Category Archives: Books

The Escapist

Men of TomorrowIt’s fuckin’ gloomy around here. Everyone’s pissed off or depressed or angry or sulking. To get a little respite, I’m retreating to the fantasia of the comic book world with Gerard Jones’ “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.” I picked it up over the weekend while browsing the aisles at my local bookstore, stocking up on fodder for my culturally elitist reading list (my duty, as a citizen of a blue state). I’ve never really left behind the familiar comfort of comic books, in part because they almost bring me back to the less prickly reality of childhood, but these days I think I enjoy the idea of them more than anything; I’d rather read about comic books than actually read them.

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Design for Comedy

America (The Book)The early word is that there’s a Jon Stewart backlash imminent. The fake news anchor’s recent and notorious Crossfire appearance — and the mention of his name and influence in seemingly every article published anywhere about the character of this year’s electorate — has brought us, as a society, ever closer to the day when the man and his television show are officially played out. That will be a shame, but in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the unexpected gift that my girlfriend picked up for me over the weekend: my very own copy “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction,” the current Amazon number one bestseller from the producers of The Daily Show.

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Old Drawings of New York

This Is New YorkI found a copy of M. Sasek’s wonderful, recently reissued book “This Is New York” while browsing for holiday gifts in the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. Its pages exude an immediately gratifying warmth as soon as they’re opened; the illustrations, completed over forty years ago, are evocative of the urban, sophisticated-primitive style of drawing that dominated commercial art in the late 1950s, and which owed more than just a passing debt to the work of Ben Shahn. Though Sasek’s drawings depict a New York nearly a century out of date and are rounded out with more than a heaping teaspoon of naivete, they still communicate the precise pitch and tone of Manhattan᾿s noisy, cantankerous character. There’s no mistaking the sense of limitless possibility in these drawings for any other city, which makes this reprint seem remarkably current.

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The Wandering Dollar

A Brief LifeHere’s how impulse shopping helps crowd-pleasing consumer choices trump more high-minded pursuits like literature: my girlfriend was looking for a copy of Juan Carlos Onetti’s “A Brief Life,” which has been impossible for her to find in town. While checking my Hotmail account (which I almost never check), I came across some spam from Alibris, an online clearing house for used book retailers. I bought a book from them once about four years ago, and they’ve been faithfully sending me junk mail ever since.

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Further Reading

Some BooksMy free time has been whittled down to next to nothing, but I still, somewhat wistfully, keep a list of books I’d like to read and movies I’d like to watch. In fact, I’ve been fantasizing of a week-long break away from everything and spent reading my way through a shelf of books, catching up on a stack of New Yorker issues, and watching a ton of movies. This is sad, because several years ago, I was reading two books a month. That was when I first to New York, and I was commuting into the city from Westchester. If nothing else, I miss that interminable daily ride on the Metro North for all the reading time it used to afford.

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Home-plate Economics

MoneyballJust added to my Amazon.com shopping cart: Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” an up-close look at the Oakland Athletics and GM Billy Beane’s use of sophisticated statistical analysis to build a remarkably successful team from one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball. This unorthodox method, which Lewis likens to value equity investing, is one of the most interesting ongoing stories in professional sports and has the potential to dramatically remake the game. Having read his past works, I’m convinced that Lewis is one of the most talented non-fiction storytellers working today, and I’m excited to see him tackle this story.

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Marks, Ropers and Insidemen

The Big ConRight now, I’m halfway through reading “The Big Con,” originally published in 1940, and a major source of inspiration for movies like “The Sting” and, reportedly, the playwright, screenwriter and director David Mamet. The book’s author, David Maurer, was a linguist, but his investigation of the lingo of con men led him to write this engrossing account of marks, ropers, insidemen and the bizarro reality of the big confidence games. It reads like part historical account, part how-to manual,and part hard-boiled fiction.

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Computer Imaging

Computers: An Illustrated HistoryGerman art book publisher Taschen has released what I sheepishly admit is probably the perfect book for me: “Computers, An Illustrated History.” The book is a somewhat perfunctory historical account of the evolution of big iron mainframes and unexpectedly powerful ‘micro-computers’ and PCs, but probably no one should consider it authoritative. Rather, its true value is as a quietly lavish compendium of 50+ years of computer photographs, mostly marketing shots of hardware. Nostalgiac kitsch aside, this is a remarkable compilation of coolly alluring imagery, some of which is beautiful, and some of which is frightening — but most all of which seems to promise a kind of precision-controlled, modernistic utopia, if only humans would give themselves over to the digital world.

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