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100 Penny Review: Murder At The ABA

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Murder At The ABA: A Puzzle in Four Days & Sixty Scenes
by Isaac Asimov
Doubleday, 1976
Hardcover, 230 pages
ISBN: 0385113056
Original price: Unknown
What I paid: $0.50 US

As any frequent user of the card catalog could tell you (back when there were such things), Isaac Asimov got around. In fact, according to the Asimov FAQ, he has at least one book in every category of the Dewey Decimal system except philosophy. This is certainly a remarkable technical achievement.

This kind of prolific output also makes it very easy to jump to certain conclusions: With over four-hundred books to his name, isn’t it possible that more than a few of them just aren’t that good? Nobody can hit a home run every time at bat — even writers who spend years on a single novel, re-writing and revising, honing their sentences, shading their words, and driving their editors mad with anticipation. Asimov drives his readers a little crazy, but in a different way. Pick up a book with his name on the cover, and you wonder: is this the clinker?

That was the thought in my mind when I picked up Murder At The ABA. Not, I grant you, an entirely fair way to approach a book one intends to review, but there we are. In some way, perhaps this helped to counteract the rose-colored view I developed with regard to Asimov after reading his third autobiography. Isaac was quite a charmer, even if he did say so himself, and I had been charmed. I don’t apologize for that, but I thought you should know.

Knowing the title, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find out that Murder At The ABA is a mystery novel involving a murder at the American Booksellers’ Association convention. It’s also kind of a “cozy” mystery, sort of. The death occurs off-screen, there’s very little violence, almost no action of any kind. It’s actually right up my alley; I’m not widely read when it comes to modern mysteries, but I like the Sherlock Holmes stories, Agatha Christie’s work (well, most of it), and all the old stuff they play on Mystery on PBS. So yay for coziness. But, then again….

Even before I knew the circumstances leading up to the creation of this book (Asimov only had three months to write it), I felt the whole thing had a rather tossed-together kind of aura about it. A good mystery, even a cozy one, should take its readers on an interesting journey. Let’s face it: a mystery book is almost defenseless in the hands of a reader. There’s nothing to physically prevent him or her from skipping to the end, thus revealing the killer or the thief or what have you, thereby avoiding all the intervening rigmarole. However, if the writing is good and the story is interesting — if there’s any indication that the long route will be more satisfying than the cheater’s path, in other words — then there’s a chance that readers are willing to stick it out until the end.

Murder At The ABA, just barely makes it, by these standards. I happen to enjoy Asimov’s unornamented writing style, but so much of this book seems like padding — even the love story — that I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to not merely skim, but to skip headlong to the ending. Not all of the book is padding, but it still took a good bit of mental effort to imbibe the frequent sections that seemed to be running in place, making up some arbitrary word-count.

The plot is centered around a writer named Darius Just (based pretty obviously on Harlen Ellison), who’s only at the convention to give a speech but somehow winds up embroiled in a murder investigation. Along the way he bumps into his publishers, other publishers, PR people, an old fuck-buddy, hotel detectives, and Isaac Asimov, why not? And when I say along the way, I mean alooooong the way. There’s a whole lot of back and forth movement, repeating visits to places and people we’ve seen before, plus a few scenes that seem pointlessly parenthetical. Darius goes here, Darius goes there, Darius eats some chicken. We also meet blinkered hotel apparatchiks who go all Quincy’s-boss on ol’ Darius, insisting that the victim died in an accident, partly so the hotel doesn’t lose business due to the stigma of a murder on their premises, but mostly so as to cover up their dirty laundry (so to speak). They are the closest thing you get to an antagonist, in this book.

The mystery starts out clear as mud, and pretty much stays that way until a glaring clue springs up in the last quarter of the book. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out exactly who the killer was from this clue, but it might as well have had a neon sign hanging on it, as the apparent crux of the matter, at least as far as sharper readers are concerned. In the end, though, the shenanigans involved with the object require some kind of diagram to explain intelligibly — too bad there isn’t one included.

The overall tone of the novel is deeply mired in the 1970′s. Darius Just is a flawed hero by today’s standards; for though he thirsts for justice, he’s the kind of guy who calls himself a feminist, while also critiquing every female body within pawing-distance, and winds up bitterly resenting a woman for mentioning his lack of height. (Get over it, man!) I know that to some readers, the kind of callous, unselfconscious sexism on display here would make the book unreadable. Couple that with the fact that Darius Just’s head is not always a very pleasant place to inhabit, and you’ve got a book that’s challenging for all the wrong reasons. I am, perhaps, too forgiving about this point: though I found it extremely grating, I still managed to get through to the end, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, if nothing else.

At the risk of seeming incoherent, I didn’t hate this book. Not at all. I never actually stopped caring about the resolution of the murder (I wanted to skip to the end, rather than abandoning it altogether). And there’s some humor tucked away in pockets here and there. I was amused by the back-and-forth between Just and Asimov that plays out in the footnotes, for example. (Asimov’s role is that of a Watson-type bit player and humble chronicler, and he’s certainly not kind to himself.)

It’s just not a great book. And I know it’s fairly typical to point out that, with over 400 of the damn things under his belt, not all of Asimov’s books can be towering classics. But it’s true, dammit, and I can’t think of a better example of this phenomenon than Murder At The ABA.

100 Penny Review: The Public Domain

Friday, April 24th, 2009

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
by James Boyle
Yale University Press, 2008
336 Pages
ISBN 0300137400
Original price: Free (ebook)
What I paid: Free (ebook)
Acquired from: ThePublicDomain.org
Condition: N/A

For a long time the legal boundaries that protected intellectual property were invisible to the ordinary masses of mankind. This was chiefly due to the fact that it was very difficult to copy intellectual property without a massive investment in equipment and technical know-how. But when the general-purpose computer gained widespread adoption by the masses, and when it became possible to network these computers together, all over the world, copying became very, very easy indeed. People who either didn’t know the rules of intellectual property – or who didn’t care about them – began freely trading copyrighted materials, which led to the content owners freaking out, further leading them to push for ever more draconian intellectual property protections in law.

This sets the scene for James Boyle’s book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. From there, using analogies, case studies, copious examples and excerpts from legal opinions and court decisions, Boyle makes a case for action against the digital rights “land grab” being pursued by content owners. It’s an important book, no question. In fact, it rather reminds me of another important book from way back when.

In the days before Nicholas Negroponte turned into the Bob Geldof of technology, he wrote a little book about a big idea. It was called Being Digital. The impact of Negroponte’s little book would be difficult to describe to someone who didn’t read it back in the mid-to-late nineties, and some of its premises might seem a little hoary these days – but it was an immensely important book at the time. Back then, when computers were for geeks, and few people imagined that shopping, watching videos, or making friends via keyboard would ever come to pass, Being Digital was a statement of belief, a manifesto that could be handed off to people who didn’t understand what we were talking about. In those days, geeks were evangelists, and Being Digital was our liturgical literature.

The value of books like Being Digital and The Public Domain is that they help teach us how to think about their concepts in ways that we might not be used to. In Negroponte’s case, he taught a generation of budding technologists how to decouple information from the mediums that carried it; Boyle, on the other hand, shows us how to look at intellectual property rights without succumbing to the logical traps that might otherwise lead us into supporting ever-expanding restrictions on how consumers can and should use the products of the content-owners.

The problem with these sorts of books, and with The Public Domain specifically, is that the certain factors lead to undesirable effects. Many of the people who would be most interested in a polemic against expanded intellectual property are already on board with the ideas being espoused in the book. They might, therefore, find it boring or obvious; or they might enjoy having their beliefs reinforced by reading a clear and persuasive restatement of all the things they already think. It’s also possible that the book will be read by strong IP restriction advocates looking to debunk it, and not many of those readers will be turned by any argument, no matter how persuasive. More importantly, however, is the fact that the lay reader may not care enough about the issues either way to give the book a shot.

They really should, though. It’s entertaining enough and non-technical enough to serve as a primer for intellectual property issue novices. The examples and analogies are down to earth, easy to understand, and may engender a certain amount of suspicion in a skeptical reader that the topics have been simplified too much to be useful. It should go without saying (but that won’t stop me) that sympathetic readers will appreciate the grounding that Boyle’s analogies provide.

I found certain portions of the book to be a little repetitive. While one certainly wants the book to tie together into a sensible whole, Boyle’s gift for reiteration gets a little out of hand. He’ll make a point. Then he’ll have an example. Then he’ll restate the original point without actually needing to, at least to my mind. But then, the issues are complex, and perhaps they do need to be driven home repeatedly. My own dislike for this method may have a lot to do with the fact that I have been reading about intellectual property issues since 1996 and, frankly, I’m kind of sick to death here.

Still, even if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t want to delve too deeply into the concepts and arguments of intellectual property, it still might be a good idea to read this book, because these issues ultimately effect the entertainment media landscape that we all have to inhabit. Seeing how those results percolate down from the high-minded concepts and legal wrangling explained in the book might be enough to anger you into action – or at least interest. At the very least, by the end of the book, you’ll definitely understand why the public domain is monumentally important to a healthy and vibrant culture, even if you don’t actively engage in the movement Boyle describes at the end of the book.

And hey, the e-edition is free, so you’ve got nothing to lose but your time.

100 Penny Review: Contrary to Popular Belief

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

An irregular feature, where we review books purchased for less than one US Dollar (not including tax). Are we destroying the publishing industry as we know it?

Contrary to Popular Belief: More Than 250 False Facts Revealed
by Joey Green
Broadway Books, 2005
260 Pages
ISBN 0-7679-1992-0
Original price: $9.95
What I paid: $0.25
Purchased from: Friends of the Library sale
Condition: Like New

In any sufficiently long-lived culture, it is inevitable that a thick strand of myth will get woven into the cultural consciousness. At least, it certainly seems that way, especially when one hears the same old urban legends spring up in one conversation after another. What does one do when presented, yet again, with some erroneous bit of trivia from a well-meaning source? It’s a problem (a petty, bourgeois sort of problem, but still).

There are a variety of solutions, depending on the situation. If the offending factoid is something you overheard well, of course, keep your mouth shut. Butting into someone else’s conversation in order to correct a misplaced fact or two is incredibly rude. However, when you’re directly engaged in conversation with someone who gets things the wrong way round, the situation is more complex. Do you care what this person thinks of you? Will they “throw-down” if contradicted? You don’t want to end up in the emergency room over some argument about whether strawberries are actually berries, or not.

This is where Contrary to Popular Belief, might come in handy. If you find yourself in the aforementioned social situation; and if the error is concerning one of the more than 250 “false facts” contained within; then you might want to politely excuse yourself from the conversation, and present your pal with a copy of the book at the next gift-giving opportunity. This is a book that’s practically begs to be passed along.

It won’t take most folk very long to read; you could probably get through it at least twice in a week. It’s fortunate, then, that this book is as fun as it is short. It’s not a reference work, but rather a cute collection of trivial bits of information, all linked by the fact that they contradict commonly-held beliefs that just happen to be wrong. Each entry gets one page a piece, though their lengths vary quite a bit, and some of the topics could have benefited from being expanded.

One of the things that I found interesting is that the entry headings were not consistent in their phrasing. Many of them are simple negations (e.g., “The world’s largest pyramid is not in Egypt”), while others are positive statements of fact (“George Washington was the ninth president of the United States”). In each case, I’m sure that the author chose one type of statement over another for reasons of clarity or effect. But, in light of studies that seem to indicate that denials often reinforce wrong information, I wonder how much truth the average reader is likely to retain from this book.

Actually, that’s an open question anyway: While there is a list of sources at the back of the book, there are no in-text citations, footnotes, or endnotes. I know this is a shallow book that’s meant to be read for entertainment purposes only, but if the Darwin Awards books can cite the original sources in footnotes, surely such a thing would be possible for Green, in Contrary.

Although he says in the introduction that he “locked [himself] away in the library, checking and double-checking the facts”, I do wonder exactly how long it took Joey Green to write this book. This list of his other works indicates that he’s rather prolific, and there’s tricks to every trade. It wouldn’t surprise me if he simply jotted down a bunch of facts that he’s run across over the years, looked up enough background info to write a paragraph or two for each, drew some illustrations, and then called it a day.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, actually. Almost any collection of trivia is likely to be an array of facts gleaned from other sources, marginally rephrased; Ben Schott, Cecil Adams, and Alex Trebek have made careers out of this kind of thing. (It’s often not worth doing original research for something as trivial as trivia.)

Yet, the question is not how much time� Green spent on this book, it’s whether or not the overall experience is good. And it is, mostly. But,� don’t expect every entry to be a homerun; there are a few that fail to amuse. For example, entries of the “Well, duh” variety, like “Shooting stars are not stars shooting across the sky.” Were this a book for children, I could see how this might be worth including; in a book for adults, however, it seems like filler. And, since the premise of the book is that it’s attempting to counteract widely believed “false facts”, it seems way off the mark.

Following that point, with some entries it feels like Green isn’t so much blasting apart common fallacies as he is splitting hairs. For example, the entry titled “Leonardo da Vinci did not paint the Mona Lisa,” rests on the premise that da Vinci called the painting La Gioconda, when it was finished. This is semantic slight-of-hand. Yes, during his lifetime, da Vinci probably never referred to the painting as the Mona Lisa. (From Wikipedia: “The painting’s title stems from a description by Giorgio Vasari in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci published in 1550, 31 years after the artist’s death. ‘Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife….’”)

But whatever da Vinci called the thing, it’s almost universally known as the Mona Lisa, nowadays. Sure, if you could drag Leonardo 500 years into the future and ask him if he painted the Mona Lisa, you’d get a confused “Che cosa?” in return. But if you took him to the Louvre, pointed his gob at this thing…

. ..and asked him if he painted it, he’d say, “Si!”

The Mona Lisa is a real thing, a real painting that was painted by Leonardo da Vinci. It doesn’t matter if what he called it. What Green’s done here is to stretch a point for no great purpose. There’s a few other examples of this kind of linguistic quibbling. (See also: King James did not sign the Magna Carta, and The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line.)

I’ll grant that, for some of these examples, Green might be technically correct, or “correct, in a certain way,” but these things are likely to be distracting to nit-pickers, oddly enough, because the rational behind them is just too nit-picky.

Still, there’s not that many distracting entries, all told, and, if you can get past them, the book remains entertaining. If you get a chance to pick it up for under a dollar (possibly more, if you’re flush), I’d recommend it.

—

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100 Penny Review: Anguished English

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Wherein we review a book that was purchased (either new or used) for one American Dollar or less. Gosh, it’s been awhile since we’ve done this feature. Anguished English - Cover

Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language
by Richard Lederer
Dell Books, 1989
177 Pages
ISBN: 0-440-20352-X Original price: $5.99
What I paid: $0.25
Where: Friends of the library sale

I know it’s not obvious from the half-baked garbage that I tend to post on a regular basis, but I really love the English language. Also, in spite of the fact that several people of my acquaintance have rather gently suggested over the years that I should stop trying to be funny, I do love a good joke. Thus, Anguished English was an inevitable purchase on my part.

I suppose that I’ve already given the game away here: I liked this book. It is, basically, a really long list of examples of humorous manglings of the English language. To wit:

- “I ate in a restaurant where the food was abdominal”

- “It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake”

Of course, there’s more. Much more. Because Lederer didn’t simply copy and paste a random assortment of these things into one big, long bullet-pointed list; he also classified them by type, separated them into logical chapters, and provides a kind of condensed history of verbal and written gaffes through the ages.

That’s not to say that it’s a perfect book, by any means. The introductory notes, while informative, contain a few too many strained attempts at humor. And, although the book is a mere 177 pages, I don’t think many people would want to try to get through it in only one or two sittings. The premise wears a little thin, if you stick with it a little too long; better to consume the book in short bursts.

After awhile, I found myself unable to simply enjoy the various gaffes without trying to figure out what the speakers’ original intent might have been. This isn’t much of a problem when it comes to examples of missing punctuation, Spoonerisms, vague identifiers or misplaced modifiers — but after a page and a half of Samuel Goldwyn or Yogi Berra quotes, I kind of began to understand how they thought what they were saying would mean what they intended it to mean. And that’s not a good thing for one’s sanity.

Another thing that might warn potential readers away from Anguished English is its age. Originally published in 1987 (my copy is a later reprint), it’s no wonder a few of its quotes sound very familiar. The book has been thoroughly quoted and excerpted over the years, by everybody from late-night talk show hosts, to morning DJ’s, from the Readers’ Digest, to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. I can also recall when sheets of these quotes were faxed from office to office by the early ancestors of the world’s current crop of serial email-forwarders (and I’ve seen plenty of the electronic version, too).

While all of these minor gripes might be valid, they don’t diminish the entertainment value of Anguished English a whole hell of a lot. There’s still plenty of funny stuff in here that you’ll either never have heard before, or will have forgotten about. And, while I’m not entirely up to speed on the history of books that collect the absurd uses to which English is sometimes subjected, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that I was reading some kind of original source document for a thousand magazine fillers and morning radio spots, which was actually kind� of nice.

Of course, what it all comes down to is this: do you like reading excerpts of misused English? Do malapropisms make you laugh? And can you enjoy this kind of humor without despairing for the future literacy of the United States, or feeling smug about your own command of the English language? If yes, then you either already own or have read this book, probably. If not, then don’t bother.

Is a good value for 25 cents? Well, I liked it.

100 Penny Review: Watch Mr. Wizard

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

DVD Cover

Watch Mr. Wizard
Standard Definition DVD (NTSC)
90 Minutes, black and white
Digiview Entertainment
Original Price: US$1.00
What I Paid: US$1.00

The smokers at my local Wal-Mart know patience. There’s only one register at which a customer may purchase tobacco products; and the local policy is to put the slowest, meanest, or least experienced employee at that station. This means a lot of standing around, while the checker wrestles with the complex operations involved in ringing up items and accepting money for them.

The other day, trapped in this unmoving line of the damned, I wound up looking at a pile of $1 DVDs. There were a lot of the things you’d expect to see for that price — terrible, unwatchable movies, and collections of terrible, unwatchable movies. And, a three episode collection of the old, “Watch Mr. Wizard” show.

Now, I know Mr. Wizard pretty well, but I’m not old enough to have seen the original program, which ran from 1951 to 1965. But I did see the later, “Mr. Wizard’s World” version that played on Nickelodeon. (Can you believe it? Educational shows on a kids’ cable channel?) I loved that show, which says a lot about me. (NERRRRRRRRRD!) But, feeling nostalgic, and willing to throw away a dollar, I added it to my other purchases. And so, for the first time ever, we present a very special 100 Penny Review: Our first video.

So, how was it? Um… kind of dull.

Look, I don’t want that to color your impression of this particular DVD with a pat, snap judgment, but it’s true. Yet, in spite of the dullness, I watched this thing with rapt attention. The world of science that we grown-ups have to deal with is complex and confusing. It’s kind of fun to recall all the things we learned in 3rd grade science class, and I was pleasantly surprised about how much I remembered. It’s nice to feel smart.

How strange it was to see this relic of 1950′s television, and to be reminded of how gentle and slow-paced it once could be. “Watch Mr. Wizard” was interesting not just because of the demonstrations (which only made up something like 10% of the episodes), but because the facts themselves were interesting. And kids used to sit there and watch this stuff. Well, why not? What else was on? The kids of today have constant 24 hour cable networks vying for their attention, which might be more exciting, but what have you ever really learned from, say, the Jonas Brothers? Aside from the fact that bad music can occur at any age?

Don Herbert, by most reports, was a pretty good guy. Of course, as a children’s television host, he was often the butt of a number of off-color insinuations. But there’s nothing sinister to be found, thank goodness. Mr. Wizard is a kindly, but stern figure here. In later years (especially for those of us who saw his demonstrations on Letterman) he became a good deal more avuncular.

Back in the 50′s, though, he didn’t let up on the kids a bit. Question after question after question — and the kids held their own. Sure, there might have been some hemming and hawing, some wrong answers here and there, but they gave as good as they got in a sportsman-like way. Nowadays, of course, you’re more likely to get a, “Hey, fuck you, man!” than a, “Gee, Mr. Wizard!” out of even the most well-behaved school-kid.

(Before you get too nostalgic about the “olden days”, don’t forget that back when these shows were taped, homosexuality was considered a mental illness, mixed-race couples could be arrested for being together, smoking was advertised on television, and women had only gotten the right to vote a scant 30 years prior.)

It does bother me a little bit, thinking that this might have been some cheap attempt to capitalize on Don Herbert’s death; There are indications that the makers were in a bit of a hurry:

So, ultimately, the question is this: Is it worth a buck? Well, that depends.

People who fondly remember Don Herbert, but have never seen the old, 50′s era version of Mr. Wizard would probably enjoy it. That makes it very much a product for adults, I’m afraid. Kids, I suspect, would be bored to tears, break the disc out of frustration, and sneak over to a friend’s house to get loaded on the Bacardi Silver in the fridge in his garage. But, if you’re a member of the former group, go for it.

Archive for the ‘100 Penny Review’ Category

100 Penny Review: Murder At The ABA

100 Penny Review: The Public Domain

100 Penny Review: Contrary to Popular Belief

100 Penny Review: Anguished English

100 Penny Review: Watch Mr. Wizard

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