FictionJohnny Hiro Volume 1 - Fred Chao; "More quirky action - car chases, giant tuna, a sky-full of fish - there is also drama as Johnny and Mayumi face their landlord in court. It's one of the fun things about comics - the ability to spin these insanely ridiculous tales."
Oliver Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout; "A seventh-grade math teacher is the link in 13 stories set on the Maine coast; the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction"
Nonfiction
Shop Class as Soulcraft - Matthew B. Crawford; "The postindustrial world is not in fact populated - as gurus like Richard Florida, who has popularized the idea of the "creative class," would have it - by "bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe." The truth about most white-collar office work, Crawford argues, is captured better by Dilbert and The Office: dull routine more alienating than the machine production of denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowlege worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker's personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic are elusive. Rather than achieving self-mastery by confronting a "hard discipline" like gardening or structural engineering or learning Russian (of which my brother has done all three), people are offered the fake autonomy of consumer choice, expressing their inner selves by sitting in front of a Harvey-Davidson catalog and deciding how to trick out their bikes (this also reminds me of my brother).
A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventures in Early America - Tony Horwitz; "Blending self-tutorial with reporting and driving around . . . the result is a lively and accessible popular history that demonstrates the survival of the past in our present-minded country"
No comments:
Post a Comment