Book Reviews on Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Why I will never buy a Kindle

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:01:18 +0000

One of my bosses got a Kindle 2 a few months ago, and was wondering how an avowed gadget lover such as myself did not have one already. I am perfectly comfortable reading books in electronic form on the small screens of PDAs or phones, but I have little interest in carrying yet another device with its bevy of chargers and accessories, so I just humored him. As far as I am concerned, the Apple iPad pretty much killed the e-reader market. E-ink technology has a place in digital signage, but a general-purpose computing device with Internet connectivity like the iPad wins over a unitasker any day.

Wittgenstein’s Poker

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 11:50:45 +0000

The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers

David Edmonds, John Eidinow

Harper Perennial, ISBN 0060936649, Publisher, Buy online

Plato is one of the sacred cows of the philosophy establishment. Whitehead famously wrote: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. That said, his political theories are utterly indefensible. His attitude towards the Spartans who defeated and occupied his native Athens (and abolished the democracy the aristocratic Plato hated so much) would in modern terms be classified as that of a Quisling. His proposals are those of a soulmate of Pol Pot: a totalitarian society with a rigid caste system. In Plato’s ideal society, the philosopher-king caste rules through lies and deception¹, children are removed from their parents to be brainwashed by the state, if they are allowed to survive the state’s eugenic culling of the weak in the first place. Dissidents are interned in reeducation camps and killed if they do not eventually recant. Given such moral bankruptcy, it is hard to take anything else he wrote seriously.

A book signing with Steven Erikson

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 06:28:42 +0000

I reviewed the Malazan Book of the Fallen last year — it is one of the very finest Fantasy series, in my opinion. I met Steven Erikson today during a book signing at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. Sadly, there were enough people in the audience who had not read all first five volumes that he read from Memories of Ice rather than from the final manuscript of the sixth volume, The Bonehunters (due out in February 2006) that he carries with him on his Palm PDA.

The Algebraist

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 01:40:33 +0000

Iain M. Banks

Penguin (UK), ISBN 1841492396, Author’s site, buy online

Much like the great Fredric Brown, Scottish author Iain Banks’ work straddles the worlds of science-fiction and mystery. His SF books are signed Iain M. Banks (the others drop the middle initial), and could be roughly classified as Space Opera. Don’t expect to find mescaline-fueled visions of alternate realities à la Philip K. Dick (Single-malt whisky seems to be the drug of choice) or dystopic cyberpunk universes. While trendy steampunks disdain space opera as a spent sub-genre devoid of possibilities, Banks’ books demonstrate brilliantly how misconceived the notion really is.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:38:50 +0000

Steven Erikson

Bantam Press (UK), ISBN 0553812173/0765310015, 0553813110, 0553813129, 0553813137, 0593046285, Publisher, Buy online: Gardens of the Moon Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, House of Chains, Midnight Tides, The Bonehunters, Reaper’s Gale, Toll the Hounds, Dust of Dreams, The Crippled God

Fantasy, like Science Fiction, is a genre that gets scant respect, in spite of (and perhaps due to) its popular appeal. Literary critics require the turgid prose of a James Joyce or T.S. Eliot to feel a smug sense of superiority over the unwashed masses unable to appreciate pedantry for its own sake. It is true many fantasy novels are serialized hack work designed to be sold by the pound, but the better specimens of the genre are worthwhile reads, beginning with The Lord of the Rings, the book that started the modern phenomenon.

Shutterbabe

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 01:21:03 +0000

Deborah Copaken Kogan

Random House, ISBN: 0375758682 Publisher, Buy online

I picked up the hardcover edition of this book from the sale bin at Stacey’s Booksellers, as the Leica on the cover just beckoned to me.

This is an autobiography by an American woman, almost a girl, who moved to Paris, fresh out of college, to break into the tightly-knit (and not a little macho) community of photojournalists. Who knows, I might even have crossed paths with her when I studied in Paris. She was certainly not the first female war correspondent, Margaret Bourke-White springs to mind (even though she is not referred to anywhere in the book), but women were still a rarity, specially one as young and inexperienced. She started as a freelancer and eventually ended up working for the Gamma agency, one of the few independent photo agencies left.

Archival photography

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 21:37:49 +0000

Henry Wilhelm is a well-known authority on preserving photographs. He pretty much wrote the book on the subject, and it is now downloadable for free in PDF format from his website.

In a nutshell:

No widespread color process is really archival, unlike black & white
Fuji good, Kodak bad

Wilhelm has contributed greatly to making photographs last by raising the public’s awareness of conservation issues, at a time when manufacturers like Kodak were engaging in deliberately deceptive marketing implying that color prints would “last forever”, when they knew the prints would not exceed 10 to 15 years (Fuji has put far more effort in making their materials last).

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Wed, 11 Jun 2003 00:17:47 +0000

Edward Tufte

Graphics Press, ISBN: 0-9613921-5-0 Publisher

Edward Tufte is probably the single most influential authority on communicating complex information graphically. He pretty much wrote the book(s) on the subject in his classic series The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

In this short booklet (24 pages), he devastatingly takes to task the shoddy quality of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and makes the case this information poverty is intrinsic to the tool itself, due to its limitations such as low resolution (cannot use complex data), poor typography, strong bias towards hierarchical outlines and fluff over substance. In Tufte’s own words:

Holy War

Sat, 10 May 2003 03:04:20 +0000

Karen Armstrong

Anchor Books (Random House), ISBN: 0385721404 Publisher, Buy online

British theologian Karen Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen to become a Catholic nun. She defrocked in 1969 (this caused a great scandal among British Catholics, many have not forgiven her to this day). She has since become a student of the three great monotheistic religions, writing one bestseller on the subject, A History of God

In this book, she recounts the history of the Crusades and how it still shapes the modern-day Middle East. Interestingly, she tries to take a tripartite Christian/Jewish/Muslim view (more accurately, a quadripartite Catholic/Greek Orthodox/Jewish/Muslim view, but she herself writes about a “triple vision”). Most other accounts give short shrift to the Jewish point of view.

Mountain Light

Thu, 26 Dec 2002 05:40:03 +0000

Galen Rowell

Sierra Club, ISBN: 0871563673 Publisher, Buy online

Galen Rowell was a world-class mountaineer and photographer. He passed away with his wife in an airplane crash on August 11, 2002.

He was a master of color landscapes and had the knack of catching unique combinations of light in the memorable photos that can be seen in his Mountain Light Gallery. Interestingly, he eschewed the large format cameras used by Ansel Adams and used exclusively 35mm cameras from Nikon (thus thoroughly debunking the orthodoxy that 35mm cannot be used for serious landscape photography).