Irregular Books

I already have access to magazines, newspapers, blogs and books with my laptop computer, which has wireless access and is portable, just like the Kindle. What is the Kindle bringing me that my computer can’t? Restrictions and limitations, that’s what. The Kindle is the Segway of the book world.

I have chosen to supplement the Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening with other works, most prominently Wyman’s Gardening Encyclopedia, which contains much more attention to detail, though much less vision. The two complement eachother well in their opposing approaches to the garden gate.

The problem with Lie Down With Lions is that what information there is gets lost in an unsophisticated story with shallow characters who behave in completely predictable ways. I understand that characters need to act out of their own motivation, and in such a sense should be predictable. What I can’t stand about this book, however, is that the motivation of the characters is so cartoonishly simple.

I can’t explain the sense of deja vu I have about this book other than to note that the book is itself a sort on a deja vu project. It covers the territory of a world without humanity… once again, with investigations of what would happen if, all of a sudden, human beings disappeared from the face of the Earth?

How did the book hold up to the test of time? Actually, its warnings were quite well made. Shrub was a well done documentation of Bush’s short and skimpy pre-presidential professional and political life. A string of failed businesses financed by his father’s powerful friends followed by a string of successful elections financed by the same people is what brought young Bush to the most powerful political position on the face of the Earth.

The term organic doesn’t mean small, or good to workers, or fossil-fuel-free, or healthy for animals, or non-corporate, or sustainable. Some people have presumed that organic was equivalent to such nice qualities, but such mistaken presumptions have always been inaccurate, even before the development of large organic food operations.

Read The Hero and the Outlaw as an introduction to the realm of strategy beyond the flip wisdom of market segmentation and focus groups, if you like. Just don’t believe the hype presented by the authors, who would like you to believe that the archetypes are as deep as marketing analysis can get.

The Audubon Society has done as good a job as anyone could with such an abbreviated format. Limitations aside, this is a pretty thick little book, and it covers a huge number of fungal species, from the many-headed slime to the aromatic milky, from the big laughing gym to the dryad’s saddle. If you’re curious about a mysterious growth out by your back stoop, you’ve got a chance of finding it between the covers of this field guide, but then again, you’re just as likely not to.

Intelligent Design ideas are motivated by the terror that God might not exist after all. This terror is reasonable if one has been raised to depend on the absolute truth of a single book such as the Bible. The trouble many Christians still have with evolution is that it shows that belief God and all the other supernatural characters of the Bible just isn’t necessary.

Marketing for Dummies, if that’s what you think of yourself, is suited exactly for you. If you’re not a dummy, you can do better.