My mother used to read my the encyclopedia -- remember when the supermarkets would sell a volume a week?

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

as well as several other sets. It has just occurred to me that one of our old friends (very successfully) sold encyclopedias so maybe that's why although knowing us we were just accumulating knowledge.

It's cool when parents read a lot of stuff like this to their kids--it's interesting and broadening.

It was a lot that we need to take into account on the truth/truthiness issue.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

with the appendix on Indo-European roots. I just realized that wandering about from entry to entry, often via the appendix, which links words conjectured to have the same root, was an early hypertext experience. The same feeling of horizonlessness, of another fabulously serendipitous discovery just around the corner.

Not life-changing, though - I think I was born a word freak.

Policy not party!

“Tree of Smoke”, by Denis Johnson, is a book which deserves more space than I am about to give it here. Having recently finished it, however, I at least want to give it a mention. What’s it about? It’s about Vietnam. It’s about covert operations. It’s about the role of intelligence and myth, stories and false stories, and the way channels of intelligence go up the chain of command, and then come back down again as policy, and how that policy can be influenced if the right sort of information goes up in the first place. The “right sort of information” is always that which resonates with the dominant myth/delusion of the times we find ourselves in.

“Tree of Smoke” is a bit like Syrania, where everything is relative and you’re not sure who to trust or who is in charge. It’s like Don DeLillo teaming up with Ernest Hemingway. Mazes, labyrinths, stories, misunderstandings, and deception form the backbone of the book. What troubles many readers is the interior nature of the narrative, and the apparent formlessness of the plot line. There is no consistent protagonist, and third person blends into first person narration quite seamlessly, which, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, can seem either careless or well crafted.

Johnson’s ability to seamlessly shift his point of view can be confusing at first, but the technique is effective in dispelling the notion that there IS an objective story line in war, or in life. It’s a mess. It’s confusing. But it’s an amazing read, well worth the effort. The descriptions of place are rich with immediacy, and the dialog is flawless, but the main appeal of the book is its attempt to chronicle “the line between disinformation and delusion.” And, not to overstate the bloody obvious, but that line has been pretty much obliterated in the last eight years.

downstreamer

I spent hours in the Book of Knowledge when I was a child. For those of you who never experienced it, it was a multi-volume set, like an encyclopedia, but along with the topic articles, it included poetry, fairy tales (I loved King of the Golden River), simple illustrated French lessons, and the like. If there was discernible order to any of this, I never figured out what it was, so I'd have to look through volume after volume to find another poetry set or to try to learn more French.

This National Book Award Winner, is a riveting non-fiction account of the ecological disaster that became known as the Dust Bowl in the 1930. Egan's effortless prose hurtles you along a timeline that starts in the primeval prairie with native americans and buffalo and thru the settlement years, on to the boom of the wheat crop years,and then, inevitably, the doom of the bust years.

He follows several families who live in different parts of the high plains, Nebraska, SE Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and NE New Mexico, as each stakes out their futures as farmers and ranchers. Egan watches these real life families dig in (sometiems literally with their sod houses!) and then ride the wave of prosperity that came with mechanized farming and the huge demand for beef and wheat during WWI. Then he follows them down thru the cataclsym and real desperation of the '30s.

Egan's descriptions of the dust storms, the ecological damage, and pitiless existence of the survivors and hangers on are so moving and gut wrenching, I had a lump in my throat for most of the book. Quite rightly, Egan treats the people with total fairness and care. These families weren't malevolent and didn't set out to destroy the land. Far from it, they really loved this land and believed in it. And after all, their government had encouraged them to come, it had made it cheap and easy to put more and more land under the plow. This was the age of man and machine taming nature.

The book takes your through the Roosevelt years as the administration came to terms with this huge ecological disaster (dust storms from the High Plains reached NYC and Washington DC and deposited tons of Nebraska dirt on the eastern seaboard). The book does a great job of describing the clean up efforts, led by Hugh Bennett, a real visionary of land management.

I recommend this book to everyone. Although it's fairly relentlessly depressing it is a page turner from page 1. Many parallels to Global Warming etc.

dupager

I know it's already 3 years old, but I really liked it. If you like comedies of academic bad manners like Kingsley Amis's _Lucky Jim_, Jane Smiley's _Moo_, or the many novels of David Lodge, you will like this one.

It's the story of two academic families--one family led by an African American woman married to a white Marxist Englishman art historian working at a prestigious liberal arts college in Massachusetts, and the other an Afro-Caribbean family in London whose patriarch is a prominent conservative intellectual. The latter professor accepts a visiting professorship at the former's college, and political, sexual, and academic hijinks ensue, fueled by the presence of both familes' grown and almost-grown children, especially the daughters in each family who are students at said college too.

Smith's cast of characters are imaginatively constructed and always believeable, even when they find themselves in horrifying, comic, or horrifyingly comic situations. Many of these characters, including both of the male heads of household, are unlikeable or even repulsive at times, but you can't peel your eyes away from the page. In that, Smith's writing is like the best of both Amises, pere and fils--as disgusting as the male characters are, you will still care about them in spite of yourself because they're so well drawn. If you like charachter-driven novels in stories set in these modern times, you will really enjoy this book. Its only flaw--like that of many other character-driven novels, is that its ending is seems rather hastily pulled together and is therefore unsatisfying. But, perhaps that's because you will believe that the end of the book is not the end of these characters, and that they'll go on living their messy, screwed-up lives as best they can.

The plays are short (even if you have an annotated copy) and they are real page turners, full of very human people who constantly fail and give into temptation and then have to scramble to save themselves. (Seems to me as if that's why they are still so read.)
The poetic language is fun and after a while you get into the "rhythm" and poetry of it--you may find yourself talking like the characters!
There's nothing like reading "The Tempest," which is about being on a deserted island, on the beach...with its constant references to the sea and beach, "Come unto these yellow sands," "I will drown my book," (okay don't take all this too far) and the almost star-crossed young lovers, the evil ambitious father(s), the hidden identities, the beautiful scenery and language, and all the magic...
There's "King Lear"--good to read if you are feeling bitter about family, with its loving but confused and completely unfair father, its greedy daughters, its noble but very pained daughter--it's like, wow, and you thought your family was bad.

make those How & Why books anymore?
I bought a condensed three-volume set of the Book of Knowledge a few years ago. It's still pretty cool.

There was a novel (tied in to the TV show Bonanza) about The Book of Knowledge (kinda) -- when I was a kid. Can't remember the name of it now, but because he'd had a set of the books, Hoss Cartwright knew how to make a fire-kite. He used it to set fire to a tarpaper shack where a bad guy was holding Joe hostage, so the bad guy could be caught and Joe could be saved, and nobody would get shot at.

Pretty cool kids' book, and I'd forgotten all about it until today. Thanks for the memory!

UPDATE: it was "Treachery Trail"!

Lambert, I really hope you'll give us your impressions on that. I'm about to read it myself - have it on order. I often have to teach statistics, and I'm always on the lookout for books to recommend to my students (or even possibly to use as supplemental reading).

I confess, I keep favorite books by the bed and other places (beside that looming pile of must-read-soons) to enjoy--reading bits and pieces of scenes to relax. "Bel Canto" by Anne Patchett is one of those books right now. (BTW, folks, feel free to rereview anything reviewed already--as this one was? Or maybe mentioned? I'll check later.) I didn't expect to keep rereading this--it's fast-moving and exciting, an action book, with disasters and impossible solutions looming constantly and kidnapping, guns and terror--but in spite of that, the book finds those little oases (apparently the correct spelling) of peace and kindness, the reality of reaching out to others, the happiness of the moment.

What are you rereading?

Cue Bonanza music.

One of the things I'm interested in is Utopia...does anyone have an updated list/suggestions re Utopian books, depictions, etc.?

By John D. Fitzgerald. When I was young, that was the series I read. A smarter than the rest kid finds ways to swindle other children. It was fun.

I also read sports almanacs and sports strategy books back in the day. That was my real release. Others were reading works of literary prowess, I was reading on Paul Brown's offensive scheme.

Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance by Richard Powers. Just finished, in fact. (Time constraints may prevent a review today.)

I tend to reread: Powers, Peter Hoeg, Sarah Paretsky (how did I forget her when we were talking about series?), Berton Roueche, Nevada Barr. I kind of rotate.

How did I forget that one?!

by Peter Kramer (of Listening to Prozac fame). He's another one I reread. But this book just knocked me over when I first read it not too long after 9/11. It's his only novel afaik. And in it he makes important commentary on the nature of violence (including economic violence) and on the cult of celebrity. It may not have got the readership it deserved because of the weird timing of its publication (which seemed really, accidentally, appropriate to me).

That's one I really should review some day. Man. Out of time now though. Gotta go.

(dashing back in between RL calls)

Stephen Greenleaf. He has a detective series (Marsh Tanner) and a couple of unrelated novels. All out of print. I've been slowly acquiring them at used book sources. (So how did I forget him?)

The series is kind of "hard-boiled detective" except that Tanner is really an old softie, but what I really love about the books is their keen offhand observations of human behavior.

Greenleaf has apparently stopped writing fiction. A loss.

i was game for that review, but i heard nothing from no one. i'm still ready to pen it, if there's a market for it.

Can we schedule next week for the Vinge reviews?

Is the Great Brain like EB?

I've read both but a while ago and am trying to think how they compare...

Here are the readings for one of his economics courses this year--and their links, some of which are free downloads, some of which can be downloaded for a small fee (nber's for $5 for example.) Thank you Dr. Krugman! We appreciate your excellent work.

ECO 553: Preliminary list of readings, 8/15/08
Paul Krugman

1. Relative prices and trade balances
Hooper, Johnson, Marquez: HYPERLINK link
DFS: link
Obstfeld-Rogoff: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10869
Eaton-Kortum: http://home.uchicago.edu/~kortum/papers/...
PPP and LOOP: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10607
Houthakker-Magee, 45-degree rule: Gagnon http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/...

2. Monetary models
Basic monetary model (Mussa): link
Target zones: Krugman 1991, link
Sticky-price evidence: Mussa 1986, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
Pricing to market: http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/confe...
Mundell-Fleming: http://www.nber.org/papers/w2321
Overshooting (rogoff): http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/...
Frankel-Rose: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4865
FRB policy modeling: HYPERLINK link

3. Portfolio models:
Blanchard, Giavazzi, and Sa: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/brookings_p...
Krugman: http://www.econ.princeton.edu/seminars/W...
Ventura and Kraay: http://www.crei.cat/people/jventura/cadc...
Gourinchas/Rey: HYPERLINK link

4. Debt, currency crises:
Garber-Svensson: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4971
Eaton-Fernandez: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5131
Calvo: HYPERLINK link
Kaminsky: http://www.nber.org/papers/w14249
Balance sheets: http://www.szgerzensee.ch/fileadmin/Date...

5. Key currencies and all that
Chinn-Frankel: http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~jfrankel/EuroVs$-IFdebateFeb2008.pdf
Flandreau: HYPERLINK link
Flandreau-Jobst: http://www.cepr.org/pubs/new-dps/dplist....
Dark matter: link
Dark matter 2: http://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/intfin/v9y2...

6. Optimal currency areas and the euro debate
Rose on gravity: link
Rose meta: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10373
Blanchard-Katz: link

7. Intertemporal:
Obstfeld-Rogoff: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4893

8. New open-economy macro
Obstfeld-Rogoff exchange rate dynamics: link
Corsetti-Pesenti version: http://www.eui.eu/Personal/corsetti/rese...
Lane survey: link http://ideas.repec.org/p/tcd/tcduee/993....
Corsetti recent: http://www.eui.eu/Personal/corsetti/rese...

9. Financial non-integration
Feldstein-Horioka: link

Euro area end of puzzle? HYPERLINK link
Obstfeld-Rogoff again: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7777

10. Bretton Woods II?
Dooley-Garber: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9971
Obstfeld et al on reserves: link

Brad Setser’s blog (for current events): link

On this blog http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/ (listed last for current events), there is a piece on China/US financial relations (big numbers, scary, but I'd rather know than not and it makes more sense than a lot of the regular newspaper stories):

http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2008/08/25/c...

All readings on-line, many free, others ask for a small fee ($5.) (This is for his RL class. You rock on econ, Dr. Krugman.)

Is anyone interested in really reading these together? We could study and I'm sure Dr. PK would answer any questions should he have time. (Of course, perhaps some of us should start with a lower level econ class...)

ECO 553: Preliminary list of readings, 8/15/08
Paul Krugman

1. Relative prices and trade balances

Hooper, Johnson, Marquez: HYPERLINK link
DFS: link
Obstfeld-Rogoff: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10869
Eaton-Kortum: http://home.uchicago.edu/~kortum/papers/...
PPP and LOOP: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10607
Houthakker-Magee, 45-degree rule: Gagnon http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/...

2. Monetary models

Basic monetary model (Mussa): link
Target zones: Krugman 1991, link
Sticky-price evidence: Mussa 1986, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
Pricing to market: http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/confe...
Mundell-Fleming: http://www.nber.org/papers/w2321
Overshooting (rogoff): http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/...
Frankel-Rose: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4865
FRB policy modeling: HYPERLINK link.

I'll remember to shorten links in future.