Books and literature – Page 34 – a sibilant intake of breath

Book project: month two

Entering the second month of our reading agreement, neither Emily nor I has finished the first book. Allowances can be made, however, for the fact that December ended with holidays and my visit. I am aiming to finish Love and Hydrogen in the next few days and move on to Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark soon after. No doubt, she will be through the more hefty A History of Warfare before too long.

Despite my nervousness about assigning a second military-themed book in a row for Emily, I have given her Ender’s Game for January. It is quite a compelling read and it serves our original purpose of sharing books that have meant a lot to us and influenced us somehow. Not only have I read this Orson Scott Card novel dozens of times, but it was a pretty important aspect of the collective knowledge of some of my closest friends in high school.

Prior posts:

First photo in a book

After asking my permission, a group of authors used one of my photos in their book Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. The photo in question is of a Soviet automobile in the Occupations Museum in Tallinn. I am not sure of the precise context in which it was used, but they have offered to send me a copy.

I will post a photo of the page including my photo when the book arrives. I am generally happy for people to use my photos with permission and proper attribution. The pleasantness of this experience stands in contrast with the unauthorized publication of one of my photos in The Oxford Student.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Passionate Minds

I started Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World with high hopes. It promised science, literature, and history in an accessible package. That promise is only partially realized. While the book does reveal some of the most remarkable (and the most flawed) characteristics of both Voltaire and du Châtelet, it sometimes makes claims that stretch the evidence provided. Often, the book simply asserts things rather than seeking to prove them.

Bodanis’ central thesis – that Émilie du Châtelet has been given insufficient historical attention – is fairly robust. Clearly, hers was an extraordinary life: born into nobility, but driven towards science and the sometimes hapless literary life of Voltaire instead of occupying a more traditional position in the Court. At times, the book demonstrates startling contrasts between the way of life at the time and the present. This is especially true of the marriages: purely political and economic unions in which years of habitation with a prominent lover were apparently not too exceptional. When a court rival attacks Voltaire through a lawsuit, her husband comes to his defence – despite how Voltaire has been living with his wife for years and they are a highly prominent couple.

In the end, the book would have been better if it had focused less on intrigue and more on what significant scientific contributions du Châtelet actually made. Saying that “[m]ore technical aspects of her work played a great role in energizing the French school of theoretical physics, associated with Lagrande and Laplace” isn’t a very convincing way of showing historical importance. Likewise, the assertion that “[t]he use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work” is never adequately argued.

The book does an excellent job of describing how atrocious the medicine of the time was, contributing to du Châtelet’s own relatively early death in childbirth. It also relates some fascinating historical episodes in an engaging way: for instance, the rigged lottery through which Voltaire made his fortune.

A book about du Châtelet written by someone with more of a focus on studying and explaining science would be a better tribute to the woman than this interesting yet flawed volume.

Selected readings

My reading plan with Emily is proceeding apace. I have chosen the book for her to read in December, and she has chosen the first three for me. Keep an eye on my blog and Emily’s for commentary as it emerges. No doubt, I will produce an index entry at the end of April, linking to all the relevant posts on both blogs.

No borrowed books

This evening, I was startled to realize that I have only been inside one library since I arrived in Ottawa in July. That was during the tour of Parliament I took with Emily, and thus didn’t involve touching a single book. This is certainly a dramatic change from Oxford: where I would frequently visit two or more libraries in a single day.

Partly, I suppose this is a reflection of my present wealth of unread books. Even devoting as much time to reading as I do, there doesn’t seem to be enough time available to make a great deal of progress through the list. In addition to that, I haven’t been doing much in the way of book-based research. Hopefully, that will change as time goes by.

The Golden Compass under review

It’s a sad day when a Canadian school board pulls your favourite children’s book from the shelves in dozens of libraries because it is allegedly ‘anti-religious.’ To be fair, Philip Pullman‘s The Golden Compass does take a critical stance on dogma and on hierarchical organizations. Elements can be taken as specific criticisms of the Inquisition and other religious abuses. At the same time, the book is engaging, well-written, and excellent. In characterization, creativity, and content it puts the Harry Potter books to shame, while also tackling much more important themes. The book was recognized by with the Carnegie Medal in 1995, and was selected by the Carnegie judges as one of the ten most important children’s novels in the past 70 years in 2007.

While the Halton Catholic District School Board clearly does have some responsibility for the selection of books in its school libraries, this choice is a mistake. If their students are going to have any kind of meaningful religious life, they are going to need to engage with criticisms of faith. That doesn’t necessarily mean giving them each a copy of The God Delusion, but it does require maintaining an atmosphere where questioning and discussion are possible. Simply stripping out high quality books that raise awkward questions is educationally irresponsible and theologically dubious in a faith supposedly based on personal relationships between individuals and God.

[Update: 4 December 2007] Emily has written a post about this book and another about the process of reading it.

I Am America (And So Can You!)

Stephen Colbert is famously critical of books. He should probably have retained his skepticism rather than publishing I Am America (And So Can You!). Without the benefit of his live delivery, his style of humour is not particularly effective and most of what the book covers is well worn ground for avid watchers of The Colbert Report. Colbert is at his best when he is dynamic; he does not sit well on motionless pages.

The book is not entirely without entertaining elements, but does not do enough overall to justify the price or the time.

The Bottom Billion

Paul Collier‘s slim and informative volume is true to my recollection of the man from Oxford. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It is engaging, concise, and powerfully argued. It is also unsparing in its criticism. Collier explains that the ‘developing world’ consists of two groups of states: those experiencing sustained growth and thus seeing their standard of living converging with those in the rich world and those that are ‘stuck’ in poverty, with stagnant growth or absolute decline.

Poverty traps

The ‘stuck’ states – where the world’s poorest billion inhabitants are concentrated – are trapped in one of four ways: by conflict, natural resources, being landlocked with bad neighbours, and by bad governance. States can be trapped in more than one simultaneously and, even when they escape, there are systemic reasons for which they are unusually likely to fall back into one. The discussion of the traps is particularly informative because of how quantitative methods have been used in support of anecdotal arguments.

Not only are ‘bottom billion’ states unusually likely to suffer from conflict, corruption, and similar problems, but some of the most important paths to growth used by states that have already escaped poverty are closed to them. To grow through the export of manufactured goods, you need both low wages and economies of scale. Even if wages in Ghana are lower than those in China, China has the infrastructure and the attention of investors. The presence of export-driven Asian economies makes it harder for ‘bottom billion’ states to get on a path to development.

Solutions

Collier’s proposed solutions include aid, military intervention, changes to domestic and international laws and norms, and changes to trade policy. Much of it is familiar to those who have followed development debates: the problems with agricultural tariffs, the way aid is often used to serve domestic interests rather than poverty reduction, corruption within extractive industries, and the like. His most interesting ideas are the five international ‘charters’ he proposes. These would establish norms of best practice in relation to natural resource revenues, democracy, budget transparency, postconflict situations, and investment. Examining them in detail exceeds what can be written here, but it is fair to say that his suggestions are novel and well argued. He also proposes that ‘bottom billion’ states should see import tariffs in rich states immediately removed for their benefit. This is meant to give them a chance of getting onto the path of manufacture-led growth, despite the current advantages of fast-growing Asian states. His idea that states that meet standards of transparency and democracy should be given international guarantees against being overthrown in coups is also a novel and interesting one.

Position in the development debate

Collier’s book is partly a response to Jeffrey Sachs’ much discussed The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Sachs pays much more attention to disease and has more faith in the power of foreign aid, but the two analyses are not really contradictory. Together, they help to define a debate that should be raging within the international development community.

Collier’s treatment is surprisingly comprehensive for such a modest volume, covering everything from coups to domestic capital flight in 200 pages. The approach taken is very quantitatively oriented, backing up assertions through the use of statistical methods that are described but not comprehensively laid out. Those wanting to really evaluate his methodology should read the papers cited in an appendix. Several are linked on his website.

Environmental issues

Environmental issues receive scant attention in this analysis. When mentioned, they are mostly derided as distractions from the real task of poverty reduction. It is fair enough to say that environmental sustainability is less of a priority than alleviating extreme poverty within these states. That said, the environment is one area where his assertion that the poverty in some parts of the world is not the product of the affluence in others is most dubious. It is likely to become even more so in the near future, not least because of water scarcity and climate change.

Climate change receives only a single, peripheral mention. This is probably appropriate. Surely, the effects of climate change will make it harder to escape the traps that Collier describes. That doesn’t really change his analysis of them or the validity of his prescriptions. The best bet for very poor states is to grow to the point where they have a greater capacity to adapt and will be less vulnerable to whatever the future will bring.

Littera Scripta Manet

Emily and I have devised a scheme for mutual education: we are each to select five books that the other person will read. Each book is assigned the span of one month to be acquired, read (however challenging it may be), and commented upon on respective blogs. My comments will obviously be here; hers will be on eponymous horn (like me, she has ensured eternal confusion by having a title unrelated to her URI). Discussion can then occur between the two of us and other readers by means of comments.

The intent behind the scheme is to select books that are both educational in themselves and revealing insofar as they reflect the character of the person who recommended them. Indeed, books that played a substantial role in developing character could be ideal for this sort of exchange.

I am going to need to spend some time seriously contemplating what ought to be on my list. One virtually never gets the opportunity to make a claim on so much of another person’s time.

Which books would the varied and interesting readers of this blog select?