The Curmudgeonly Professor

I Just Discovered Lee Child's Series Featuring Jack Reacher

My trip to Costco the other day did bear some fruit as I stumbled onto the paperback titled Nothing to Lose by Lee Child. The last few years, I sort of got over my penchant for reading every new paperback in sight, plus everything else. Blogging takes up a lot of time, plus photos, plus editing every photo, plus watching Matlock, plus going to Kohl's Department Store, plus taking out the trash. So you can see I have been a busy man. However, once I read the front and back cover reviews, I decided to give Lee Child and Jack Reacher a try. The reviews include words and phrases like the following:"The coolest continuing series character now on offer" (Stephen King); "Electrifying . . . utterly addictive" (NY Times); Explosive (People); "Colossal. Earthshaking. Stupendous" (NY Times). So you can see that for Costco's discount price of $5.59, finding something that measures up to all of these accolades and is colossal, earthshaking, stupendous, electrifying, and addictive would definitely be worth trying. I am only about half through, in one sitting, and so far the book measures up to the hype. Most book reviews are "Number #1" or Stupendous, or Fantastic, but many books are actually not that well written, or are boring, or repetitious, or have reviews written by fellow authors in the same genre, or by a book reviewer in the Lightning Flats Daily Gazette. Child is a smooth writer, hooks you on page one, and keeps the tension continually rising. Moreover, the book thus far is free from potty language, an attribute apparently deemed essential by most writers any more. He does seem to have a fetish for describing each coffee cup in detail that the protagonist uses when he drinks coffee. Other than that, I'll probably finish the book by l:00 a.m. tomorrow morning and then go buy some others in this series. Much more interesting than talk shows.

David Baldacci's "The Whole Truth" Raises the Specter of Perception Management

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David Baldacci's The Whole Truth provides more than just another spine-tingling spy or espionage thriller, something that Baldacci is very, very good at writing.  The story concerns the use of a perception management firm to invent truth from pure fiction and make everyone in the world believe it almost instantaneously through electronic information transmission.  Baldacci writes in his Author's Note at the end of the story that the Department of Defense defines perception management in one of its manuals, and notes that many public relations firms now offer perception management as a service. Baldacci believes, however, that not many such firms do a very good job at perception management since doing so requires specializing in creating Big Lies.

Baldacci notes that PM people create facts and sell them as truth.  He states that many of the techniques he writes about in his story are "standard operating procedures" for these firms.

The reason why his focus on perception management is so scary is because we have a continuing battle to know what we can believe and what has been invented out of thin air.  The way we are led to think about the wars we are currently fighting, about political issues and participants, about science, about research results from experiments, about government information releases, about coverups, about lies--all of these and many more issues provide us with a cautionary tale to be careful what we believe, to be cautionary about notably biased information sources, to always, always ask "What is being left out here?"  We cannot just turn into a society of cynic disbelievers, but we must use better judgment than we sometimes have used in the recent past to take off our blinders and evaluate critically the sources, the bias, the data, and the underpinnings of the information we are fed.  We need reliable information and we need to be more critical of what other people want us to believe.

A Book to Read: The Yellow Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

Lewis Buzbee has written a charming and delightful tale about love for bookstores, books, and reading for pleasure. His "memoir, a history" titled The Yellow Lighted Bookshop (St. Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 2006) is a story about ". . . the unique experience of the bookstore--the smell and touch of books, the joy of getting lost in the deep canyons of shelves, and the silent community of readers."

Buzbee weaves the history of libraries and book publishing with many anecdotes and personal experiences from his life as a book seller and sales representative. As a lifelong reader and from the experience my wife and I had of operating our own bookstores, I could relate poignantly to many of the experiences Buzbee relates here.

Here are a few gems from the book:

• A bookseller . . . by virtue of what he sells, predicts how people will think, and changes in the way individuals think can bring about profound and long-lasting social effects. . . Because it changes what and how we think, the bookstore has always been a quietly powerful institution.  But not always to the good of the bookseller. (p. 114)
• Over the next twenty years, the customers of Printers' Computer section literally helped to create the demand for home computers, supercomputers required of government and academic research, computer and video games, virtual reality, the Internet, e-mail, and all the rest of the hard-wired software that both simplifies and confounds life today.  (p. 115)     

In reply to the criticisms that traditional books are dead, that Americans are reading far less "literature," and fewer "traditional books" than in previous decades, and that electronic media are driving people away from books, Buzbee offers the following comments:  

• In 2004, American publishers produced between 135,000 and 175,000 new titles . . . or around 411 new titles every single day.
• Books in Print currently lists nearly 4 million active titles and 1.5 million out-of-print titles. (pp. 128-129)
• Per capita . . . the United States comes in fifth, behind the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. (p. 129) 
• Books are digested, Francis Bacon reminds us, but never consumed. (p. 132) 
• Literary culture may comprise only a fraction of our society, but its role is crucial.  In the bookstore the individual can meet that culture, become part of a river of creation and imagination that has flowed without interruption for thousands of years.  The bookstore is still the place where we may engage in the free and unrestricted congress of ideas.  In the bookstore, we may be alone among others but we are connected to others.  (p. 215).   

Buzbee explains the economics of publishing, the meager rewards, typically to writers, and the economic problems of publishing  and selling books.  Events of this past week underscore the concerns of book people everywhere with the announcement of further consolidations, elimination of decades-old publishing imprints, and layoffs of some of the best editors in the business.   For true book lovers, nothing can replace the feel, heft, smell, and uncertainty that makes turning the page one of the greatest adventures of learning imaginable.  Buzbee illuminates for us the role of books and his love for reading and bookselling.  

In the author's closing comments, Buzbee notes that a new book by one of his favorite authors has arrived at the bookstore and concludes:  "Even though cash is tight, I know I'm going to buy it.  I turn and go into the store."