My Blog

Steve Jobs, by Walter Issacson

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:50:33 -0600

Steve Jobs was a mercurial, obstreperous, and difficult man. Steve Jobs had some serious eating disorders, and was fairly neurotic about food. Steve Jobs was also a visionary genius, who remade at least 5 industries before he died in 2011 at the age of 55.

Walter Issacson has done a masterful job of capturing all of these facets in wonderful detail. From his adoption by working class people in California, though his counterculture days of living on an apple orchard commune in Oregon, his time at Reed College in Portland, the meeting with and development of the original Apple and Apple II with Woz... just everything is dealt with, in a detail that Jobs guarded strenuously while he was alive.

Those who want to know Steve Jobs owe it to themselves to read this biography.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, by Simon Garfield

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:31:00 -0600

This was a fun book to read, and it had some interesting stories to tell about the development of certain typefaces, like Gill Sans, Papyrus, and Helvetica.

Having said that, though, I have to say that it’s also the most subjectively opinionated piece of nonfiction that I’ve read in a long time. “Friends don’t let friends use Comic Sans,” is one opinion the author quotes, and seems to share, even though you can find Comic Sans in a wide variety of different contexts.

Still, the author knows that he’s being opinionated, and that doesn’t seem to mind whether you agree with him or not. He also surveys the history of the development of different typefaces, from the invention of Guttenburg’s blackface type to the modern sans serif fonts. His book is also delightfully well illustrated, not just with different typeface examples, but with line drawings from various publications on printing that illustrate various expressions we have for type; for example, where we get the words uppercase and lowercase.

Written in a breezy style that is informed without being condescending or overly academic, this book went by quickly, and left me with a greater appreciation for the job of a good type designer - which is not to get noticed.

A School For My Village by Twesigye Jackson Kaguri

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:32:20 -0500

Twesigye Jackson Kaguri grew up in southwestern Uganda, in the beautiful but impoverished and remote town of Nyakagyezi. He was stubborn enough - and smart enough - to graduate from Makerere University in Uganda, and went on to graduate school at Columbia in the US.

But he never lost his love for, and concern for, his home village and his people. As the HIV/AIDS epidemic spread through Uganda, bolstered by ignorance and superstition (one supposed “cure” for men infected with AIDS was to have sex with a virgin), an entire generation of Ugandan children, orphaned by the disease, were in danger of being lost to a life of ignorance and continued poverty. Kaguri refused to let that happen, and began what is now known as the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School - where children who have lost at least one parent to the disease are given free clothes, textbooks, instruction, and two meals a day.

This book narrates both the upbringing that Kaguri received in Nyakagyezi, interwoven with the story of how he came to build the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School. It is a story of personal vision, persistence, and the determination to make a difference in the lives of “the least of these.”

What to help? Want to be a part of this government-free popular movement to help AIDS orphans and their grandmothers help themselves? Here’s where you go.

Justine, by Lawrence Durrell

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:44:41 -0500

I first read Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet - of which Justine is the first volume - back when I was a senior in college, some 35 years ago. I remembered it as being the best novel I’d ever read, though it took me over 150 pages in the first book to really become engaged. This time, I was completely engaged within the first 20 pages, if not by the characters, by the simply luminous quality of the writing.

Justine recounts the interactions of the as-yet unnamed narrator with a circle of Alexandrians - both natives and those from other places in Europe and the Middle East - that have made the city their home. Their interactions, intellectual and passionate, with one another, form the fabric of the narrative, with Alexandria - its street scenes, cafés, homes, and landmarks - forming the backcloth, invoked like another character in the story.

Justine is just the beginning. Any suppositions you might have about the characters and their relations at the end of the book will be completely overturned by the time you’re half way through the second volume, Balthazar.

Durrell wrote this quartet of novels based on what he called an “Einsteinian” model, with the first three representing the dimensions of spatial separation, while the fourth novel takes place at a much later point in time.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:47:32 -0500

Shadow gets out of prison a few days earlier than he’d expected, but only because his wife, Laura, has been killed in a car accident. Without direction, he is befriended - if that’s the right word - by a confidence man named Wednesday, who offers him a job as his bodyguard. We come to learn as the story progresses, that Wednesday is the Norse all-father Odin.

It turns out that emigrants to the United States brought their gods with them when they arrived, and gods and other mythological beings from all over the world - leprechauns, satyrs, sprites, nymphs, and other spirits and gods now live here among us. However, the power of these beings diminished as people’s beliefs fade, and new gods have arisen - gods of media, celebrity, drugs, and technology. The new gods are determined to exterminate the old gods, and Shadow finds himself unwittingly caught up in the battle between the old and the new gods.

A central premise of the story is that the gods exist because we believe in them - at one point in the story, a woman who we learn is the goddess Eostre says that the modern gods - the Men in Black - exist because “everyone knows they must.”

This is an amazing story, in scope and in execution. When I finished it I found myself wondering: “how, exactly, did he do that?” It’s easy to see why it won both Hugo and Nebula awards.