Recently Read

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, by David Weinberger
You have to be careful with these The Future Is Now books. A blurb on the front cover says "in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan," which could mean a lot of things. (For instance, "it's superficial technological determinism!" or, "it will prove to have the shelf life of yogurt!") But I enjoyed it, and I'm quite prepared to buy the overall argument: the internet isn't changing us, it's revealing us. Not unlike another networked communication technology I've done a little research on.

Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, by Lisa McGirr
The best history of the New Right to date. And I'm not just saying that because of all the recommendation letters Professor McGirr's husband has written me this year. Her book is an extremely smart and balanced case study of grassroots politics in Orange County, California from Goldwater to Reagan. You might not feel like reading such a book, and if so, that's fine. The shocking thing is how long it took for a good historian to get around to writing one.

The Sinaloa Story, by Barry Gifford
Gifford is like James Ellroy on peyote. He's best known for collaborations with David Lynch (Wild At Heart, Lost Highway). Like many a Lynch movie, the Gifford novels I've read start out great, burning rubber with gritty noir energy and all-American badness, and then somehow run out of gas a few miles outside town in the dusty desert of plotlessness. This one was no exception. Gifford is good for Unknown Armies inspiration, though. The Sinaloa Story's Ava Varazo is the model for Anna Cairo, my UA game's femme fatale. At our game on Monday, Brant said "I have never hated an NPC in any game as much as I hate her." So Gifford and I must be doing something right.

The Real McCoy, by Darin Strauss
The last, and probably least, of a trilogy of early 20th century Americana novels I recently inhaled. (The others being Carter Beats the Devil and Kavalier & Clay. Oh, and John Henry Days. They're not actually a trilogy. They're just a bunch of books I read.) It's the story of Kid McCoy, a turn of the century boxer who may have been the origin of the phrase "the Real McCoy" but was in every other way a con artist and scammer. And his real name wasn't even McCoy. I probably read this too fast; it hasn't really stayed with me.

Exit Strategy, by Douglas Rushkoff
The biblical story of Joseph retold among 21st century hackers and dot-com executroids. A good read, smart and hip and funny, though not as big a rush as Rushkoff's first novel, Ecstasy Club. Writers probably hate when you analyze their books like this, but I couldn't help read it as being about Rushkoff himself. He's a media and culture commentator who made his name in the early 90s with plugged-in-to-the-zeitgeist books like Cyberia and Media Virus (not to mention The Gen X Reader, which ensured he would be confused ever after in people's minds with Douglas Coupland). His early books were extremely smart but also breathless in their enthusiasm for, well, just about everything that was Happening Now, from the subversive potential of Ren and Stimpy to the utopia awaiting us all in MMORPGs. But after a few years Rushkoff discovered that the people who made his books into bestsellers weren't so much the subversive young culture jammers he loved, but marketing executives who wanted to sell things to those subversive young culture jammers. And books like Media Virus gave them a fistful of tools with which to do so. (Actually that other culture-savvy Douglas went through much the same process a few years earlier with all the people who wanted to hire him to sell things to Generation X.) Rushkoff admits that the adulation (and top-dollar consulting fees) of the PR mavens turned his head for a while, but ultimately he recoiled from that world, and I think his last three books (Exit Strategy, Coercion, and the new Nothing Sacred) can all be seen as a kind of penance for the time Dougie, like the wayward Joseph, labored at Pharaoh's side.

(PS Read Rushkoff's weblog here.)
(PPS One caveat: the "future footnotes" created by readers of the "open source" edition of the novel were kind of annoying. Hey, I'm all for exploring new media, but making reading a novel more like reading UseNet seems to me a step in the wrong direction.)

The Queen's Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, by Benjamin Woolley
Elizabethan super spy 007, baby. Nuff said.

Recently Wrote

Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time, by Peter Galison
OK, OK, so I didn't actually write it, but I was Professor Galison's research assistant on this book, and I dug up a lot of stuff for him. It's a brilliant book, and I do say so myself. Galison shows how a very nuts-and-bolts technical preoccupation of the 19th century (the synchronization of clocks) was directly linked to a great theoretical revolution of 20th century physics (relativity). As above, so below.

The book jacket quotes James Gleick saying "This is how twentieth-century science really began....Engaging, original, and absolutely brilliant," and then goes on to say, "Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time." I agree with Gleick's praise absolutely, but I'm here to tell ya, that wasn't esteemed historian of science Peter Galison doing all the culling of photos and patents and documents in them "unexplored" archives. :)

(Note cheerful smiley. I liked being an RA. Working on that book was a terrific experience and Prof. Galison's been great to me.)