Review: Beyond The Far Side

Beyond The Far Side by Gary Larson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Larson's Far Side cartoons always make me laugh, I relish every collection I come across. I like the dark, wry humor. I always recall the unusual activities of cows depicted, but in this collection rhinos are as often the visual punchline.

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Review: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is really a microhistory of the American Revolutionary War using hotheaded, idealistic an fawning Lafayette as a lens. As usual, Vowell entertains and educations with her wit, cycnicsm, and insight. Like Assassination Vacation, her travels to national parks and sites works in here aiding her success in bridging today with the 18th Century. Her stellar case of celebrity narrators includes standout understatement from Nick Offerman.

What did I learn? Besides being reminder of the debt owed to French backing she brings forth valid evidence that starving, ragged Continentals was unnecessary, naval strategy was key, and Fort Lee, New Jersey should be renamed since General Charles Lee was a traitor.

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Review: Functional approach to precalculus

Functional approach to precalculus by Mustafa A. Munem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This text came out the year I was born as a textbook for a community college in a county adjacent to the one I teach at 45 years later. This was a fully digested of the New Mathematics or New Math brief, dramatic change in the way mathematics was taught in American grade schools during the 1960s. While the phrase is often used now to describe this change as a short-lived pedagogical fad which quickly became highly discredited, the set of teaching practices introduced in the U.S. shortly after the Sputnik crisis in order to boost science education and mathematical skill in the population, introduced topics seen here including modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, and abstract algebra. These topics have been greatly de-emphasized or eliminated in US elementary schools and high schools curricula since then while built upon outside of the US. Consequently, a typical US math student is a good academic year behind foreign students who also tend to school for longer during the year. The rules of sets would later prove to be very valuable with the onset of databases and other formations of data that were emerging in society. I find it is the area my incoming students are weakest at when I meet them in their final semester before calculus where the readers of this text were grappling with the idea of a set algebraically closed under an operation. This is something we cannot approach at the level of a first-year college student, any longer. This allows such concepts as the circle as a set of equidistant points from a center as well as proofs and theorems – all notions current students are allergic to. I see the readers of this text could handle mathematical induction, now an optional and often foregone topic, as well as periodic function, basic trigonometry to inverses of the sine and cosine as well as vectors and polar coordinates. Now, these topics, a good engineering foundation, have their own semester.

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Review: Flowers from Eugene Field

Flowers from Eugene Field by Eugene Field
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This mawkish and sentimental book has floral and landscape illustrations inside with poems by Field on various topics from babies to kittens and dolls, much hinting at religious and moralistic instruction for youths. Nothing rises to the level of a "Wynken, Blynken, & Nod", but there is a sequel to "Mary’s Lamb" by Sarah Josepha Hale, aka "Mary had a little lamb".


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Review: My Young Years

My Young Years by Arthur Rubinstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rubinstein so often reports the piece was a success in concert from the very earliest part of this career, that I was prompted to find this recording of him performing the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor to see about it, and indeed full of exploitable dynamics I can see why this piece would win over even reluctant audiences. Rubinstein is as much an evangelist for Brahms and this long, elaborate, adventurous Grand Tour of a performance career.

This is a dense and breathless telling of the young man's accidental discovery of this ability and lurching early career, on up to World War I. Along the way, he recounts all the elite and low-lifes he met, including casual dalliances with young ladies inside and outside of bordellos. (The ease of relating these sexual adventures is rather intriguing considering a life in high art, but then it was a popular art and Arthur was, really, a pop start on the road.)

Among the luminaries and characters met and described here are German pianist Heinrich Barth, Ludwig Bösendorfer himself (piano manufacturers figure in often as agents behind recital arrangements as they seek talent to showcase their often shoddy wares), Pablo Casals (a miserly anarchist here), Lina Cavalieri of My Secrets of Beauty and Arthur's pin-up girl, Russian basso and roué Feodor Chaliapin, the tragic and talented toper and gambler Paul Draper and his powerhouse wife Muriel, the original Englebert Humperdinck, various royalty, Jenny Lind, Lydia Lopoukhava future wife to John Maynard Keynes, cameo by a sullen John Reed, his best Karol Szymanowski, the Tchaikovsky brothers, and much more.

The final chapters covering World War II are fascinating for depictions of life during wartime in a vacant Paris, crowded London, and neutral Spain. At the beginning, we read of a Poland largely subsumed by its neighbors and a tense Europe were even well-attended concerts do not make it easy for a performer to obtain passports without subterfuge.

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Review: Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neat: Don Henley founded and funded The Walden Woods Project to preserver more of the sacred land around the pond.

A great quote for a cantankerous Thoreau, "Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour ..." What would he think of NAFTA, the internet, and freeways! Still, I know his message which resounds clearly and eloquently here: the comforts of modernity relieve only those inconveniences it itself foments.

Thoreau's prose is crystalline and reasoned. His essay on Reading is a humbling lecture on the possibilities of books when approached reverently. Often he interrupts his prose with poetic quotes or his own verse, such as his paean to life as an inward voyage whereby we discover our potentialities, our unique possibilities for greatness:

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."

You can certainly draw a line from the vociferous frugality and civility of Benjamin Franklin to Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists. How much we have changed from this spiritual side of the American experiment...

Of course, Thoreau was no hermit and could 'stroll' into town. His character sketches of human and fauna visitors as well as sketches of flora cultivated and encountered add depth to this work which has a cyclical arc. We start in this spring with the roughing in of his cabin and seasoned wit stories of the several years he enjoyed the location we end with the study of thawing as winter gives way to spring.

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Review: The Unknown Poe

The Unknown Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This slim volume contains much you will not find in your "unabridged" Poe collections. First, there is some Poe correspondence, prose and poems from his juvenilia, excerpts of his philosophical essay Eureka: A Prose Poem and more. This last is capstone to thread of the prose pieces where he minutely and even scientifically measures and analyses his imagination, admittedly one he finds easily fueled by alcohol. In a concluding section, Poe's criticism is sampled, including that of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Then, the analogy includes his supports especially among the french, his ardent promoter Charles Baudelaire, translator Stéphane Mallarmé, and others fans Paul Valéry, J. K. Huysmans, and André Breton. This is a unique anthology for the serious Poe fanatic.

Probably most interesting to me is how objectively and even scientifically Poe plumbed his psyche, charted the modes of his imagination. It recalled to me the words of Thoreau in Walden:

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."

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