Category: books

Musicophilia is a collection of neurological anecdotes all dealing with music.

It never ceases to amaze me how much we can learn a lot about brains from by studying those with damaged or otherwise unusual ones, and I’m very grateful that Oliver Sacks not only dedicated so much of his own ample brainpower to that very task, but also chose to transform his professional experience into reasonably accessible stories for non-experts. Not being anything like as musical as Dr. Sacks, however, I found it a bit difficult to relate to him as a narrator of tales specifically about music.

Sometimes he used the word “music” to refer to “serious Western classical music” in a way that seemed to indicate that pop songs obviously didn’t count. I think I would have felt the book was several degrees more approachable if he had started out with some acknowledgement of the wide variety of music in the world, and then explicitly characterized some of  it as being more cognitively challenging or worthwhile to produce and consume, and therefore more relevant to many of his case studies and much of his discussion of them, rather than leaving such things implied but largely unsaid.

All in all, not one of the better Oliver Sacks books, but still, like all eight of the other Oliver Sacks books I’ve read so far, undoubtedly worth reading.

When and Why I Read Musicophilia

Whatever Oliver Sacks writes about, he approaches it in an educated, thoughtful way. With footnotes. I especially enjoy reading what he has to say about brains.

Genre: non-fiction (neurology, music)
Date started / date finished:  12-Apr-17 to 24-Apr-17
Length: 391 pages
ISBN: 9781447222705 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2007
Amazon link: Musicophilia

The Back of the Napkin was disappointing, perhaps because I’m not in the target audience. As far as I can tell, the target audience is people who work in a consulting firm or a big corporate environment, don’t like drawing, and don’t know what a Venn diagram is.

In the service of better business meetings, the book brings together basic visual displays, superficial insights from cognitive science, and the five w’s of journalism, wrapping it all in a nicely designed but gimmicky napkin-shaped book printed in black and red.

The author sets out some good principles and good examples, but at the end of the day, I just felt like he was showing off the successes of his own career; none of it seemed particularly likely to help me, and somehow it didn’t make for compelling reading.

When and Why I Read The Back of the Napkin

Bought it in Atlanta in 2014. It’s been waiting its turn long enough.

Genre: non-fiction (business)
Date started / date finished:  26-Mar-17 to 20-Apr-17
Length: 276 pages
ISBN: 9781591843061 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 2008
Amazon link: The Back of the Napkin

When I read Airframe, what struck me most, apart from the author’s finely honed ability to build and sustain tension, was how outdated 90s communication technology seemed. Beepers, CD players, video recorders that use tape, faxes, landline telephones, television screens that aren’t flat… and what the heck is a telex, anyway?

More thoughts on this un-put-down-able techno-thriller below.

Continue reading Airframe by Michael Crichton

I have mixed feelings about Travels, Michael Crichton’s collection of autobiographical anecdotes.

On the one hand, Crichton is an intelligent, educated and interesting person with stories to tell that are exotic and absorbing, and he’s a good storyteller. On the other hand, a third of the material is about his rocky medical career, and another third of it relates to paranormal stuff, and in a couple of the non-medical, non-paranormal chapters, Crichton relates some nearly lethal experiences of the kind that involve water and thus cause me disproportionate anxiety.

In short, I like how he writes, but I didn’t like much of what he wrote about in this book.

For more on what stood out for me as well as more on Crichton’s oddly unscientific treatment of paranormal phenomena, see below.

Continue reading Travels by Michael Crichton

Edward Tufte was a byword among the publishing professionals I worked with in 2004–2008. If you had anything whatsoever to do with the design or illustration of serious books, you had at least one of his four giant tomes on your shelf, if not all of them:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Envisioning Information
• Visual Explanations
• Beautiful Evidence

Visual Explanations is the only one that’s made it onto my shelves so far, but at least now I’ve read it. Now I know what all the fuss is about.

Tufte’s lovely, informative book shows readers how data has been displayed throughout history in a variety of fields and how it is clarified or obscured by the manner in which it is displayed. He shows you illustrations of magic tricks and data from the Challenger disaster as well as 17th century book frontispieces; snapshots from computer interfaces as well as images from works of art history and natural history.

When and Why I Read Visual Explanations

On the to-read list since June 2012. Ties in with The Back of the Napkin because it’s about visual thinking.

Genre: non-fiction (information design)
Date started / date finished:  30-Mar-17 to 08-Apr-17
Length: 151 pages
ISBN: 0961392126 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 1997
Amazon link: Visual Explanations