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A Winter’s Tale ::
I’m reminded of the thing Italo Calvino said: “Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there.” A Winter’s Tale seems to be Mark Helprin’s attempt to mythologize the world, the time we live in. As this thing, which I will deem “human society,” progress ever forward, as our states and our economies become more consolidated and more powerful, and as we see what seems to be more chaos, more threats to our vitality, we lose, I think, our sense of meaning, our sense of purpose, and individually we become more disenfranchise and isolated from the system that’s been created. This just adds to the the chaos, to the depravity we witness. With this magical, mythological tale of superhuman characters living lives that span a hundred years to build bridges and to protect children and to fall in love with each other, I can see Helprin creating a story he hopes to become a myth. And he does it convincingly. Though I do not like all aspects of his story, I can say that it is beautifully written and that we do, in fact, need that myth that he is trying to create.
One L ::
One L is Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law. With his signature sense of drama and sensitivity to human emotion, Turow shows the tumultuous, challenging, and at times extreme nature of Law School. It revealed some emotional truth about his experience, which I thought was important to see as I start thinking more seriously about getting a JD myself.
Revolting Librarians ::
This book, which has essays, poems, and stories written by roughly forty librarians working at the beginning of the 1970’s, provides a snapshot of the political and social landscape that those were facing at that time. Though some conditions have changed since this books was written -- for example, there are more technological and copyright issues now -- I think the fundamental problems that librarians are facing today are very similar to the ones they were facing back then. Were it not for their their activism and their sense of social responsibility (this book is rife with that sentiment), those issues -- which are incredibly important but no one pays much attention to -- would have disappeared long ago.
The Laws of Our Fathers ::
Drawing on drama of the courtroom, which has proven again and again to be an inexhaustible well of stories revealing some fundamental truth about who we are, Scott Turow explores how a group of baby boomers and their children struggle through a court case involving a state senator, two gang members, a deviant parole officer, and one murdered mother. What started out to be a clear case of a jealous, faltering son plotting to murder his massively incomprehensibly successful father turns out to be a multi-layered tale of betrayal, of nearly botched pseudo-politically-motivated crimes, and sense of political idealism that defined politics in the 1960’s and, for better or worse, has endured three decades and must be reinterpreted by all of the characters three decades later. The Laws of Our Fathers is incredibly gripping and thought-provoking. I can’t help but think of it as a version of Pynchon’s Vineland that you can actually read.
Primary Colors ::
Primary Colors tells the story of Governor Jack Stanton, who is running for the Presidency. But he has many hurdles before him: there’s the fact that he’s from an unknown Southern state (so unknown Klein doesn’t even mention it); that he has a wing-nut group of advisors, some of whom seem to only narrowly avoid being sued for sexual harassment. Then there are his own sexual indiscretions, which we are reminded of every thirty pages or so, when a new woman comes forward saying that she’d had some sort of fling with Stanton. On the one hand I am disgusted with Stanton, and want to see him pay for all the terrible things he has done in his life. But then on the other, when he has a shining moment and moves a crowd into believing in themselves again, I want to see him, or some real manifestation of him, run for office.
The Future of Ideas ::
In the past I’ve agreed with pretty much everything Lessig has said about the nature of law and economics on the Internet, so getting me to buy into what he was saying in The Future of Ideas was not very hard at all. But of course, the book can also stand on its own merits. Here’s a rundown of how the book works:
The Internet started out being very open and free. It’s open nature spurred a massive, wave of fast-paced economic, technological, and cultural growth, which we saw throughout most of the 1990’s. But now we see the landscape of the Internet changing. Both through politics (such as Copyright law and the DMCA), and through the architecture of the Internet (control of the software, hardware, and content that define it) we are starting to see a new Internet, which is very much controlled. That control is invariably works in favor of already-established, massive (many times monopolistic) corporations, who exert that control remain protected from the open market. This condition is bad, Lessig argues, not only for business but for democracy as well.
One of the central ideas of The Future of Ideas is that control of the Internet defies the idea of Right vs. Left. This is not an issue of Conservatives protecting large corporations and rich people from the dangers of new business and normal people or Liberals trying to set up massive regulations to protect new (less effective) businesses and normal people from mighty corporations. Instead, this book argues that control of the Internet is an issue of old vs. new. The old, already-in-control corporations who regulate the Internet wind up squelching out competition and slowing the Internet’s growth, which is bad, not only for businesses and markets, but for freedom as well.
To stop this condition of perfect control, Lessig demands that we who use the Internet maintain a Commons, a haven of free information from which all people obtain knowledge and come up with new ideas. That freedom has been critical to the successes we have seen throughout history and losing that freedom means that we lose the opportunity to evolve and grow as a society.
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