The Confessions of a Trivialist/Samuel Rosenberg/219 pp.

Rosenberg is, according to the book's Foreword by Buckminster Fuller, a processor of trivia. When faced with a mystery, he "process[es] whole acres of trivia - significant details overlooked by others." In this way, he has been able to get at the (possible) reasons behind the actions of various historical figures, and uses that information to (re)create what Fuller calls "highly plausible but sometimes directly undocumented intimate episodes" in the lives of these people. By using these methods, Rosenberg gives us, in this volume, his hypotheses of events in the lives of Mary Shelley (creator of Frankenstein's monster), Herman Melville, Albert Schweitzer, and Lot's wife, among others. He includes an interesting chapter on the possible origin of the Santa Claus figure, as well as information about child-prodigy William James Sidis, who went from entering Harvard at the age of 11, to working subsistence jobs and collecting streetcar transfers (and writing perhaps the most boring book in the world, Notes on the Collection of Transfers).
While the book contains some pieces of interesting information (including an account of the author's 1955 interview of Schweitzer), I was turned off by the very thing that is Rosenberg's stock-in-trade - his tendency to make an assumptive jump in logic from a collection of random facts to a full-blown (alleged) episode in a person's life. While it is entirely possible that the figure of Dr. Frankenstein was based on Mary Shelley's father and her husband, we have no actual physical proof of that fact, merely the author's assumption and supposition. The book was enjoyable, however, for the new information (trivia) it gave me on Sidis, Melville, and the strange triangle of Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poet Byron.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains/Nicholas Carr/276 pp.

According to Carr, the advent of the internet has changed the way we as humans process information through our brains; due to the web format of small snippets of information or long articles broken up by distracting pop-ups and in-text ads and links, we are losing the ability to read (and perhaps, think) deeply. Carr traces the history of information dispersal, from the oral tradition to clay tablets, papyrus and Gutenberg's printing press, up through radio and television to the multi-media web-based formats of today. He presents scientific evidence that shows how the brain is constantly evolving, gaining and losing synapses connected to learning and memory. He also includes a chapter on the "googleization" of information - how the goal of the founders of Google was to apply manufacturing's process-improvement methods to the internet, and how that affects the way we search for and browse information on the web. (He also discusses Google's efforts to make all information available via the internet, including their huge book-digitization project.)
On a personal note, I was two chapters shy of finishing this book when it became due at the library. I took the book to the library, thinking I'd just renew it and finish it, but found that someone else had a hold on the book so I couldn't renew it. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just find a quiet spot here and finish the book." The irony is that I was unable to focus enough to do the deep reading required to finish the book, and had to settle for just briefly scanning the last two chapters!

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much/Allison Hoover Bartlett/274 pp.

My sister recommended this book to me; she hadn't read it, but thought that the title described my book addiction perfectly.
Actually, this book is only tangentially about people like me, seeming hoarders of any book they can get their hands on. Specifically, this book is about John Gilkey, a rare-book thief who stole books from dealers, not in some scheme to re-sell them and make big bucks, but because of a belief that having a large personal library would make him a well-respected member of high society. Bartlett, through interviews with Gilkey, book seller and amateur detective Ken Sanders, and other members of the rare-book world, explores what makes a book "rare", and what causes the obsession some of us have with collecting books. However, this work is mostly about Gilkey, his history of book-stealing, and how he justified his thefts to himself and to others.

goodreads
A similar book, about stealing maps and prints from rare books. Both are must-reads for rare-book librarians, imho.

Wormwood Forest/Mary Mycio/259 pp.

Approaching the Chernobyl nuclear incident from a naturalist's perspective, Mary Mycio details the effects that the massive amounts of nuclear radiation and fallout have had on the environment of the area, from the villages surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear plant to Ukraine, Belarus and Russia overall. She details some of the early efforts by the Soviet government to contain the radiation and how the breakup of the Soviet Union has affected clean-up, monitoring and research activities of the three post-Soviet nations. The story is a combination of horrifying details of the effects the disaster had on first-responders' health, as well as the surprisingly positive effect on local flora and fauna of the zone's inhabitants being evacuated indefinitely. Mycio interviews local residents who have sneaked back into the zone, scientists researching the effects of the lingering radiation, and botanists, zoologists and environmentalists observing the recovery efforts of the local plant and animal life. My only complaint is that, while the majority of the book is written on a level understandable by laymen, the author at times goes into excessively detailed descriptions of chemical processes and radiation levels. There is also, apparently, some confusion in scientific circles as to how radiation levels should be reported: some countries report in roentgens, some in becquerels, some in curies, etc. Mycio is forced to spend almost a complete chapter explaining why radiation is reported differently, and how to relate the different radiation units.
My favorite parts of the book, though, are when she describes the amazing ability of nature to recover from such a devastating event. With the exception of government workers and researchers,and a number of illegal squatters, the zones of exclusion are almost completely deserted. In the absence of human population, other species have bounced back, in some cases from near-extinction. In this regard, the book provides a good argument for protecting the earth from overpopulation by humans.

link to list of various radiation units
goodreads entry on this book

Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl/Robert Polidori/112 pp.

With the recent 25th anniversary of the April 26 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, I have been reading several books lately to learn more about this event and what its long-term effects have been.
Built in 1970 as a bedroom community for employees of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, Pripyat was completely evacuated when a massive explosion occurred at the plant's No. 4 reactor. Residents were told they were only leaving for a few days, and were not permitted to take anything with them when they left. Similar instructions were given to the residents of the city of Chornobyl and of neighboring villages. Published in 2003, Zones of Exclusion is Polidori's photographic record of how the area has changed (and how it has remained frozen in time) in the following 25 years. Some of the most striking photos are of an amusement park, never used, that had been scheduled to open on May Day, just days after the nuclear plant disaster. Also interesting was the obvious way in which the city's plant life was, little by little, returning the town to forest.
While I enjoyed looking through these images, I was disappointed by the fact that this book, like so much other literature on the Zones of Exclusion, talks about how the area has been "untouched by humans" for the past 25 years, but other books I've read recently (specifically Voices from Chernobyl and Wormwood Forest) make mention of former residents, profiteers and vandals returning to the area to collect everything from family mementos to car parts to sell on the black market. Looking at these photos, I can't help wondering how much of what I'm seeing is the result of nature taking back the area, and how much is just the result of vandalism and theft.

link to a similar photo montage

amazon

Zeitoun / Dave Eggers / 337 p.

What to say about Zeitoun, other than, "Read it, the sooner, the better?"

This book was an incredibly good read.  The first part introduces you to Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy and their children.  They're an all-American family.  He was born in Syria, she in Baton Rouge, an American convert to Islam before she met her husband.  They and their children live in New Orleans where they run a frenetic and thriving family business.  They have lots of relatives in Louisiana and across the world, with whom they are in various degrees and qualities of relationship.  As Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, they talk about whether to stay or go.

After the hurricane hits, the levees break, and all the systems in which the Zeitoun family lives are tested: the family system, the communication system, the media networks, the physical systems of the city infrastructure, the bureaucratic, police and judicial infastructure, and in essence, everyone's ability to talk, to listen and to trust.  I will say nothing else about what happens, but if you are like me, you will feel a wide range of emotions as events unfold, and you will learn some things that will shake your faith in humanity, and other things that will strengthen your belief in the human spirit.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking / Malcolm Gladwell / 286 p.

I've heard several people talk about this book since its publication five years ago, but I just now got around to picking it up myself.  I have a certain prejudice against the idea that we make our best decisions when we do not analyze or make a point of bringing additional information to the question.  Knowing about the recent psychological experiments that show how our instantaneous reactions to photos of people of various ages and races are usually painfully ageist and anti-nonwhite makes me extremely suspicious about any argument extolling the virtue of such instant reactions as the best means of decision making.

For the first chapter or so, this is precisely the idea that the book seems to advance.  However, before very long, Gladwell introduces complications to the idea.  Alongside the many examples of elegantly correct intuition, he shows counterexamples of intuition clouded or distorted by exactly the kind of prejudices I was thinking of; at one point, he even cites the very studies I had read, and in the end, he has some interesting ideas about reducing the impact of prejudice on decision making. He also comes to make a key distinction between the quick judgment of experts and that of non-experts, which addresses another objection of mine.

As with Gladwell's other books, there are parts of the book where the connections among the examples seem stretched, but overall, the book is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea / Barbara Demick, 314 p.

You can read all the facts and statistics you want about totalitarian regimes like the one in North Korea, but nothing puts you inside that Orwellian universe like having the lives of six different people narrated, year by starving, repressive, life-twisting year, by the L.A. Times reporter who interviewed them after all of them, in their own ways, managed to escape the troubled country of their birth.  When you see how people meet, fall in love, marry, live in families and neighborhoods and cities, it is hard not to care what happens to them.

There are elements here of post-apocalyptic novels like Julian Comstock (reviewed earlier) or World Made By Hand, as lives previously lived in quiet, disciplined austerity descend into anarchy punctuated by brutality,  as electricity, medicine and food depart and some rules of social and physical survival change...and others do not.  The whole while, government street-criers, newspaper reporters, and eventually homeless orphans chorus on with paeons to the fatherly benevolence of North Korea's rulers, past and present. Of course, this book is nonfiction - the author has dedicated some ten years of her life to the book, conducting multiple in-depth interviews, finding documentary evidence and other corroboration under incredibly constrained conditions inherent to dictatorship.  That simply makes it all the more compelling.

The Gift of Fear / Gavin de Becker / 420 p.

The full title of this 1997 nonfiction bestseller is The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.  I bought myself a copy because Carolyn Hax recommends it so often in her "Tell Me About It" advice column and online chats, especially when a letter writer shows signs of being the victim of domestic abuse, stalking or other potentially violent circumstances. 

At first, I was not sure if I was going to like the book.  Having read, and mostly agreed with, sociologist Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear (1999), which points out how much media portrayals of violence and other fear-inducing phenomena grossly distort people's perception of what they truly need to be afraid of, I thought this book would simply urge people to trust their every fearful instinct.

In fact, de Becker's and Glassner's books fit together very well.  De Becker is the founder and CEO of a major personal security firm, Gavin De Becker and Associates.  He is in the business of predicting and preventing violence, so he has no truck with what in the later chapters of his book he calls "manufactured" fears brought on by an eyeball-hungry media.  Unlike Glassner, though, de Becker explicitly values the sensation of "true fear" as a valuable signal that can save one's life in a truly dangerous situation - a signal that is all too frequently suppressed.  That observation will be familiar to reader's of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (2005), another book exploring the power of rapid cognition in situations in which one is forced to think fast.

Both Gladwell and de Becker recognize that intuition, like chance, favors the prepared mind - even the evolutionarily-honed survival instinct that de Becker believes resides in every one of us. De Becker's aim in The Gift of Fear is to bring his own expertise to bear on the ordinary and extraordinary instances of his readers' lives in which "high-stakes prediction" of violence is necessary.  He does this through many stories drawn from his clients' experiences with crimes as unusual as assassination and as common as spousal abuse and stalking, interspersed with glimpses into his own process of judging the likelihood of violence in the situation at hand.  He wants his readersto accept that violence is inherent to human society,  to trust and act upon intuitions warning them of immanent violence, (here de Becker urges women, especially,  to overcome their social conditioning toward "niceness") - but to reduce the intrusion of worries that can actually detract from one's ability to respond to "real fear." 

This seems like a very tricky line to walk, but de Becker manages it, with authority.  I would recommend this book to many people, for many reasons.