DeBotton, Alain. How Proust Can Change Your Life. London : Picador, 1997
Reviewed by Crosby
After some frustration attempting to read Marcel Proust’s mammoth contribution to our literary culture, I put it to one side to read further later.
Then I came across this book. It is charming, humorous and succinct. It makes no attempt to summarize Proust which would be meaningless anyway: amongst this book’s points is that the reason for reading Proust is not to come away with facts or a plot, but rather to experience his internal worldview through his exquisite detailing. DeBotton goes on to say that there is, indeed, a contest to summarize Proust: you must do it in 10 seconds or less. (This is to emphasize that Proust cannot be summarized.)
DeBotton gives various delightful quotes from people who read or attempted to read Proust’s book including that of a publisher who complained why anybody would want to read a book that takes 30 plus pages to describe somebody waking up and another from an American woman residing in Italy who sent a letter to Proust describing herself as young and attractive and that she spent 3 years devoting all her time to reading his book and all she wanted to know from Proust was whether he could just tell her in a couple of sentences what the book was about. (By the way, this sentence comes nowhere near to one of Proust’s run-on sentences, which ran on for some 300 lines: another of the many little items in DeBotton’s slim tome.)
DeBotton pulls out various themes and passages from Proust’s tremendous work. His book has chapters dealing in subjects ranging from love to how to put down a book, and, then, shows how, by reading Proust, you can gain an enriched perspective on life.
Whether you have read Proust or are thinking of reading his gargantuan classic or if you want to fool others into believing you have read and understand him, try DeBotton’s tidbit of a book. It is not weighed down with heavy academia and analysis. Instead, it will give you perspective with a smile. Oh, and it has some drawings.
1st floor PQ2631.R63 Z54917
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Zoo, or Letters Not about Love
Shklovsky, Viktor, 1893-1984. Zoo or Letters Not about Love: A Novel. Translated by Richard Sheldon. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001. First English edition published by Cornell University in 1971.
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
Shklovsky was a Russian writer living in exile in Berlin between the world wars. Zoo is an epistolary novel based on his love affair with Elsa Triolet. In this novel, the letters are written to Alya who has ordered the letter writer not to write about love: “Your love may be great, but it’s far from joyful,” she tells him in letter three. Alya’s lover’s letters are both heart breaking and funny. They are full of observations made necessary by the writer’s need to communicate with Alya while avoiding the subject he most wants to write about. But his heart is not only broken from his love for Alya. He also mourns the loss of his homeland. In order to avoid the topic of love, the letter writer expounds on apes and monkeys, the German spring, Hispano-Suiza automobiles (lacking a motor, unable to love, but great on mountain passes); publishing opportunities, the crease in his pants, other contemporary writers, and his homesickness for Russia, and of course, Alya. Every page of this book is thought provoking and witty. You’ll want to read this more than once.
1st floor PG3476.S488 Z323 2001
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
Shklovsky was a Russian writer living in exile in Berlin between the world wars. Zoo is an epistolary novel based on his love affair with Elsa Triolet. In this novel, the letters are written to Alya who has ordered the letter writer not to write about love: “Your love may be great, but it’s far from joyful,” she tells him in letter three. Alya’s lover’s letters are both heart breaking and funny. They are full of observations made necessary by the writer’s need to communicate with Alya while avoiding the subject he most wants to write about. But his heart is not only broken from his love for Alya. He also mourns the loss of his homeland. In order to avoid the topic of love, the letter writer expounds on apes and monkeys, the German spring, Hispano-Suiza automobiles (lacking a motor, unable to love, but great on mountain passes); publishing opportunities, the crease in his pants, other contemporary writers, and his homesickness for Russia, and of course, Alya. Every page of this book is thought provoking and witty. You’ll want to read this more than once.
1st floor PG3476.S488 Z323 2001
Howl and Other Poems
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1959.
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
“Howl” is one of the great poems of the twentieth century, and in this City Lights collection it is accompanied by nine other Ginsberg poems from the mid-1950’s including
“Sunflower Sutra,”
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
“America,”
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
And “In back of the real”
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
Flower nonetheless
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.
‘Howl” is Ginsberg’s lamentation for his friend Carl Solomon. It begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn/looking for an angry fix.” In this poem Ginsberg both celebrates the energy and genius of his generation and morns the waste of that generation’s promise through lives lived too hard . . . "who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in/Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their/torsos night after night/with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-/cohol and cock and endless balls."
Ginsberg’s use of chant-like repetition gives this poem an ecstatic religious feeling, brought out even more unambiguously in “Footnote to Howl,”
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!
If you haven’t heard Allen Ginsberg recite his poetry check out this video: Allen Ginsberg in concert with Donald Was (Lannan Literary Series) Listening Room Video L2811 v.9
1st FloorPS3513.I74 H6 1959b
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
“Howl” is one of the great poems of the twentieth century, and in this City Lights collection it is accompanied by nine other Ginsberg poems from the mid-1950’s including
“Sunflower Sutra,”
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
“America,”
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
And “In back of the real”
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
Flower nonetheless
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.
‘Howl” is Ginsberg’s lamentation for his friend Carl Solomon. It begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn/looking for an angry fix.” In this poem Ginsberg both celebrates the energy and genius of his generation and morns the waste of that generation’s promise through lives lived too hard . . . "who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in/Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their/torsos night after night/with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-/cohol and cock and endless balls."
Ginsberg’s use of chant-like repetition gives this poem an ecstatic religious feeling, brought out even more unambiguously in “Footnote to Howl,”
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!
If you haven’t heard Allen Ginsberg recite his poetry check out this video: Allen Ginsberg in concert with Donald Was (Lannan Literary Series) Listening Room Video L2811 v.9
1st FloorPS3513.I74 H6 1959b
The Americas: A Hemispheric History
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. The Americas: A Hemispheric History. NY: Modern Library, 2003. 235 pages.
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
Author of many books including Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, (1995) Fernández-Armesto is a professor of history and geography at the University of London and Oxford. Critics have described his books as both popular and scholarly and The Americas fits this description. It is more of a carefully crafted essay or lecture than straightforward scholarly work. In this book, Fernández-Armesto seeks to present a unified history of the two continents that make up the Americas. In presenting this unified history, Fernández-Armesto dispels a number of myths, one of them being that the people and countries of the southern continent have always been economically and politically behind the countries to the north. He does this by describing the advanced city-based civilizations that developed from Mexico and into South America and the extended period of intense cultural transmission from the southern hemisphere into North America often by way of Europe. It was not until the population grew and moved west across North America and as industrialization took hold, that the northern continent began to eclipse the southern continent economically and politically. Fernández-Armesto spends some time looking at the effects of colonization on both continents. He looks at similarities between countries like Brazil, Chilé, and Argentina, and the United States and Canada in terms of populations, immigration, political systems, and commerce, and in terms of geography and climate. He looks forward to time of equalization between the two continents, mostly likely to occur through the exploitation of natural resources to the south. Although there are no footnotes, Fernández-Armesto concludes his book with a chapter-by-chapter bibliographic essay.
2nd floor. E 18 .F39 2003
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
Author of many books including Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, (1995) Fernández-Armesto is a professor of history and geography at the University of London and Oxford. Critics have described his books as both popular and scholarly and The Americas fits this description. It is more of a carefully crafted essay or lecture than straightforward scholarly work. In this book, Fernández-Armesto seeks to present a unified history of the two continents that make up the Americas. In presenting this unified history, Fernández-Armesto dispels a number of myths, one of them being that the people and countries of the southern continent have always been economically and politically behind the countries to the north. He does this by describing the advanced city-based civilizations that developed from Mexico and into South America and the extended period of intense cultural transmission from the southern hemisphere into North America often by way of Europe. It was not until the population grew and moved west across North America and as industrialization took hold, that the northern continent began to eclipse the southern continent economically and politically. Fernández-Armesto spends some time looking at the effects of colonization on both continents. He looks at similarities between countries like Brazil, Chilé, and Argentina, and the United States and Canada in terms of populations, immigration, political systems, and commerce, and in terms of geography and climate. He looks forward to time of equalization between the two continents, mostly likely to occur through the exploitation of natural resources to the south. Although there are no footnotes, Fernández-Armesto concludes his book with a chapter-by-chapter bibliographic essay.
2nd floor. E 18 .F39 2003
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Introduction to Elementary Particles
Introduction to Elementary Particles. New York: Wiley, 1987
David J. Griffiths
Review by Mark Schneider
Many students of physics fantasize about becoming particle theorists—dealing with strings, unified theories of everything, quantum gravity. But the fact is that most of these folks (and this includes me!) never really get very far down that path. Griffiths's little book does an absolutely fabulous job of giving the reader (assuming a typical physics major’s understanding of quantum mechanics) quick and real insight into what relativistic quantum theories are all about, without years of pain and confusion. Be forewarned, though, if you are looking for a book that gives the latest dope on the most current particle models, this volume is two decades old, so look for something else (Donald Perkins’s Introduction to High Energy Physics is a more recent standard). But in a couple evenings' readings, Griffiths can help you become expert enough to sit through rather theoretical talks and have a good notion of what is going on, or allow you to get started with a more advanced book, and even to calculate a few simple Feynman diagrams on your own. Griffiths is also the author of probably the best-loved undergraduate physics textbook of all time, his Introduction to Electrodynamics, as well as a very nice Introduction to Quantum Mechanics.
Fourth Floor Science Library QC 793.2 .G75 1987b
David J. Griffiths
Review by Mark Schneider
Many students of physics fantasize about becoming particle theorists—dealing with strings, unified theories of everything, quantum gravity. But the fact is that most of these folks (and this includes me!) never really get very far down that path. Griffiths's little book does an absolutely fabulous job of giving the reader (assuming a typical physics major’s understanding of quantum mechanics) quick and real insight into what relativistic quantum theories are all about, without years of pain and confusion. Be forewarned, though, if you are looking for a book that gives the latest dope on the most current particle models, this volume is two decades old, so look for something else (Donald Perkins’s Introduction to High Energy Physics is a more recent standard). But in a couple evenings' readings, Griffiths can help you become expert enough to sit through rather theoretical talks and have a good notion of what is going on, or allow you to get started with a more advanced book, and even to calculate a few simple Feynman diagrams on your own. Griffiths is also the author of probably the best-loved undergraduate physics textbook of all time, his Introduction to Electrodynamics, as well as a very nice Introduction to Quantum Mechanics.
Fourth Floor Science Library QC 793.2 .G75 1987b
A Mexican Ullysses
Vasconcelos, José. A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography. Translated and Abridged by W. Rex Crawford. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1963.
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
Vasconcelos’s (1881-1959) autobiography, in its original edition, is comprised of four volumes. Translator Crawford has winnowed it down to one volume of under 300 pages for this edition. Critics consider this work to be a classic of Mexican literature. Vasconcelos’s life was unusually rich and his observations on his own life as well as the political and social changes within Mexico and in the United States make his book both enlightening and fascinating. He was a traveler, often exiled in the United States, but also in Spain, France, and England. Vasconcelos describes his education in Texas and in Mexico and his youthful sexual appetite. When he was not involved with establishing or opposing a presidential administration, he was seeking the time and place to write his three part philosophical treatise: The Ethics, The Metaphysics, and The Aesthetics. He served as the Minister of Education in the administration of Alvaro Obregón. Among other accomplishments, Vasconcelos established small libraries throughout Mexico and made Spanish translations of the Greek and Roman classics available throughout Mexico’s schools and libraries. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Oaxaca and later for president. Vasconcelos was a strong nationalist and resented what he saw as the interference of the United States and Britain in the affairs of his country. He was nostalgic for the connection with Spain and admired much of what Spain contributed to Mexico. The book ends as Vasconcelos seeks final asylum in Argentina, his wife and son deciding to stay in Europe.
2nd floor F1234 .V2716
Reviewed by Rebecca Stuhr
Vasconcelos’s (1881-1959) autobiography, in its original edition, is comprised of four volumes. Translator Crawford has winnowed it down to one volume of under 300 pages for this edition. Critics consider this work to be a classic of Mexican literature. Vasconcelos’s life was unusually rich and his observations on his own life as well as the political and social changes within Mexico and in the United States make his book both enlightening and fascinating. He was a traveler, often exiled in the United States, but also in Spain, France, and England. Vasconcelos describes his education in Texas and in Mexico and his youthful sexual appetite. When he was not involved with establishing or opposing a presidential administration, he was seeking the time and place to write his three part philosophical treatise: The Ethics, The Metaphysics, and The Aesthetics. He served as the Minister of Education in the administration of Alvaro Obregón. Among other accomplishments, Vasconcelos established small libraries throughout Mexico and made Spanish translations of the Greek and Roman classics available throughout Mexico’s schools and libraries. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Oaxaca and later for president. Vasconcelos was a strong nationalist and resented what he saw as the interference of the United States and Britain in the affairs of his country. He was nostalgic for the connection with Spain and admired much of what Spain contributed to Mexico. The book ends as Vasconcelos seeks final asylum in Argentina, his wife and son deciding to stay in Europe.
2nd floor F1234 .V2716
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