The book has virtues: the theming is strong; the concepts are so very interesting. To me, though, the contract needed to be proofread a few more times before it was executed. I do not blame the writing because there are chapters that flow smoothly, chapters that felt ironed out, even slick. For the most part, though the small errors in formatting and the larger choices of structure in each individual sentence made the book feel unpleasant to actually read.
Read MoreMy understanding from the history lessons of the book is that malls were intended to be “safe” replacement downtowns for white-flight suburban women, plunked down in empty fields in a vaguely cardinal direction from the nearby (and newly built) island of suburban homes—hence the “[direction] + [land type]” naming convention. The mall as a structure was isolated by what the book refers to as “moats” of highways and parking lots so that only those suburban car-havers could get there; protection from the dangerous elements of the city from which the suburbanites fled in the first place. Car supremacy & anti-black racism, the beating heart of mid-century America.
Read More“The problem with foreign oligarchs isn’t that they’re foreign, but that they’re oligarchs”
Read MoreSo if you’re trying to decide whether to read this book, the answer is definitely yes do it. If you want a direct thesis sentence to help you, here it is:
[G]lobalization, in turn, depended on key technologies devised or perfected by the U.S. military during the Second World War. These were, like synthetics, empire-killing technologies, in that they helped render colonies unnecessary. They did so by making movement easier without direct territorial control.
That’s pretty much it. I can’t summarize how we got here, because that’s the book’s job, dude. Go read it. It's fun (and also horrifying). You'll learn things (horrifying things). What else is there?
Read MoreBut let this be a reminder to myself and to you that expectations are poison for reality. The book was really good, as a whole, up until the chapter about computers, which disappointed me greatly. There is a chance it was a personal issue and not the book—I’ll admit that sometimes things just don’t stick—but even after reading and re-reading, the explanations and stories about computing felt tenuous and vague. Everything was extremely unlike the detailed and highly comprehensible chapters on, say, the typewriter, or the telegraph. If you’ve ever played a long video game and the final dungeon feels like the developers ran out of time and just plopped a bunch of enemies in a bland maze, well, this had the same vibe. It’s there because it is supposed to be there.
Read MoreIn the national arts library at the Victoria and Albert Museum I read how the cobalt quality varied throughout the Ming dynasty. The finest blue was in the mid-fifteenth century Xuande reign, while under the emperors Zhenge and Jiajing a hundred years later, porcelain-makers were using an excellent violet glaze. Meanwhile—and bear with me on the dates here—the “blue and white” from the Chenghua (late fifteenth) and Wanli (late sixteenth) reigns was virtually “gray and white,” after those emperors imposed trade sanctions against Central Asia. With the details scribbled down in my notebook I went down, with some excitement, to the Chinese gallery and tested it out. To my delight I could now tell immediately, by color alone and from a distance, when a Ming vase was probably fired. The possibilities for pretentious expertise were endless.
When I write reviews of non-fiction, I tend to excerpt the facts and strip them of their commentary. Unless the point I am reinforcing is authorial presence in the narrative or something similar. The dry banter throughout Color adds an immense value, and the above illustrates how a likable author can carry the reader through any subject. The minutia is interesting but partially irrelevant [note from 2022, I cannot believe I called it “irrelevant” when it has been my most-cited concept over the last eight years!!]; what is most fascinating is the basic concept that color and creation can be tied to history through physical production.
Read MoreMentally comparing NYU’s campus integration, where my office is currently embedded, to Columbia’s walled fortress, where I worked for a year, solidifies the vivid picture Death and Life paints during some of its pontifications:
“Big universities in cities, so far as I can see, have given no thought or imagination to the unique establishments they are. Typically they either pretend to be cloistered or countrified places, nostalgically denying their transplantation, or else they pretend to be office buildings. (Of course they are neither.)”
Read MoreStructurally, it swings between light personal anecdote and researched didacticism. Tonally, it is like talking to my dad. The author is a total square, and speaks with the casual paternalism born of white, Midwestern, upper middle-class comfort. Take, for example, the position of language regarding airline deregulation:
With some basic parameters and policies for the aviation industry set, the job seemed done.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. In fact, the government was just getting started. As bureaucracies tend to view such matters, if a few good rules are sufficient, then many more are even better. The aviation industry also became swept up in a wave of sentiment opposing free market competition in the 1930s.
I’m not sure whether the anecdotes or the history lessons taught me more, but Pull Over! was at its best when it blended the two.
Read MoreGrains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler is not a book to recommend; it cannot be skimmed. Ever. Almost to the point of being purposefully cheeky, the fascinating is muddled together with the mundane and tedious. Perhaps the author realizes that a reader will appreciate knowledge more when they must work for it.
Read MoreEven in the underworld
Old Ji still brews wine.
But Bai is not down there yet,
So who do you sell it to?
Read MoreAt no point did I ever want to stop reading, however, because each paragraph unlocks another piece of a grand mosaic that eventually leads to a more vivid mental image of current China.
Read More