Books of the Month – January 2012

I just loved Just My Type, a thoroughly enjoyable romp through fonts and typefaces.

I also liked two family stories:

• The Boy in the Moon, the true and heartbreaking story of a severely handicapped boy and his dad’s quest to take care of him.
• We The Animals, a tight, harsh novel about three boys growing up with flawed parents, but parents who love them very much

and finally I recommend Poor Economics, a clinical look at how poor people behave with their finances — just like not-so-poor people, it turns out, minus the cushion of cash in the bank, which means any mistake can be fatal.

** The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is the  first part of the author’s memoir (the second, The Arrogant Years I read last month). It focuses for the most part on earlier memories and especially on her father, who did look dashing in, yes, a white sharkskin suit, in the Cairo of his youth, while The Arrogant Years focused more on her mother and more on their lives in New York. The author managed to create two memoirs on pretty much the same events that hardly repeat one another, so both are worth reading.

This book is a love paean to her father, who consistently adored his youngest child even as he often treated her mother shabbily, at least from a modern perspective, and even when his prosperous Egyptian ways are reduced to penury in Paris and eventually the US as Jews were chased out of Egypt in the 1950’s. Throughout, she is able to recreate settings and situations so vividly that it’s easy to forget that she left Cairo as a little girl, and certainly was not around when her parents are courting. A great portrait of a larger than life man and  a family with many hardships.

 

* Seven Years by Peter Stamm

I have this theory that translated novels must be decent, otherwise why bother translating them in the first place. And this theory has, I’m sorry to say, many exceptions including Seven Years, a depressing novel of a man who married for reasons that never quite become clear either in his head or the novel  and also has a mistress who is not that bright, not that beautiful, and terribly repressed to boot. What does he see in her? Mute devotion is the only possibility, and one wonders how that could be satisfying…  So Mr. self-centered swans about his failing architecture firm (run with his wife, perhaps that explains the need to escape?), his supposedly beloved daughter (how can he put her in the middle of the mess?) and his doormat mistress — only to be utterly surprised when the whole setup blows up in his face.

It would be nice to become attached to one character, any character, but the hero is just too much of a cad, the mistress almost non-existent, the wife all-business, and the daughter too little. Maybe I should revise my theory about translated novels.

** Masters of Management by Adrian Wooldridge

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World – for Better and for Worse is an exhaustively researched book not so much about the business gurus of its subtitle but about management theories in general. If you’ve ever snickered at the back of the room while company executives blabber on about re-engineering and synergies and war for talent, this may be the book for you. I must say I found it strangely cold and unengaging in its encyclopedic approach — and I got annoyed by the comments about the childcare needs of women, as if children did not have fathers, too (and mothers did not spend years of their lives without young children to care for).  Still, the book is full of interesting summaries and insights, for instance that most entrepreneurs do not offer world-changing products, but rather a new twist on existing products, often based on process improvements.

 

Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn

Another adventure in drugged-out New Yorkers and another failure… Toxicology honestly advertises the topic right in the title, and it’s an equal opportunity parade of drugs of all types, for all ages and marital statuses. Inane dialogs and detailed descriptions of minute actions don’t help.

* Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox is a devilishly clever book that wraps a novel into another, or rather multiple novels into the story of its author and his muse, and it left me absolutely cold. Admiring the craft, perhaps, but at best indifferent to all the protagonists, at worst actively annoyed of the complicated packaging that ultimately reveals trite and unbelievable tales.

*** Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

If you are interested in the causes (and remedies!) for poverty, you will want to read Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, in which the authors suggest that we need to put the assumptions about the poverty trap to the test by running experiments. Do mosquito nets get ignored if given away for free? Let’s compare outcomes between regions that did give them out for free and others that did not. Do  poor people bypass childhood vaccinations because they are uninformed, or do they simply procrastinate, like the rest of us? Are crises always worse for the very poor, or for the middle class? Is fertilizer better purchased right at harvest time or when it is needed?

Through simple experiments the authors find that “the poor” are just like everyone else: they procrastinate, they spend rather than save, they practice diversification in their meager assets — but they don’t have a cushion, so when things go bad, they go really badly. The book is careful about prescriptions but still makes it clear that most anti-poverty programs are shooting blindly, using untested (and arrogant) assumptions when it would be pretty simple to ask, test, and measure. An inspiring and very approachable book. Since I said mean things about Ecole Normale intellectuals earlier I should mention that Duflo was educated there, and shines.

* Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

Ten Thousand Saints starts with a teenager’s dying of an overdose and proceeds to a tedious description of how his best friend moves away to live with his drug-dealing father in New York city and the dad’s  cocaine-abusing stepdaughter. Unfortunately the dialog generated by drug-addled teenagers and their drug-addled parents is mind-numbingly boring. On top of that,  the dead boy’s girlfriend is pregnant and somehow decides that she will raise the baby with the best friend — a great plan when you are sixteen and have no parental support, don’t you think? I know the kids are on drugs but no sixteen year old is that misinformed and stupid, right?

By the end of the book I was relieved to find that the baby would be raised by someone else but most of all I was relieved I had turned the last page.

*** Just My Type by Simon Garfield

As I gushed about Just My Type: A Book About Fonts to my friends I encountered many blank stares and realized that, just maybe, the topic of typefaces (you know, Times Roman versus Helvetica versus tens of thousands of others) might be best suited to a few geeks. Well, geek I am, about type at least, but this book is not just for geeks! The author focuses each chapter on a particular typeface, giving some historical facts (from Gutenberg to the IBM Selectric ball — how’s that for a boomer’s artifact?) or relating funny experiments (as in trying to live without looking at any Helvetica fonts for a day — an impossible feat in any urban setting). There are deja vu stories about types for road signs (as described in The Big Roads) and new stories about designing types for particular airports (Charles de Gaulle, anyone? if only the passenger areas could be as beautiful as the Frutiger type!)

My only nit is that the author should have included even more illustrations. I got lost sometimes when he emoted about the curve of a g in a type I was not familiar with. But I loved the book otherwise. It made me wonder about how we can wander around the world not knowing the names or families of the fonts that surround us, much like people who don’t know about plants must be missing out when they take a walk…

*** The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

The Memory Chalet is a poignant memoir by an erudite historian who, felled by Lou Gehrig’s disease into complete paralysis, lets his sharp mind meander, remember, and ruminate into dazzling essays. The title is a self-deprecating play on words from the memory palace of classical memorizers, more modestly sized to suit the author, who nevertheless needs to compose the essays entirely in his mind since he cannot physically write them but it’s a prodigious chalet where a simple bus ride evokes class warfare, formidable teachers hammer German into his head, and French intellectuals of the Ecole Normale are as narrow-minded as I remember them to be. Highly recommended, for all its ivory tower undertones.