Although I've seen that there are of course interesting new releases, I am going to read 'old' books this January.
One of these new releases is, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, by Mildred D. Taylor, whose book The Well (about children in the face of racial prejudice) I found excellent.
As the Guardian's books preview of 2020 noted, Anne Brontë's 200th birthday was on January 17th. I'm ambivalent about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so if anything I'd reread Agnes Grey. Featuring a heroine who leaves home to teach due to her family's financial position, it helps sap all of the illusions that one had about governess work after reading Jane Eyre.
Charlotte did try to adjust expectations in Shirley, but Charlotte's melodramatic vein weakens the effect of her warnings; you don't — or at least I don't — expect to find 'tiger-like' James Helstones pouncing on governesses regularly. To leap to another book, Mrs. Norris, the aunt of the heroine in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is so villainous in an unspectacular, quotidian, realistic way that she makes you shudder; I'd say that the families with which Anne's character, Agnes, stays, impress you in that way as well.
***
At the beginning of the year I started with an anthology of news analysis and opinion columns from the Manchester Guardian that was published at the end of 2017: The Bedside Guardian 2017.
It was about Brexit, too, of course; the anthology was compiled the year after the hapless referendum. (The opinion columnists' wide-eyed enthusiasm about the Labour Party's chances of fixing things under Jeremy Corbyn was painful to read, although natural because of how badly the 2017 election went for Theresa May, considering what's happened with the most recent election.)
A few writers argue that Britain's socioeconomic fabric is deteriorating rapidly, apart from thriving hotspots like parts of London.
I guess that right-wing newspapers publish viewpoints that the European Union is to blame for this. But the Guardian's analysts tend to argue that British austerity measures, the 'bedroom tax' which has made living in council housing in Britain an even greater burden, financial exploitation by under-regulated industries (e.g. payday loans), and council taxes that are too low to pay for adequate community services, play a greater role.
*
A deeper look at Britain's economic woes is Mike Carter's book All Together Now?, which the Guardian's books arm also published in 2017. (I received it free of charge as a reward for being a member; and read it in December.)
In 2016 Carter travelled on foot between Liverpool and London, 'reliving' a labour rights march that his father took in the early 1980s. He explains his fraught relationship with his father, meets strangers and pre-arranged interviewees as he goes, records the battered socioeconomic order in the towns and cities through which he walks, and analyzes the causes.
Showing posts with label 21st Century. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 21st Century. Show all posts
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Saturday, December 07, 2019
December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II
Aside from James Baldwin's Another Country, I began reading Edward Snowden's book Permanent Record, a present from my godfather, and published earlier this year.
It is written in a philosophical vein at the beginning and perhaps two thirds of the way into the book, when Snowden writes his meditations on privacy and the American Constitution and the role of whistleblowers, etc. I take a little longer to disentangle the phrase, but usually I welcome it. There's also a clear-eyed assessment or two of the Bush era that is refreshing to read in retrospect.
It is as edifying as it is dumbfounding to read a person my age making so much effort to think of things and take responsibility for ethical dilemmas in his work. I don't think it's easy to look beyond one's tasks and beyond the context of one's workplace and end-of-month paycheque.
As Snowden's computer-obsessed childhood and teenagerhood in the 80s and 90s, his family, his rather abstracted approach to coping with the demands of school, and his flight from community college into a technological career, unfold earlier in the book, my amazement is hardly lessened. I'm not a libertarian nor was I ever a fan of a badly-defined 'War on Terror.' It's also true that I'm not prone to 'gaming the system,' preferring to negotiate the school and work world according to the rules. But the lack of that shared experience didn't weaken the feeling that he is like most of the people I know, for example me, who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and had some exposure to technology. So it is astonishing that he did strike out on his own path.
Whether I'm over-inclined to praise the book or not, I liked how the 'secondary characters' are sketched — whether by Snowden himself, at the prompting of his editor, or through the pen of a ghostwriter. Snowden's father, for example, or his then-girlfriend, now-wife; a handful of details about his wife already suggests people whom I've known, and I can imagine a personality half-way between reality and analogical figures. Snowden mentioned in his introduction that he tried to respect the privacy of the people around him while writing, but the portraiture has not become too vague.
I hadn't heard before, likely due to ignorance, that the Arab Spring had been an indirect factor in Snowden's decision to publish details of the mass surveillance programme. The extent to which private companies have been running American foreign and domestic security — this is one of Snowden's complaints — was also unknown.
In a way the book helps reduce the guilt I've tended to feel toward Edward Snowden. After all, he went through a great moral conflict, when the public for whom he did it — at least I speak for myself — trots along in ignorance. Even his photographic portrait on the book cover looks faintly martyred in expression, and it's no wonder. The book does help bring closer to the reader the aspects that bothered him of the American intelligence community's mass surveillance programmes, in a way that the press articles might not have, so one feels less ill-informed.
As for his elucidation of the techniques of the modern American intelligence community, I am not certain whether I am comfortable 'spying' on the CIA and the NSA and defence contractors as the public may do while reading Snowden's book — sometimes it feels as if he has shrunken the reader to the size of a mouse and taken us along in his pocket into the buildings at Fort Meade, a top-secret facility in Hawaii, etc., where he worked. He makes it pretty clear that the people who work in these buildings are individuals with their own quirks, needs, strengths and weaknesses. Even if Permanent Record feels like a rare opportunity to examine the people who examine us, and it is kind of gripping, and Snowden makes pretty clear that security and the protection of secrets can be incredibly lax within the agencies, I also feel ashamed about my snooping instinct.
Anyway, not having finished the book yet, this is only a half-informed review. As for the technological details, I cannot tell whether a reader who knows something about hacking or system administration or other things will find their curiosity appeased, or be disappointed that it has been reduced to a more lay-reader-friendly version.
*
Besides, I've been making progress in the physics textbook about particle detectors: Teilchen-Detektoren by Otto Claus Allkofer, from the 1970s or 80s.
I couldn't tell you the difference between a fog chamber, a spark chamber, and a scintillation detector easily, or specify which detects neutrons, muons or electrons.
But it is thrilling enough to imagine that if I had a physics background, the prose and structure are straightforward and well-reflected enough that maybe — just maybe — it would be a pretty helpful reference work.
And I'm also wondering if this is relevant to my father's work.
*
Lastly, I have begun reading an e-book version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, hoping that this will help me begin to read up on computer science for my own career.
It is written in a philosophical vein at the beginning and perhaps two thirds of the way into the book, when Snowden writes his meditations on privacy and the American Constitution and the role of whistleblowers, etc. I take a little longer to disentangle the phrase, but usually I welcome it. There's also a clear-eyed assessment or two of the Bush era that is refreshing to read in retrospect.
It is as edifying as it is dumbfounding to read a person my age making so much effort to think of things and take responsibility for ethical dilemmas in his work. I don't think it's easy to look beyond one's tasks and beyond the context of one's workplace and end-of-month paycheque.
As Snowden's computer-obsessed childhood and teenagerhood in the 80s and 90s, his family, his rather abstracted approach to coping with the demands of school, and his flight from community college into a technological career, unfold earlier in the book, my amazement is hardly lessened. I'm not a libertarian nor was I ever a fan of a badly-defined 'War on Terror.' It's also true that I'm not prone to 'gaming the system,' preferring to negotiate the school and work world according to the rules. But the lack of that shared experience didn't weaken the feeling that he is like most of the people I know, for example me, who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and had some exposure to technology. So it is astonishing that he did strike out on his own path.
Whether I'm over-inclined to praise the book or not, I liked how the 'secondary characters' are sketched — whether by Snowden himself, at the prompting of his editor, or through the pen of a ghostwriter. Snowden's father, for example, or his then-girlfriend, now-wife; a handful of details about his wife already suggests people whom I've known, and I can imagine a personality half-way between reality and analogical figures. Snowden mentioned in his introduction that he tried to respect the privacy of the people around him while writing, but the portraiture has not become too vague.
I hadn't heard before, likely due to ignorance, that the Arab Spring had been an indirect factor in Snowden's decision to publish details of the mass surveillance programme. The extent to which private companies have been running American foreign and domestic security — this is one of Snowden's complaints — was also unknown.
In a way the book helps reduce the guilt I've tended to feel toward Edward Snowden. After all, he went through a great moral conflict, when the public for whom he did it — at least I speak for myself — trots along in ignorance. Even his photographic portrait on the book cover looks faintly martyred in expression, and it's no wonder. The book does help bring closer to the reader the aspects that bothered him of the American intelligence community's mass surveillance programmes, in a way that the press articles might not have, so one feels less ill-informed.
As for his elucidation of the techniques of the modern American intelligence community, I am not certain whether I am comfortable 'spying' on the CIA and the NSA and defence contractors as the public may do while reading Snowden's book — sometimes it feels as if he has shrunken the reader to the size of a mouse and taken us along in his pocket into the buildings at Fort Meade, a top-secret facility in Hawaii, etc., where he worked. He makes it pretty clear that the people who work in these buildings are individuals with their own quirks, needs, strengths and weaknesses. Even if Permanent Record feels like a rare opportunity to examine the people who examine us, and it is kind of gripping, and Snowden makes pretty clear that security and the protection of secrets can be incredibly lax within the agencies, I also feel ashamed about my snooping instinct.
Anyway, not having finished the book yet, this is only a half-informed review. As for the technological details, I cannot tell whether a reader who knows something about hacking or system administration or other things will find their curiosity appeased, or be disappointed that it has been reduced to a more lay-reader-friendly version.
*
Besides, I've been making progress in the physics textbook about particle detectors: Teilchen-Detektoren by Otto Claus Allkofer, from the 1970s or 80s.
I couldn't tell you the difference between a fog chamber, a spark chamber, and a scintillation detector easily, or specify which detects neutrons, muons or electrons.
But it is thrilling enough to imagine that if I had a physics background, the prose and structure are straightforward and well-reflected enough that maybe — just maybe — it would be a pretty helpful reference work.
And I'm also wondering if this is relevant to my father's work.
*
Lastly, I have begun reading an e-book version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, hoping that this will help me begin to read up on computer science for my own career.
Saturday, March 02, 2013
A Good Day to Die Hard
The fifth film in the Bruce Willis series Die Hard has not been well received by the critics whom I read, and one of them is also one of my favourite critics, Anthony Lane.
He describes a passage set in Chernobyl, and laments its wasted scenic possibilities. Martin Cruz Smith wrote a book (published in 2004) in the same setting, and "relished the outlandish details of life in the poisoned zone," while A Good Day to Die Hard concentrates on finding papers somewhere in the abandoned nuclear complex, in a naïvely implausible manner:
From "Ways to Win: 'A Good Day to Die Hard' and 'NO'", by Anthony Lane, in the February 25, 2013 issue of the New Yorker.
He describes a passage set in Chernobyl, and laments its wasted scenic possibilities. Martin Cruz Smith wrote a book (published in 2004) in the same setting, and "relished the outlandish details of life in the poisoned zone," while A Good Day to Die Hard concentrates on finding papers somewhere in the abandoned nuclear complex, in a naïvely implausible manner:
Any lingering radiation is dispelled with a few squirts of cleansing spray, and Irina tests the all-clear by removing her protective mask and giving a cautious sniff, as if the rich aroma of cesium 137 were akin to that of lamb stew.
From "Ways to Win: 'A Good Day to Die Hard' and 'NO'", by Anthony Lane, in the February 25, 2013 issue of the New Yorker.
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