reading them. This book I did read through while I was in London, remembered much of it, and reread now with pleasure.

I’ve also noticed that it's been a year since I started this challenge. Originally I had had books listed in 104 sections, including 47 divisions; after half a year I had books in 122 sections, including 57 divisions, and now I have books listed in 140 sections, including 67 divisions (goal: 750 sections, including 90 divisions). So in my first year of the Dewey Decimal challenge I’ve read books from 36 new sections (18 per half year), including 20 new divisions (10 per half year). Half a year ago I thought this was quite modest and hoped to do better, but all I’ve managed was to repeat exactly the previous stats, lol! Oh, well, I suppose it’s one of those cases when the journey is the destination.

I’ve read Your inner fish: a journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body by Neil Shubin (611) highly recommended by Lorax on DDC Wiki, with which I wholly concur. It’s a fascinating book that traces the origins of limbs, hands, teeth, eyes, ears, smell receptors, and bodies themselves, with data from paleontology, embryology and genetics.

From reading this book, I’ve gained a new understanding of not only how our various body parts and organs evolved and why, but how the evolution works in general. Time and again, some genes got duplicated by mistake, and then eventually one of the copies mutated into something useful, and the mutation survived because it gave an advantage to the descendants who had inherited it. In this way, for example, two kinds of color vision receptors that most mammals have increased to three in Old World monkeys, and the number of odor genes have multiplied from a handful in jawless fish to over a thousand in mammals. However, evolution is apparently a two-way street. Once something becomes less useful, mutations that prevent that gene from functioning properly don’t harm the animal too much and get passed on to the next generation. Thus, once colorful fruit appeared in the jungles and monkeys developed a richer color vision "in response" and began relying more on sight and less on smell to identify the best fruit to eat, their sense of smell deteriorated. Shubin writes that "fully three hundred" of their (and our) odor genes "are rendered completely functionless by mutations that have altered their structure beyond repair."

It was also fascinating for me to learn how precursors of some of our organs and various structures existed in very early animals, biding their time till the situation changed and they could evolve into something useful.

I also found out many interesting facts about how our organisms from this book. For instance, I was surprised to learn that an odor receptor can interact with only one kind of molecule, and that’s why we need so many of them, and consequently so many odor genes. But a particular smell may be composed of many molecules in various quantities, and so the author likens the signals our brain receives from various activated odor receptors to a chord. Another thing that surprised me was that a gene that switches on, say, hand- or eye-building genes in one animal would do the same in a totally different animal if inserted into its embryo, simulating its genes to build an eye or a hand wherever it’s inserted. Thus, a mice gene can trigger a fly’s eye-building genes to make an extra eye – a fly’s type of eye, of course – wherever it’s inserted.

A paleontologist, Neil Shubin also writes about their work: how they decide where to go to search for fossils, how they look for them in the field, and the work that gets done with the fossils after they get home. He says that it may take several expeditions to the same place to discover something significant, and since they usually search in most undisturbed places – deserts or high Arctic where it snows even in July – they have to put up with prolonged stays in tents in uncomfortable conditions. However, he manages to write with humor about the lifestyle necessitated by his profession. In general, I’ve found this a very well written book. No matter what he writes about, it never gets boring.

I’ve read Rowing to latitude: journeys along the Arctic’s edge by Jill Fredston (797.122). In this book, the author recounts the trips she and her husband undertook along the coasts of Alaska, northern Canada, Labrador Peninsula, Greenland, Norway and Spitsbergen, as well as along the Yukon and the Mackenzie rivers, all in rowing boats. She had enjoyed rowing since she was ten, even rowing to school on Long Island where she lived. Another fascination from very early on was snow, and so after having obtained a graduate degree in polar regions and glaciology, Fredston took the job of an avalanche specialist in Alaska. In a few years she married a fellow “avalancher” and rower, Douglas Fesler, and the two of them began taking extensive journeys during the summer months. She says that they chose to row in the Arctic not because they prefer the north per se, but because of their deep passion for wildness, and these days there isn’t much wildness left in the lower latitudes.

Fredston does write about rowing and what attracts her to it, as well as about their narrow escapes from high waves, headwinds, pack ice and bears, both polar and brown; about the breathtaking scenery and about garbage-strewn villages whose inhabitants treat the ocean and their own yards like a dump; about the magic of peaceful close encounters with wildlife and about men with rifles who traverse the tundra in ATVs in search of something to kill. She devotes a chapter per place, but after having read the book, each stands distinct in my mind. She writes with a great sense of humor and a very good style. Despite some sad passages, I deeply enjoyed this book. And the color photographs included in it are simply superb!

I have several more books to add:

The philosopher and the wolf: lessons from the wild on love, death, and happiness by Mark Rowlands (128) is a two-fold book. Firstly, it’s an animal book, as the author writes about the wolf he kept for eleven years. Secondly, being a professor of philosophy, Rowlands takes this opportunity to reflect on lupine and human nature and approach to life. Although the story is narrated chronologically, and the philosophical musings mostly spring from specific situations or circumstances, there’s a natural progression to them too, as each new interlude builds on the previous ones. I’ve found this book interesting, charming, and easy to read, even though I disagree with its author on many points.

Dianne Hales, the author of La bella lingua: my love affair with Italian, the world’s most enchanting language (450), came to Italy every year for 25 years to pursue her study of Italian language and exploration of Italian culture. Her book is similar to Deborah Fallows’s about Chinese, but while Fallows focuses on her observations of daily life in China, Hales writes mostly about various aspects of Italian culture. What the two countries apparently have in common is that despite the fact that its people speak a wide variety of very differently sounding dialects, both view their national language as a unifying force and feel patriotic about it. In Italy this sense is also enhanced because for most of its history it wasn’t a unified state, and so language served as the conduit of the common national culture, what bound them together and made them a nation.

Aaron Lansky describes in Outwitting history: the amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books (002.075) how his interest in pre-war Jewish culture and a lack of Yiddish books in the 1970s America made him collect them from heirs who couldn’t read them and led to him founding an organization dedicated to saving, preserving and disseminating Yiddish literature. It’s an informative and entertaining book, and I enjoyed it, although I’m not sure I can take his assertions about food shortages on Cuba at face value.

The disappearing spoon and other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements by Sam Kean (546) is an exciting and easy-to-read account of discoveries in chemistry and physics, with lots of interesting stuff they don’t tell you at school. For example, I had known, of course, that how reactive an element is depends on how filled its outer “orbit” is with electrons, but I had no idea that there are “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons that make some elements’ nuclei more stable than those of their heavier neighbors on the periodic table. And the fact that some evidence has been discovered that one of the fundamental physical constants may have changed over time – and may even be changing slightly in the course of the year, as the earth gets closer or farther away from the sun – was a complete revelation. Unfortunately this book is marred sometimes by the author’s tone, but it was still definitely worth reading for me.

Peter Allison’s How to walk a puma and other things I learned while stumbling through South America (918) is interesting and amusing, as he describes the year and a half he spent visiting various locales in South America, which he hoped would have enough wildness and danger left to make him feel alive again, after a decade on the boring desk job in his native Sydney. His ability to enjoy himself in any non-monotonous and overly safe circumstances make his book highly enjoyable to the reader.

57> Ooh, both La Bella lingua (though I don't speak a word of Italian beyond things like 'gelato' and 'proscuitto') and How to walk a puma sound interesting. And the former would even be a new division for me! Incidentally, if you liked the latter, you should check out Whatever you do, don't run by the same author about his time as a safari guide in Botswana, even though you already have a 916.

58> Yes, I've enjoyed both these books! I have read Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide and Peter Allison's other book Don't Look Behind You!: A Safari Guide's Encounters with Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos and liked them both, too. I didn't list them on my DD challenge list because I thought Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari more informative about life in different African countries. But Allison's book about South America has a wider focus than his African books.

All those books sound interesting. I definitely want to find out how to walk a puma.

I have a couple of new books to add:

Dick Pitman wrote in the prologue to A wild life: adventures of an accidental conservationist in Africa (639.97) "The book is set almost exclusively in Zimbabwe. Whatever sins it may have committed in the eyes of the world – and I’m not blind to these – Zimbabwe took me in, dusted me down, and gave me the life I’ve enjoyed. I’m not about to kick it in the teeth. I’ve mostly refrained from political comment and merely described those events that have impacted my own activities." The author keeps true to his word, but my fears that this would turn out to be a whitewashed, worth-reading-only-for-animals-related-episodes kind of book didn’t materialize, because his activities pitted him all too often against successive governments, each as thoroughly corrupt as the previous one, as well as various international conservation organizations, many of which apparently spend most of their money on actions that at best don’t make any difference to conservation efforts (workshops, conferences, consultations, discussions, talks, etc.) and at worst actually promote animal slaughter under the guise of providing people with a sustainable income (from hunters). Even though it could have been a depressing book, the author’s very clear-eyed and satirical tone, which cuts right through the currents fads and pretensions, makes these passages almost a pleasure to read. And it’s not all bad news, as Pitman describes his and fellow dedicated enthusiasts’ successful efforts to circumvent the government officials and save wildlife, as well as his visits to various wildlife areas to restore his energy and to remind himself what he was doing it all for. There are also passages of pure fun, in which the author recounts the animals’ and tourists’ antiques and his own misadventures. But, perhaps, what stood out the most for me was the unimaginable dedication of many national park employees who continued to do their work despite lack of payment, physical danger from poachers and imprisonment by governments in cohorts with poachers. It seems that people who complain that Tolkien’s orks are too bad and his elves are too good don’t know enough about human nature.

Dmitry Samarov’s Hack: stories from a Chicago cab (388.4132) is comprised mostly of anecdotes about his experiences working as a taxi driver in Chicago, with some descriptions of his work life in general thrown in. Because different days of the week have their specifics in his profession, that’s the format he follows, with an extra chapter about holiday times. Samarov’s descriptions are spot-on, but most of the stories he relates are depressing. Several are about people who hire a cab to go buy drugs (right outside, in plain view of everybody, on one occasion a block from a police crackdown on drugs). A number of stories feature passengers in inebriated condition. Two are about women fleeing domestic violence. A few of the passengers are thoroughly disgusting themselves. I understand that a normally dressed person who knows where he’s going, spends the time in the cab looking out the window or making polite small talk, and then pays and leaves, doesn’t make for an interesting story, but very few stories in this book are happy ones. The one I liked best was about a woman who, after she had survived cancer in her fifties, decided to live her remaining life to the fullest, and among other projects she undertook was learning to appreciate opera. She took the cab to drive her home from the opera house, after she’d just gotten a position as a supernumerary there – like an extra in a film, she explains. The most interesting tidbit in the book relates the fact that the cab company the author works for – Yellow Cab – buys retired New York cabs to save money and puts them on the street in Chicago, with the predictable result that they break down every other week. It’s a short book and a quick read, and an interesting one, just don’t expect it to lift your spirits. In the beginning of the book, when the author said that no one embraces his profession from choice, I was surprised – I thought many guys liked to drive – but by the end of the book I could see his point: if it isn’t boring, it’s usually unpleasant.

I used to think that I should follow the Dewey numbers assigned to books on their pages in Library Thing. In a few instances, when I thought that the number I had in mind was much better, I used it, but if it could go in either category, I went with LT, because I thought that LT numbers were based on most libraries’ numbers. However, now that I’ve realized that the numbers on LT book pages change frequently and sometimes are totally off, I’ve decided to make my own decisions more often, if it makes sense to me. For instance, I’ve reassigned Kakapo rescue from 598.71 to 639.97, following LT, but I’ve put A wild life: adventures of an accidental conservationist in Africa in 639.97 too, instead of 333, because it also discusses conservation of specific animals. However, I’m not going to put The zoo that never was in that number, because it’s not about conservation of any species; the author just rescued whatever injured or orphaned animals he encountered and then released them once they could fend for themselves. If it were about one animal, I would have put it in that animal’s number, but since it’s about different animals, I think it belongs in 590. Below are three books from my library that I’ve added to my DDC list, following a change of number by LT (that I agree with).

Before the wind: the memoir of an American sea captain, 1808-1833 by Charles Tyng (387.544) was published by the author’s descendant who found it. The memoirs describe the author’s career working on merchant ships, from ship boy to captain, during which he made 18 various trips. I enjoyed this book. He took a lively interest in everything he saw and had a knack for descriptions. Needless to say, his profession also led to various adventures. He happened to be in Chili and Brazil during their wars for independence, from Spain and Portugal respectively. He learned about the battle of Waterloo, when his ship stopped at St Helena where Napoleon was then guarded. Tyng also witnessed the arrival of the fruits of the industrial revolution. When he saw a steamship for the first time, he thought that it was on fire. His ship was the first one to arrive into Amsterdam via a newly constructed canal, amazing the people who lived alongside the canal and damaging several bridges. When in England, he traveled on the first railroad in the world, from Manchester to Liverpool (the boiler blew up, killing the engineer and burning several workers). This book really allowed me to see life in the early 19th century, and the fact that the author had been everywhere was an added bonus.

In The sweetest club in the world: the U.S. Senate by Louis Hurst (328.73) the head of the Senate restaurant in the 1960s provides an unforgettable picture of the U.S. Senate at the time. Think senators specially taking the time to find out how much a cup of coffee costs in the Congress and Pentagon restaurants and complaining if it’s a few cents less than in theirs – this was a regular occurrence. Think a senator’s wife stealing the flowers brought in for a lunch with the first lady, before the event. Think another senator’s wife stealing the mink coat of Liza Minelli who was then married to a senator (Minelli naively thought that if only senators and their wives had access to the room, her coat would be safe there). A memorable book.

Cats in the sun by Hans Silvester (778.932) contains his photographs of cats on various Greek islands. I highly enjoyed this book and have leafed through it many times. Perhaps, the most impressive photograph depicts a cat in the moment of leaping from the high fence on one side of the street onto the other: just a black cat flying across the bright blue sky.

I've read The bluebird effect: uncommon bonds with common birds by Julie Zickefoose (598). It's organized by species, as the author describes her experiences with bird rehabilitation or conservation. It’s richly illustrated with her beautiful watercolors and pencil sketches of birds. I liked it that it’s focused on ordinary birds, many of which I know and often see myself.

Mostly, it’s a very pleasant book, although chapters on sandhill cranes and mourning doves do talk about the fact that these birds are considered game species in many U.S. states – something I found as shocking as the author, when she had first learned about it. She also riles against cat owners who let their pets go outside where they kill birds and small mammals, but I thought she was rather inconsistent on this issue, since she writes that she lets her dog hunt chipmunks on her 80-acres property and “hosts several large rat snakes in their garage all summer, where they help control the white-footed mouse population” – even though she admits that these snakes are not at all averse to diversifying their diet with bird eggs and nestlings. Also, while she’s understandably against crane and dove hunting, she writes that she accepts gifts of venison from her “hunter friends” and sounds glad that squirrels are rare where she lives, since her neighbors in Appalachian Ohio shoot and eat them. Interestingly, she expresses concern that feeding wild birds may cause their numbers to increase beyond reasonable, citing a time when she counted seventy cardinals in her backyard after a heavy snowstorm. However, since it was usually more like seven, it seems that on that particular day the cardinals from a very wide area flew in, as they were searching desperately for something to eat. So I don’t understand her equanimity about a hawk who, instead of migrating with the rest of his species, had settled in her backyard for the winter, specializing on eating male cardinals. I think allowing a raptor to move into one’s backyard out of season and make a living catching the birds one attracts with feeders is no different from allowing a cat – or a snake – to do the same.

Still, for the most part, it is a pleasant book. My favorite story was about chimney swift nestlings whom the author raised and later released in a nearby town, “full of old buildings and uncapped brick chimneys, and situated on the confluence of two rivers, with associated hordes of aquatic insects overhead.” As the human-grown birds took flight, “a squadron of wild swifts came down to meet and flank each flier…. The wild swifts made them welcome, swooping down as a body to fly alongside them.” As I read this, I thought how uncommon such behavior is in people.

The chapter tied with that one as my most favorite was about starlings. Julie Zickefoose recalls seeing a starling in town, who kept flying from a wire overhead to a spot in the middle of a traffic intersection, where lay the remains of another starling: “It can only be a starling’s mate. An hour later, I see the bird, still sitting on the wire, still watching what is now just a paste of feathers, unrecognizable to any but its mate.” She also writes about Mozart’s pet starling “that could whistle parts of his concertos, with its own improvisations and additions. When it died, three years later, he held a funeral, with invited guests in full mourning dress.” When the author had raised and released a starling, it tapped on her window the next day with a nickel in its beak, which it dropped into her palm full of mealworms. Another wild starling who settled in her backyard called her “Mommy” in the voice of her toddler son (and I was shocked that that’s what it took for her not to throw out its eggs from the nest box intended for another species).

Oh, and the story about barn swallows who’ve traded barns for home-improvement stores and learned to hover in front of the infrared beam of the electric eye that opens the automatic doors to let themselves in and out. And I loved it how the author stopped buying chicken nuggets for her son, when she saw that even a turkey vulture won’t eat them.

I’ve learned a great deal about different kinds of birds from this book. I also marveled at the author’s dedication in raising songbird nestlings. As she explains, there are far more facilities for the rehabilitation of baby raptors who only have to be fed once a day than baby songbirds who may have to be fed every twenty minutes, from dawn to dusk – and dawn happens early at the height of summer. Julie Zickefoose also said in an interview that eight years of writing and, perhaps, twenty of drawing went into this book – and it shows! I was not surprised to read that a number of Amazon reviewers were buying extra copies for Christmas gifts, even though it was published in March.

61: I used to think that I should follow the Dewey numbers assigned to books on their pages in Library Thing.
Hmm. I recently overhauled my DD thread because after a year and a half I hadn't gotten around to filling in pre-LT books. Instead, I'm filling in the categories with recently read books, and realized that some DD assignments are just weird. I haven't yet considered alternatives. Hope this doesn't take another year and a half.

> 63
I don't think it's a problem with most books on LT, so it probably won't take a huge amount of time. However, I do wish users had a way to correct some really ridiculous numbers, like 658.562 - quality control - for Jules Verne's Mysterious island, 579.6 - mushrooms - for Gerald Durrell's Three tickets to Adventure, or 641 - food and drink - for a collection of James Herriot's books.

I'm currently reading a huge book on butterflies, which is somewhat slow-going. So after the first 400 pages I felt a need for a break and read Paramedic: on the front lines of medicine by Peter Canning (610.737). It's a memoir about the author's first year working as an ambulance paramedic in Hartford, Connecticut. I found it interesting and informative, and the fact that he’d worked in the state health bureaucracy previously gives another layer to his book. He also provides good descriptions of the city.

What surprised me the most in his book was that they had to pick up drunks who were unsteady on their feet, because the poor men could fall and injure themselves, check their medical condition, give them fluids or medications if it could help them feel better, and take them to the hospital where they got a bed and a meal, usually for free because all these alcoholics seemed to have state health insurance. Canning writes that the local rehab was much more particular in regards to whom it would accept (a person had to be able to walk and be well-behaved), but the hospital had to take in everybody. Some of these drunkards came to the hospital so often that everybody on staff knew their names. A nurse told the author about one of them that he cost the state $800,000 a year in hospitalization bills alone. I must say that I found it very strange that while people in low-paid positions who don’t get health insurance from work and can’t afford to pay for necessary health care don’t get any help from the state, and neither do people whose HMOs refuse to pay for necessary treatments, drunks get free room and board at hospitals. Then again, this book was written in 1997, so it could have changed by now.

Another thing that surprised me was that although ambulance personnel always ask patients what hospital they want to go to, I assumed that they were affiliated with one of the hospitals and had good salaries and benefits. But it turned out that that’s not at all the case. Ambulance services, like police and fire services, fall into the purview of the city authorities, but unlike policemen and firefighters, ambulance personnel are rarely city employees. Sometimes ambulance services are outsourced to private companies who pay paramedics – the highest-skilled people in ambulances – $14 an hour and rarely provide pension plans (at least when this book was written). Other towns just have basic units staffed with volunteers who can provide basic first aid, but can do little for a heart attack victim. I was also surprised to read, “When we go to nursing homes or corporations, they always make us use the rear entrances by the trash bins and loading docks.”

And there’s another curious pattern I’ve noticed. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but having read a number of various memoirs, it appears to me that men who adopt children, for some reason, feel the need to tell their readers repeatedly exactly how much money they make, while male medics, for some strange reason, seem to have the need to tell their readers repeatedly exactly how tall they are. I’ve never seen either trend with adoptive mothers or female medic memoirists.

What's the book on butterflies?

64>

What do you mean, you wish there was a way to correct bad numbers? You can correct them on your own copy, as with anything else; you can't change work-level data, as for anything else.

65 >
The book on butterflies is Mariposa Road: the first big butterfly year by Robert Michael Pyle. The author chronicles the year he spent travelling all over the United States, trying to see as many species of butterflies as possible.

66>
Thanks! Somehow I didn't realize that I could change the DDC numbers in my books' list; I thought that DDC numbers were different from the spelling of titles or authors' names and had to be supplied by the LT system. I actually saw more wrong or very general numbers than I remembered, as well as books that didn't have any. However, when I go to the books' pages, if there was no number previously, it still says "not set," and if there was only one reported number before, it still says "1 copy" and gives only the previous number. Maybe it takes a bit of time to load on the books' pages? After all, users' tags do show up on books' pages, and everybody's rating is included in the calculation of the average rating on the book's page.

Incidentally, you wouldn't know by any chance, if there's a way to make my list of books always be in the same style and order? After I change it from A to B and have the books resorted by author instead of the date I added them on, it usually stays like this for some time, but then one day I look at my list, and it's back in default view, and I have to change the style and have it resorted all over again.

67: And he has another one about monarchs. A new area of interest for me. The advantage of vast ignorance is I get to read all about it...

Yes, I first heard about the monarchs book and planned to read it, but neither of the two nearest public libraries had it, while one had Mariposa Road, and so I decided to read it instead. Since I love both nature books and travel books, it seemed a perfect fit. However, having read 420 out of its 540 pages, I haven’t yet learned anything about butterflies from it. The author hardly ever talks about butterflies in general, or how different groups of butterflies differ from each other and what the species in each group have in common. He just mentions the species he saw, usually telling the reader about their appearance and how rare or common they are, but after the first two dozen species or so, I’ve found it hard to keep it all in mind. At no point does he say anything at all memorable about any of them. Virtually everywhere he went, he met fellow butterfly naturalists who are all his old friends, but again he just mentions their names, professional positions and book titles, and so not a single one of them stands out in my mind, even though he spent days in their company, as they helped him find and net butterflies for identification. Actually he mentions everything that happened to him during that year: his car problems and his teeth problems, the items he forgot somewhere and had to come back for later, what and where he ate for breakfast, what kind of beer and where he drank in the evening, his wife’s struggle with cancer, his political opinions, this being an election year, etc., etc. He omits nothing, but is content just to mention what he was doing and move on to the next thing he did. There were a few beautiful descriptions of natural areas and a few really interesting bits of information, none of them related to butterflies, for me to be able to get through it (almost), but personally I would have hesitated to recommend it to anybody who isn’t an avid butterfly enthusiast. However, plenty of people on Amazon enjoyed it, by no means all of them lepidopterists; so it’s probably a matter of personal taste. It has a pleasant, vacation-y feel. Many travel books make me think that I wouldn’t have liked to be there myself, but that I enjoy reading about the trip; this is the first one that has made me think the opposite. But once again, many people did find it to their liking, and so your reaction to this book might be totally different from mine.

69: Thanks, that's useful to know. A few months ago I went to a local talk about dragonflies, expecting to learn... something... considering that I'm starting from zero. Instead, it was a catalog: I saw this dragonfly here, I saw that dragonfly there, buzz, buzz, buzz... at the end of the hour plus I was aware that there are lots of dragonfly species, but I had not the slightest idea of crucial distinctions or relationships. The photos were pretty, I'm not disappointed that I sat through them all, but I can't keep details in my head without some sort of structure to attach them to. So I'll probably skip the butterfly book.

69, 70> I'm finding there's an inordinate amount of that going on in some of these "nature" books. The title will have the thing or place being investigated, but then the book is all about the author's daily life or connections or travel impressions. Only about 10-20% of of the book's pages actually discuss the title subject. It does get a bit frustrating, but it's better than 0%. Cheers!

70, 71>
Well, in this book most of the content - probably eigthy-something percent - dealt with butterflies, but it was all exactly like the talk on dragonflies that Qebo attended.

I have several more books to add.

I’ve finally finished Mariposa road (595.789) which I’ve already described in my previous posts. So I’ll only add here that it was amusing to read a book about butterflies right after a book about birds. Julie Zickefoose riled against cats in her bird book, to the point of writing how she’d rescued a bird from “a cat-infested yard.” Well, Robert Pyle had the following to say about birds:

I felt actually hot in Monterey for the first time, but there were no butterflies at the flowers. A nectar-rich garden that should have furnished ladies or something had a black phoebe in residence instead. I was beginning to think that these flycatchers might present me with some serious competition…. I set out on the extensive trails. Everywhere it looked like there might be butterflies, there was a black phoebe stationed…. The sun came out… but in such a nectar trove, in warm sun, I saw no butterflies. It seemed almost unbelievable and certainly unacceptable. I scanned a slow 360 degrees with my binoculars, seeing only one Say’s phoebe and one black phoebe. “Ah! That’s it!” I said. “The damn phoebes got them all!” … The first of February came in on a raft of sun… I got the heck out of doors. First stop, a huge mustard meadow… near Milpitas. But when I saw both a black phoebe and a Say’s phoebe swinging slo-mo arcs around the field… I knew I was doomed by the competition. The first butterfly out of the grass would be snapped up by one or another of the fly-catchers faster than you can say fee-bee.

So it’s all a matter of perspective, but I did wonder what Zickefoose would have thought if she’d read this book. I mean, she likes phoebes so much that she even named her only daughter Phoebe. Well, at least Pyle doesn’t write of “phoebe-infested gardens.” :)

Worm: the first digital world war by Mark Bowden (005.84) is an account of efforts to contain the Conficker worm in 2008-2009. I thought it would read like a thriller, but it didn’t. First of all, a significant portion of the book is filled with background material: history of the Internet, history of malware, biographical sketches of the key players in the Cabal (the group that fought Conficker). Secondly, they never stopped Conficker or really learned who was behind it. I’m not saying that it wasn’t an interesting book – just that it wasn’t a page-turner.

I did learn a lot about cybercrime from it. In particular, I didn’t realize that worms can make infected computers call for instructions whoever sent the worm and then crash designated websites, without the computer owners’ knowledge. Or they can take control over computers belonging to a particular bank or government agency and steal money or information – or sell control over such computers to whoever is interested. I’ve heard that one can buy anything on the Internet, but I had no idea that it includes control over “fifty computers belonging to the FBI.” This way the creators of the worm can make money with much less risk of exposure, since there’ll be no direct contact between them and the infected computers after the infection occurs. Some worm-makers don’t even infect computers themselves, but just sell their malware to whoever would like to use it. I was very surprised to learn that that’s not a crime. That is, according to the author, there’s nothing illegal in creating software that, say, exploits a flaw in the Windows operating system to gain control of other people’s computers, and in selling it to somebody.

I also found out that cybercriminals can run from your garden variety bored teenage hacker who just wants to show off to very well-coordinated groups of people who are more knowledgeable and talented than the best Internet security specialists. The latter is what happened with Conficker. Whoever created that worm gave the Cabal, composed of the best and most experienced Internet professionals, a run for their money, always keeping one step ahead of them. The Cabal kept solving seemingly impossible problem, only to have their quarry upend the game once more. This begs the question as to why these people turn to crime, if they could obviously get any computer-related job in the world and make a ton of money legally, but the author never addresses this question.

Another interesting point is that the Cabal was composed of network specialists who work for some company or run their own Internet-related companies, pure Internet researchers, and a volunteer who routinely spends his evenings hunting worms and then informing infected companies, without benefiting from it in any way (I was amazed that such people even exist! Ditto the guy who ran up a debt on his personal credit card to buy domains ahead of Conficker.) Anybody missing from this list? Yes, the government. It was very hard for the Cabal to get the attention of any of the relevant agencies, and then said agencies’ combined input into the effort to combat the worm was zero. Basically, if you’ve ever thought that the men and women in Washington are individuals with huge egos and feelings of entitlement who take much more from the country in the form of high salaries, benefits and various perks than they give back, this book will serve to confirm this opinion.

Microsoft also comes in for its share of the blame. Before Conficker another worm had exploited a similar flaw in the Windows operating system. Back then Microsoft issued a “patch” for the port that worm had used to gain entry, but didn’t bother to check if a similar problem existed with any of the other ports. Had they done this and fixed that flaw too, Conficker wouldn’t have happened. And funnily, the author says elsewhere that if only everybody registered their Windows operating systems and allowed all the security updates from Microsoft to go through, Windows would have been “well near impregnable.” Yeah, right!

I don’t know if people who’re into computers would find this book informative, but for me it was interesting to look over the shoulders of the Internet defenders, as they go about their work.

I’ve also read a couple of books for young adults, which I found to be quite detailed on their respective subjects.

Martin W. Sandler recounts in The impossible rescue: the true story of an amazing Arctic adventure (979.803) the 1897-1898 overland expedition which required its members to walk two thousand miles in Alaska in winter in order to rescue stranded whalers. The sled dogs had their work cut out for them just transporting the supplies. Members of the expedition could catch a bit of a break when they were using reindeer to pull the sleds, for then they could hitch a ride too, but it looks like most of them did most of the journey on foot. I was also surprised to learn that reindeer are not native to the American north and were introduced there by the American government from Siberia in the 19th century.

Bomb: the race to build – and steal – the world’s most dangerous weapon by Steve Sheinkin (623.45119) examines various aspects of the race to build the atomic bomb. Personally, I disagree with the author on some of the issues, but have still found this book worthwhile. The most interesting bit of information for me was about the Norwegian resistance fighters who twice sabotaged the Germans’ efforts to produce heavy water in Norway. According to the author, this played the crucial role in Germany’s failure to build an atomic bomb during the war.

I’ve read Tent life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia by George Kennan (957.7 ). When the first attempt to lay a telegraph cable under the Atlantic had failed, it was proposed to build an overland line to Europe via Alaska, Bering’s Straits and Siberia. There already was a line from the mouth of the Amur river to Europe, and so the Russo-American Telegraph Company needed the build the line along the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. To this end, an exploring party was sent to Siberia in 1865-1867, consisting of several individuals eager for an adventure, of whom the author was one. The second successful attempt to lay the cable under the Atlantic made this project obsolete, but Kennan’s book is no less interesting for it. It’s full of anthropological observations, humorous passages and details of life and travel in Eastern Siberia in the mid-19th century.

During the three years the author spent there, he traveled all over the Kamchatka Peninsula and along the coast of Asia from Okhotsk to Anadyr, mostly by dog sleds. Unlike the members of the Alaskan rescue expedition about which I had read earlier, Kennan and his comrades could ride in the sleds because they traveled from one village or temporary nomads’ camp to the next, and so they didn’t need to carry anywhere as much provision, but often they were compelled to run besides their sleds to keep any feeling in their legs. Quite a few times they actually had to camp in the open in the middle of a snowy plain. In the beginning of winter they put three upright sledges together to form a sort of wigwam, shoveled the snow from the ground in between the sledges and lighted a huge bonfire in front of it, which came out during the night anyway, and so they woke up at midnight with frozen legs, despite wearing furs and sleeping in furry sleeping bags. Later removing the snow from any area became impossible, and they erected a tent on the snow, using the sledges to block the wind. Once during a heavy snowstorm they were snowed in to such a degree that they began to suffocate during the night and had to cut the roof of their tent to get out; they had to spend the next ten hours huddled on their haunches in a circle to try to keep their faces from being plastered with clouds of snow driven across the plain. Another time they discovered that a narrow line of beach between the sea and the rocky coast was occupied by a wall of frozen snow, and so they had to use their axes to cut a road in the side of this wall. But there were compensations, such as incredible auroras and the no less incredible hospitality of the local people, considering the precariousness of their circumstances. However, although Kennan found life in winter hard there, in the summer he was bored when he had little to do other than hunt, socialize and wait for the supply ships from America to arrive, and so he couldn’t wait for the winter to arrive again and make traveling by sledges possible, so that he could renew his exploration. When the second attempt to lay the telegraph cable under the Atlantic proved successful, instead of boarding the ship to San Francisco, George Kennan chose to travel to Moscow via postal horses and then to America via Europe, to make a trip around the world, but he decided not to include an account of that in his book, since trips across Russia from the Pacific had been described before already.

I found this not a fast, but a memorable read.

I’ve finally managed to finish The majic bus: an American odyssey by Douglas Brinkley (917.3) in which I had gotten bogged down for two whole months! And I don’t even have a good excuse for it. It’s not a new number for me. Nor was it a particularly enjoyable book for me, as I hoped it would be.

I liked the author’s concept. A history professor at Hofsra University on Long Island, Brinkley decided to take 17 students on a 7-week bus trip around the country in order to make American history come alive for them. Unfortunately, I didn’t much like the description of the trip itself. Often they arrived somewhere late or just passed through something, and Brinkley simply had to tell his students about it, because by tomorrow they had to be somewhere else and there was no time to lose. Also, considering that it was a college course and not a vacation trip, a lot of time and attention was spent on popular music. Of their stay in Chicago, Brinkley writes: “Students made mental notes of the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, and the Chicago Art Institute as we drove past. They would visit all of them Saturday afternoon.” Comments like this made me wonder if the author had also earned his degree in one afternoon. Further on he seems to remember with pride how his students “visited the show at the Art Institute of Chicago, bypassing Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Van Gogh and heading straight for Grant Wood’s celebrated 1930 American Gothic.” It seemed to me that he only appreciates Modernist art and literature and popular music, and looks at all other forms of culture with disdain. Something else I noticed was that Brinkley mentions that half the students on the trip were Jewish, while, judging from the group photo, none were black; however, they spent a considerable amount of time on African American history and none at all on the Jewish American history.

There were certainly passages I liked – most of them discussing environmental issues. On the other side of the spectrum, the most harrowing episode from my POV involved students firing semiautomatic weapons at prairie dogs from the back of a pickup truck, at the invitation of a local ranch owner, “tired of East Coast misconceptions of life on the range.” Brinkley sums up this experience thusly: “the hunters hit nothing, but dirt; the wily varmints always just managed to dodge death by a whisker…. It became impossible not to like Roger Barber and envy him for living on such a dream spread.” I’m not sure that these New York City boys’ lack of success at hunting actually proves the prairie dogs’ high chances of survival despite the onslaught, but in any case, the fact that a despicable activity is difficult doesn’t make it less despicable in my eyes. (I’m also not sure if it’s legal to let someone else borrow one’s firearms.)

This book is 500 pages long – an enormous length for a seven-weeks trip – and not necessarily because the author gives lots of background information, but because he feels compelled to describe each of his meals and snacks and every shop he visited on this trip.

So overall, I think that it’s a fascinating concept, but that it was poorly executed, even if the students involved were happy with their trip.

That sounds like a weird and not very educational trip!

^
Yes, indeed! It was such a promising idea, but I think it suffered from poor organization and from the author's inability to appreciate any aspects of culture outside of his academic specialty. I kept waiting for something interesting to turn up, but it turned out to be too little for a book of this size.

I have another book to add. Shattered faith: a woman’s struggle to stop the Catholic Church from annulling her marriage by Sheila Rauch Kennedy (234.165) became the first book I’ve read for this challenge that I’d never have read otherwise, but I’m glad I did, because it offered me an interesting perspective into a mindset and a world so different from my own. The author describes the process of annulment, not only as experienced by her, but also by a number of other women in this situation and their children. Her book is well written, and regardless of where one stands on this issue – if anywhere at all – the reader will likely come to understand her point of view, if not necessarily to agree with her.

Although Sheila Kennedy was the one to initiate the separation and to file for divorce two years later, she was devastated when her ex-husband petitioned for an annulment two years after the divorce, and she absolutely refused to consider it. She explains that an annulment is not like a divorce. A divorce merely says that the marriage became unworkable at some point and was terminated. An annulment means that the marriage never existed at all, because it was so flawed from the start as to compromise its validity. Since Vatican doesn’t recognize divorce, while the divorce rate among American Catholics is the same as among other Americans, the Catholic Church in the USA has to stretch its annulment guidelines every way it can in order not to lose a huge chunk of its members (and likely their children too) in every generation: Could at least one of the spouses have been not mature enough at the time of marriage to fully realize the commitment and responsibility this step requires and thus unable to give an informed consent to the marriage and become a proper spouse? Could some childhood trauma have made one of them too psychologically impaired to bond in marriage? Has either of them ever suffered from depression?

Now, I’m sure there are plenty of divorced Catholics who are willing to go along with this to be able to remarry and remain in good standing with their church – but not everybody. The author tells the stories of several women she met who had followed the teachings of the Catholic Church and had fully dedicated themselves to their marriages which had lasted for twenty to thirty years and had produced three to six children, only to have their "careers" declared invalid by that same church, just because their husbands wanted to marry someone else now. Divorce at that stage of their marriage was often hard, but annulment was a lot harder still. Not only did they feel that their lives had been erased, but they also lost faith in their church as a moral beacon and a support in a time of crisis, and for these women, their families and their church had been everything. They also didn’t want to lie, especially "before God," and were aggrieved to be manipulated into it by the church tribunal, which invariably took their husbands’ side entirely. The children in such families also suffer when told that they hadn’t been born in a sanctified union, feel betrayed by both their fathers and their church and often end up estranged from both, leaving their mothers to wonder how they’re going to raise them without the moral and spiritual guidance of their religion.

All the stories included in this book ended well, as the children naturally found the moral and spiritual guidance in their mothers, and the women broadened their lives through careers outside the home and/or volunteer work. However, the author insists that it’s not really a happy end. Having been married to a nephew of President Kennedy, she told her ex-husband’s friend who tried to persuade her to change her mind:

Imagine for a moment... that Congress passed a law that changed the way votes are counted in presidential elections. Assume... that these ways of counting, if valid in 1960, would have given Nixon the small percentage he needed to win the election. Now Congress makes this law retroactive and annuls Kennedy’s presidency.... The annulment doesn’t alter the legal ramifications of the Kennedy presidency.... It’s just that he was never president as we now view presidency. He just thought he was. Joe’s ambassador points out the obvious: that Kennedy gave his life for his country and the presidency. It would be unthinkable to take it away. Precisely, I answered. I doubt the Kennedys would go along with it.... But that is what annulment does. These women gave their lives to marriage and motherhood with no less dedication than Joe’s uncle gave to his presidency, and without… marching bands or the White House in the bargain. Even though men would never be expected to remain silent while an institution erased what they had done with their lives, that is exactly what the Church and others expected of these women.

The author suggests some alternatives. One would be for the Catholic Church to relinquish its jurisdiction over marriage, as it has over all the other legal issues, especially since its ruling on the validity of a marriage has long been of no legal consequence – i.e. assume the Protestant approach. Another might be to extend to Catholics’ second marriages the distinction the Catholic Church recognizes between a sanctified marriage conducted in a Catholic church and a valid, albeit not sanctified (from the Church’s perspective) marriage conducted elsewhere between a Catholic and a non-Christian. Catholics married to non-Christians remain members in good standing: they can fully participate in Mass and go to confession, even though they’re parties to "unsanctified" marriages. Sheila Kennedy thinks the same can be true of people who blew their chance at a sanctified marriage, perhaps, after a trial period to see that they have learned from their mistakes. After all, if a criminal can confess and be forgiven in the eyes of the Catholic Church and restored to his membership, why not a divorced person who wants another chance at marriage? (A priest with whom the author shared this idea told her that the Orthodox Church practices this approach with remarried people.) But either of these changes would require that Vatican changes a cardinal doctrine, and that doesn’t seem likely at present. Sheila Kennedy says that she wrote her book largely to expose the unfairness of the current system to some of the most devote Catholics and to advocate for change.

It was interesting for me to read the stories of all these women, very different, except that they were all devote Catholics whose marriages didn’t last their lifetimes. Surprisingly, it wasn’t even boring or dreary to read about the legal proceedings in the author’s case. It would have interesting to know how divorce and accompanying issues are approached by the Catholic Churches in other countries, but I understand that it was far outside the author’s plans or needs to engage in such a research. I do wish, though, that she had included at least a couple of stories of male correspondents in annulment cases, even if it’s the women who are far more likely to be adversely affected by them. (It was actually a newspaper article about a man who successfully appealed his marriage’s annulment to the Vatican court that made the author seriously investigate this option. She won, but it took the Roman court nine years to process her appeal; then it took the Boston Archdiocese two more years to inform her of the verdict, supposedly because it "had to be translated from Latin." This book had long been published by then, and I learned about Sheila Kennedy’s vindication from the Internet after I had read this book.)

I’ve found William Ecenbarger’s book Kids for cash: two judges, thousands of children, and a $2.8 million kickback scheme (365.42) so shocking that I checked its reviews first, and only when I’d seen The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, and The Philadelphia Inquirer treat it seriously, did I decide to read it. Its author details how in 2003-2008 a Pennsylvanian juvenile county court judge routinely had kids who’d committed very minor misdemeanors incarcerated in the private juvenile detention center which shared its profits with him and the county president judge; how the two judges were protected by the entities designed to investigate judicial misconduct; and how only the president judge’s unrelated public association with a mobster brought about their downfall. A sad book, of course, but a very worthwhile read.

I’ve read another book from the Enchanted world series, this one about Water spirits by Stephen G. Hyslop (398.2). Like the book about fairies and elves, it both tells various legends and talks about the folk beliefs from which such tales arose. One can put the tales in this book into two groups: tales of the natural water spirits, such as mermaids, selkies, nymphs and guardians of lakes, ponds and springs, and tales of zombies and ghosts of human beings who died at sea under unfavorable circumstances.

The former kind of tale often features a mortal who entered the underwater realm, usually moved either by curiosity or the charm of one of its denizens. This magical place is invariably described as beautiful, but there’s usually a price to be paid for going where no mortal was meant to go. Sometimes a person becomes torn between the two worlds, sometimes he finds that centuries have passed on earth while he spent a few days underwater, sometimes the enchanted world proves more sinister than it appears and wants to hold on to those it has drawn into its net.

The author explains that in the past when seafaring was very dangerous it was difficult for people devoid of wanderlust to understand those who wanted to leave the safe harbor for the perilous sea. Therefore, stories arose of mysterious otherworldly beings and worlds that were hard to forget once one had glimpsed them. Add to that that the sea itself seemed very mysterious to people back then. Unable to understand the reasons behind its changeable winds, storms, or deathlike stillness when the ship couldn’t move, behind the diseases that attacked the men at sea, such as scurvy, or after leaving a foreign place, and other vagaries of seafaring, but driven to find a cause for everything, they imagined the sea ruled by beings who were fickle and incomprehensible to humans. But as the sea remained unchanged, while human civilizations came and went, its masters and mistresses were believed to be immortal and sometimes holding the secret of immortality. Naturally they were also very powerful, and those who dared defy them usually did so to their peril.

The second kind of tales usually involves either drowned seamen, whose spirit was believed to be restless because their bodies hadn’t received a proper burial and were moved to and fro by the currents of the sea, or a ship full of zombies or ghosts of seamen who’d done or suffered some wrong and thus couldn’t rest in peace either. Seeing such ghosts or zombies was nearly always bad luck for the living who generally didn’t live long afterwards.

In short, while the tales in the Fairies and elves book were a mixed bag, the ones in this one almost invariably have unhappy endings. The sea could be a bounty to those who dared venture there – and the sea kingdoms were always portrayed as lands of plenty in legends – but it did extol a very heavy toll from the mariners too.

Ella, please forgive me for going off topic, but I'm hoping you'll be willing to direct me to the right place. I can't find in LT how to reassign (or assign in the first place, or even select one of sometimes-several options) Dewey numbers--if not to the entire site, at least for my own collection. For example, John Keegan's The Second World War, does not show a Dewey number. I'm happy to add a general (940.54) but how do I do that? Can you help?

^
If you go to your library, you'll see on top of the page buttons with letters representing various styles in which they can be displayed. Right next to these buttons there's a button for changing display view. If you click on it, you'll see various lettered styles with drop down menus of what they display. You can choose to have Dewey numbers displayed. Then you can change them in your own library by double-clicking on them, like any other displayed information (author, title, etc.). Hope this helps! (And be prepared to see some really weird numbers listed!)

I’ve also read Dream state: eight generations of swamp lawyers, conquistadors, Confederate daughters, banana Republicans, and other Florida wildlife by Diane Roberts (975.9) which had proved as entertaining as its subtitle implies and quite informative, even if I don’t always agreed with the author. It’s a history of the state, often illustrated with stories about the author’s numerous ancestors.

Bootstrapper: from broke to badass on a Northern Michigan farm by Mardi Jo Link (630.973) was a mixed bag. It’s well-written and interesting, and the author has an excellent sense of humor, but it’s not the kind of book I expected it to be, judging from its title and description. For one thing, it’s not so much about farming, as about the author’s attempts to pull her life together emotionally and fiscally after her divorce from her husband of 19 years, after she came home late from work to find him smoking an unspecified illegal substance in the garage. For another thing, it’s not about a commercial farm. Link grew vegetables on it to feed her family, but she didn’t produce anything for sale there. Her income came entirely from freelance writing (she’s a journalist by profession) and an unspecified outside job. She does mention ordering seeds from a catalog and planting. That year she also bought some chickens, but soon the meat chickens chased the egg chickens out of the coop and began terrorizing the author’s sons aged 9, 13, and 16 – a situation Link apparently was unable to do anything about. She also realized that she couldn’t bring herself to kill the meat chickens. She couldn’t find anyone to do the deed for her either, and so she ran an ad in the local paper, offering live meat chicken for free to whoever would pick them up from her property. She refers to the guy who showed up as her savior and to his family as angels. The egg chickens remained and finally started producing eggs, but she admits that she spent more money on the chickens than she had spent on fresh eggs from other people’s farms before. Then again, she herself admits that she’s no financial genius. To wit, she re-mortgaged her farm, using the funds her grandfather had left to her sons for college as collateral, only to realize the next day that she couldn’t afford to pay this mortgage. So she sold part of the land instead to keep the other part and the house and to bring in some cash to pay off debts. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I don’t see anything in it to write a book about either.

Much of the book is devoted to describing the family’s financial problems. When it was time to buy firewood, Link drove her sons around the countryside, collecting the logs that had fallen from other people’s pickups. When they had hit a wild turkey, she asked her sons to try to find it, not to nurse it to health, as she’d have done in happier days, but to kill it for food, because she hadn’t been able to buy anything other than eggs for months. Part of their poverty stemmed from the fact that she had waived off most of the child support her ex-husband should have been paying, afraid that otherwise he’d ask to share the kids on a week-on, week-off basis, as was common for divorced couples in their area. I can easily sympathize with her that she didn’t want to give up having her kids with her full-time – gone are the days when a divorced woman could at least count on keeping her children and having their father pay adequate child support. However, she writes that she was also too proud to ask her parents for help or to apply to any of the half-dozen state programs she was qualified for, except for free school lunches. Now, if she were alone, this would have been her own business, but considering that she had three kids living with her, I couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t very responsible of her. What amazed me throughout this book was how uncomplainingly her sons apparently put up with all this. In an age when adolescents throw fits when they don’t get electronic gargets and fashionable outfits of their choice, it’s certainly refreshing, not to mention astonishing, to read about kids who don’t complain when they have to walk around the house wrapped in blankets and eat hot dogs for Christmas dinner (forget about the presents). And it’s not like they hadn’t known anything better. The author’s parents, both schoolteachers, had paid for her journalism school and certainly kept a warm, food-laden house. So when Link writes of her pride in her sons, I can totally see her point, but when she says that she’s proud of herself because she’s managed to hold on to her farm and her kids, I can’t quite share her sentiments. I mean I agree that she did the right thing in both keeping the farm and keeping the kids, but I don’t think there’s much reason for pride in how she did it – or for writing a book.

However, despite the subject matter, it’s not a sad book, and it’s actually often funny, probably because she wrote it five years later, when she’d remarried and published two successful books about local murders and could probably look back on her post-divorce tribulations with a humorous eye.