J.D. Salinger, whose death was announced Thursday, is remembered in the post below, along with historian Howard Zinn, who also died this week. This top cover of The Catcher in the Rye is the famous blank one Salinger insisted on, and of the edition I first read. Salinger didn't want an illustration to interfere with how the reader imagined Holden Caulfied, and he was right. When I first saw the cover on an earlier edition (bottom photo) that my friend Mike brought on a high school debate trip, I was shocked. That wasn't my Holden. Now I have paperbacks with both of these covers. Salon has a slide show of its many other covers--though I haven't been able to get it to work myself, here's the link.

J.D. Salinger, Howard Zinn

Update: Here's a really neat little story about Salinger's life in Cornish, New Hampshire.

J.D. Salinger is dead at the age of 91. I discovered Salinger at the same time of life as most, although when I did--in the early 1960s--it was more subversive (especially for a Catholic school boy) and yet more of the times, since Salinger was still publishing then. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1961. I was blown away by The Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger's voice (like Vonnegut's would later) took over any writing I tried. It was just something I had to work through and assimilate. But Salinger changed more than my writing--he changed how his own generation wrote (John Updike, Philip Roth included) and following generations as well.

For me his Nine Stories and his two Glass family books were in their own way even more mind-blowing. I can vividly remember finishing "Teddy" as I was walking fast up Hamilton Avenue in my hometown, too excited to sit or even stand still. This story and some of his other stories were my first introduction to Zen and other non-standard philosophies. I remember in high school getting a book of the Stoic Epictetus out of a college library, through the sister of a friend, because of Salinger.

And in high school and my first years of college I would check every issue of the New Yorker, hoping for a new story by John Updike (a reasonable hope) or--wonder of wonders--J.D. Salinger. And one night in 1965, wonder of wonders, there was one: the final Glass story and the final story of any kind Salinger published in his lifetime. I was in a bus station--I don't remember why--but I do remember reading it while sitting in the waiting room very consciously of there being an attractive young woman (older than me, however) on each side. But even that couldn't keep me from being absorbed in the story. The short stories, Franny and Zooey, were reading revelations.

For years afterwards I would wonder what Salinger was writing, and when we would see it, the literary equivalent of the Fatima letter good Catholics waited for the Pope to read. Salinger was not just a recluse but fierce in defending his silence and any use of his work. Now, depending on what his heirs and literary executors do (and they're already active, having made the announcement of his death), we may be in for a flood. No one knows how many new novels and stories there are, or what they might be like, or if there are none intact. It's hard to believe, after all these years, that they could be as revelatory. But Salinger may surprise us again.

There's also the distinct possibility of new collections of previously uncollected published work, and the less attractive possibility of movies and TV shows based on his work (there must be producers tonight already rabid for the rights to "Catcher") and various versions of Salinger's life. (The basic accuracy of a book about him by one of his children was challenged by his other child.)

The day before Salinger's death was announced, we learned of the death of Howard Zinn, whose A People's History of the United States not only made him a campus hero, it changed how the history of this country is written. I heard Zinn speak twice--the first time in the 60s, to a small group of beleagued draft-age students about the Vietnam War, the second time in the decade past, to a gymnasium filled with students--the largest crowd I've ever seen on the Humboldt State campus. I have a favorite Zinn passage--an eloquent and profound one-- by which I will always remember him. I posted it on another blog here. May these flawed men whose work changed our lives now rest in peace.

These provocative essays by Paul Chaat Smith on American Indians in contemporary culture, reviewed below.

Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong
Paul Chaat Smith
University of Minnesota Press 189 pages

Paul Chaat Smith is an enrolled Comanche, veteran of the American Indian Movement in the 60s and 70s, and now an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. His main interest is contemporary artists, and many of the essays in this volume were originally linked to particular exhibitions—though the subjects range well beyond art. As for what the title means, “it’s a book title, folks, not to be taken literally,” he writes. “Of course I don’t mean everything. Just Most Things. And the You really means We, as in all of Us.” So this book should be of interest to Native readers as well as non-Natives.

Smith has a fluid style, contemporary and anecdotal as well as incisive, so these pieces are easy to read. He’s big on irony (“Alas, it’s practically the only thing I know”) so there’s edgy humor. This is a collection, so his opinions, observations and bits of autobiography are repeated, though in different ways. That works pretty well: you won’t forget what he really thinks about Dances With Wolves or his AIM experiences. Among the fascinating topics he takes on several times is the late 19th and early 20th century transition, when American Natives lost the last of their land, with some joining the Wild West show and all becoming defined by the movies, including a very early epic about the massacre at Wounded Knee, starring actual participants on both sides. (The soldiers were a little worried that the Indians were going to show up for the battle scene with loaded rifles.)

He can be provocative: “Generally speaking, white people who are interested in Indians are not very bright.” He worries that Indians have bought into a limiting self-image. He’s more interested in conceptual art and the installation art of James Luna, for example, who plays with traditional forms and the contemporary world, to interrogate common images and self-images of Indians today. Although Smith writes with intimate honesty about the National Museum of the American Indian, he wonders when contemporary Indian artists will see their work exhibited alongside other contemporary art.

He’s not advocating assimilation either. He argues that Indian peoples have always absorbed change into their cultures. His basic message for all might be this: “Good intentions aren’t enough; our circumstances require more critical thinking and less passion, guilt and victimization.”

Even with my limited experience, I am still often surprised at the simplistic views many otherwise intelligent non-Natives have of Native peoples. Non-Native readers who've had some authentic acquaintance with Native neighbors are more likely to appreciate this sophisticated treatment. Probably Native readers will find it intriguing. Not everyone is going to agree with Smith’s views, but they should start some interesting arguments.

Not Forgot: Remembrances of writers who died in the past decade by other writers here in the Guardian. Authors we lost in 2009 include (pictured): J.G. Ballard, John Updike, influential anthropologist Edward T. Hall, poet and memorist Jim Carroll, science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer, novelist Frank McCourt and Arne Naess, co-author of the paradigm-shifting Deep Ecology.

Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle is one of two excellent books on technology that should make fine gifts for the tech-minded reader. Reviewed in post below.

Tech Gift Book # 1
Simulation and Its Discontents
by Sherry Turkle
The MIT Press 217 pages

Daily life is being reshaped so rapidly and extensively by quickly pervasive new technologies that experienced perspective is correspondingly crucial. With The Second Self in 1984, Sherry Turkle established herself as a trenchant observer and analyst of the personal computer’s effects on people, and perhaps more importantly, as a deft writer on the subject. In this new book, she examines how professionals in several fields interact with computer simulation, suggesting the effects on all our lives. For as we’ve seen with cell phones and related applications, evaluating their effects is an afterthought at best. “The more powerful our tools become,” she writes, “the harder it is to imagine the world without them.”

Turkle tips her psychology background with the title, a nod to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. She quotes architect Louis Kahn’s question—“what does a brick want?” (with its echo of Freud’s “What do women want?”) and adapts it to all the fields she studies, and to focus the overall question: what does simulation want? And what do we want?

As a new faculty member at MIT in the 1980s, Turkle surveyed student and faculty reactions to the increasing use of computers in academic and professional settings. Twenty years later (finishing in 2005), for another ethnographic study she went back to the architects, engineers, biologists, chemists and physicists in the same firms and departments. In this book, she presents findings from both studies, highlighting their contrasts but also the developing themes.

The central theme is the most obvious and most profound: the worry over losing a sense of reality while being seduced by simulations. It was a worry at MIT as early as the first pocket calculators: without the visual reference of slide rules, students were making what seemed like small mistakes—a single digit-- but they were huge errors in order of magnitude. Similarly, simulations hide their own errors. The first simulations of crystals growing were mesmerizing, and also wrong. Simulations express biases in their code, their structure: an early game called Sim City (players planned and built a city) embedded economic theories associated with Milton Friedman, so that taxes for social purposes were always bad.

In the 1980s, Turkle found faculty insisting that students learn the programming to understand the assumptions of the simulations they used. By 2005, few were doing so. A generation has grown up with computer simulations, and the fear is that they can no longer detect errors because they have little experience with the reality being simulated. (Interestingly, Turkle found cases in which older faculty were pushing simulation programs but being resisted by younger students, who wanted more hands-on experience.)

Architects find that simulated designs look so “finished” that it's hard to change them, even though they are preliminary. Builders weren’t checking computer designs, assuming they were correct. But the basic fact of programming still pertains: garbage in, garbage out. Computers can be wrong, based on wrong assumptions and biases, and following programming steps that don’t end up reflecting reality (which is usually more complex.)

Turkle’s study is 100 pages of this book. The rest is comprised of case studies, including two that are especially fascinating: William Clancey’s study of NASA scientists and their relationships to the Mars rovers, and Stefan Helmreich’s description of high tech deep ocean explorers, about to be made obsolete by technology that doesn’t require human presence.

Another good bet for the Techie on your gift list: The Best Technology Writing 2009, reviewed below.

Tech Gift Book # 2
The Best Technology Writing 2009
edited by Steven Johnson
Yale University Press 222 Pages

Like a lot of writing on technology in the past couple of decades, Steven Johnson makes a good point and then overreaches. In his introduction to these pieces from magazines (Wired, Discover, Atlantic, Technology Review, New Yorker) and web sites, he points out that most of them are about the present, while tech writing has been habitually about wonders to come. This leads him to dismiss thoughts of the future entirely, which misses the point: the introduction of so much new technology so quickly requires attempts to understand its real world meaning, if we’re to have any control over the future at all.

He does a fine job selecting the writing in this volume, though. There’s absorbing reporting, like Dana Goodyear on the cell phone novel phenomenon among adolescent girls in Japan (leading to a lucrative new category in traditional book publishing there), and Joshua Davis on the guy who discovered a fatal flaw in the Internet. New tech roles in the 2008 election are evaluated in pieces on the Obama campaign and Nate Silver’s approach to polling, and Andrew Sullivan writes a deft if somewhat obsolete essay on blogging. Dalton Conley’s brief look at “time and money in the information age” yields unsurprising but quantified conclusions: because of new tech, top wage earners are working more, and there’s greater income disparity between the middle and the top.

The evaluative essays cover the usual suspects with mixed results. Nicholas Carr’s “yes, but,” discover-a- trend-by-interviewing-yourself piece on how the Internet makes him impatient with “deep reading” is familiar (and appropriately followed by an Onion expose, “Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book.”) Clive Thompson’s similarly first person analysis of the “digital intimacy” enforced by Facebook and Twitter (“what’s it like to never lose touch with anyone?”) is thought-provoking and sensitive to this new phenomenon.

Sharon Weinberger analyzes the effects on privacy of GPS and Google Earth, while Dan Hill’s almost surreal narrative of pervasive surveillance is classically chilling. As in the Turkle book, Sim City's cultural, economic and political assumptions hidden from players are mentioned, as Luke O’Brien writes about a new game by the same designer. This time, "Spore" applies a brand of Intelligent Design to biological evolution.

The book drifts off with some familiar natterings by Wired’s “Senior Maverick” Kevin Kelley, and Clay Shirky’s call for a mouse-driven future, in which he misunderstands the nature and importance of story so completely that he resurrects my fears about what the virtual world can carelessly destroy. But on the whole this is a very useful book, and it’s a paperback, too.

Blog Attack

This blog has been under attack by mass comments in the Chinese language. For the time being, I'm restricting comments and have enabled comment moderation, which means I see the comments before they are posted. If this doesn't help, I'll be forced to turn them off completely. Update: I've lifted restrictions on who can comment, but I'm keeping comment moderation, which means I see comments before they appear here, and can decide whether or not to let them appear.

So please continue to comment, and if you're comments don't show up right away, this is why. Sorry, because even though I don't get a lot of comments, I value the ones I do get.

A famous French linguist looks into the nuances and ramifications of the death and life of languages, and the cultures that they express, noted in post below.

On the Death and Life of Languages

By Claude Hagege
Yale University Press 334 pages

An average of 25 human languages disappear each year. Of the unknown number of languages that once existed, only five thousand remain, and half of them may be gone by the end of the century. That may even be a conservative guess.

French linguist Claude Hagege looks at the history of languages and their relationship to cultures. When cultures disappear, so do their languages, and that's been true in Europe as well as in Africa and North America, where the death of thousands of languages embedded in Native American cultures continues today, though there are concerted efforts to preserve and revive their use.

This is a scholarly, detailed and nuanced view of the subject that's of more than historical relevance. Hagege's last chapter involves the threat to national languages by the Internet. Are languages destined to die when cultural boundaries break and become part of larger cultures? Should this even be mourned, or are there valuable points of view embedded in languages that larger societies need? There are writers on Native American languages who make convincing cases that this is true. Though this book may be of primary interest to linguistic scholars and social historians, it does raise larger questions and contributes a knowledge base to begin to address them.

A new annotated edition of Thoreau's The Maine Woods is one of the books concerning nature and the environment informally evaluated for holiday gift-giving potential, in the post below.

Gift Books: Nature and Environment

Some books I've seen, evaluated for gift-giving potential:

On the literary side, The Maine Woods by H.D. Thoreau has been reissued, annotated by Jeffrey S. Cramer (Yale University Press.) Like Cramer's 2007 annotated selection from Thoreau's journals (I to Myself, also Yale) and perhaps his edition of Walden (which I haven't seen), this is comfortably large-sized book that presents the text in two center columns of facing pages, with lots of white space and annotations in columns on both sides, of equal size. So essentially the facing pages are divided into four columns, with the text in the center two. This format may appeal to some people but it doesn't appeal to me. The text feels squeezed, and I find it hard to read. It's puzzling as well, because a lot of pages have only one or two annotations, and a lot of white space. There are no illustrations. Of course, these matters of format may not matter to hardcore Thoreau fans.

Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner (Yale) is an attractive and useful book, though it is about how to read poetry more than about the relationship of poetry to nature. But it does discuss that as well. It's nicely illustrated, and the poems alone are worth the price of admission. More here.

Water edited by John Knechtel (MIT Press/ Alphabet City) is an eclectic and perhaps eccentric collection of pieces on the subject of water, with some art, some science and a lot of urban planning. The book is about as tall as a paperback and a bit wider. There are a lot of illustrations, of varying quality and interest--some of them are really eccentric. If you or your gift recipient is a fan of Alphabet City or books similar to this published by MIT, this one may interest you. It does nothing for me.

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka by Adele Barker (Beacon Press) is a pretty straightforward account concerning a part of the world where a lot has been going on but little has been reported. This book is for someone motivated to know more about Sri Lanka. The travelogue writing can be oddly revelatory: "We ate on a beach that the police assured us had been de-mined..." The author makes brave attempts to understand the country's conflicts from the various cultural perspectives in play. She also describes the effects of the 2004 tsunami, which happened at Christmastime. However, this book is available only for preorder for the holidays, unless your bookstore gets early copies. It's officially available Jan. 1.

Green Intelligence by John Wargo (Yale) is an expose of the long-term effects of chemicals, from the effects of nuclear bomb testing to industrial and consumer chemicals in the environment that the author believes are hidden causes of some of the childhood disabilities and epidemics that characterize our times (obesity, asthma, learning and developmental problems) as well as dementia in the elderly. So it's not a cheerful holiday book by any means, but there may be someone on your list who would like to--or might need to--read it.

Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future by Saleem H. Ali (Yale) offers a carefully worked out, big picture view, serving an approach to future policy. It links confronting poverty to dealing with environmental problems, in an argument with a philosophical point of view about human nature as reflected in society. This book is for someone who wants to grapple with big ideas, argue with the author and possibly come away convinced that this is a new and useful way to see the interlocking problems that threaten the future.

While the easy choice for a Climate Crisis book would have to be Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore (Rodale Press), I'm still a big fan of Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley by Stephan Faris (Henry Holt). While Gore's book is about what we can do in the present to save the future, Faris is a journalist who covers what is happening right now, which more than suggests what is likely to happen in the future. There's a concrete quality about his reporting that can illuminate the topic for those who aren't quite sure what it's really all about, plus the quality of his writing keeps you reading. More here.

Finally, here are a few books I'd put on my Wish List--books I've read something about but haven't seen myself: James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin (Princeton University Press) sounds fascinating and useful, as described by Tim Flannery in this review. Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse by David Orr (Oxford University Press), Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology by Mark V. Barrow, Jr. (University of Chicago Press), Seasick: Ocean Change and Extinction of Life on Earth by Alanna Mitchell (Chicago), Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand (Viking), look intruiging. None too cheerful, but if this season is about heritage and the human future, then for the right readers these can be appropriate choices.

The Atmosphere of Heaven is one of a trio of related books that combine biography and cultural history to be considered for gifts this year, described in the post below.

Gift Books: People in History

They're a combination of biography and cultural history, and all the more fascinating for that. Moreover, read in sequence they have a lot to say about the nineteenth century, particularly in England. All three deal with science and scientists, while two relate directly to the arts and politics of the day.

The most obvious pairing begins with The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiment of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius by Mike Jay (Yale.) This is a detailed and fascinating look at the earlier part of the century, when the effects of the French Revolution were shaking up English politics and culture. Though centered on the relatively (and unjustly) unknown Thomas Beddoes, the cast of characters includes Coleridge, James Watt, Thomas Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather. Beddoes, Darwin and several others were polymathic Renaissance men by today's standards, and they deeply influenced the arts as well as sciences.

Author Jay quotes Darwin writing that Beddoes epitomized this era's "age of wonders." The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon) by Richard Holmes more or less takes up where Jay leaves off historically, following the mid 19th century Romantic poets (especially Shelley) and their connections with the science of their day, reflected in their work (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, not the least.) Holmes is the better known and more reviewed book. The two make a fine pair.

The scientific figure who tends to focus the mid 19th century for today is of course Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection remains arguably the most consequential theory even in the 21st century so far. There were lots of books on Darwin this year, the 200th anniversary of his birth, but I particularly liked The Young Charles Darwin by Keith Thompson (Yale) for its clarity about a part of Darwin's life that hasn't been widely examined. It provides a more focused look on the science of the day.

All three books suggest what an adventure it was to be involved in the arts and sciences then, with opportunities for insights and achievement as new discoveries cascaded, science was changing rapidly and was defining itself. These books suggest what was gained but also what was lost now that science and art are so separated, and it is so much more difficult for anyone to have any comprehensive sense of significiant discoveries, how they relate, and what they mean in the larger sense.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
Jean Decenty & William Ickes, editors
The MIT Press 255 pages

Why We Cooperate
Michael Tomasello with Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms & Elizabeth Spelke
Boston Review/Yale University Press 206 pages

Science has its own dogmas. Sometimes the dogma is a powerful prevailing theory with a superstar and institutionally well-placed adherents, or more often a set of biases based on a longstanding theory that determines how science is organized and done.

Lately, the prevailing dogmas of neo-Darwinian evolution that continued the bias towards the "struggle for survival" of individual organisms has been challenged in a number of life sciences. The growing power of neuroscience is beginning to shake things up as well. The outcome so far is an impressive if still fairly primitive movement towards recognizing what we call empathy, altruism and cooperation that have long been observed, though those observations were often ignored or discounted.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy collects reports on multidisciplinary research with neuroscience heavily in the mix, as these sciences (including various branches of psychology research) to some extent reorganize themselves. These reports generally support the existence of empathy, often through neurological research, for example following the discovery of "mirror" neurons.

Why We Cooperate presents a report by evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello on his research with chimps and human children, and a series of responses by another anthropologist, two psychologists and a professor of logic and philosophy. Tomasello's basic finding is that altruism and the urge to cooperate exist naturally--not just culturally.

Both of these books seem to be part of a movement--a slow or a fast one, depending on your point of view--away from a strictly individualistic (and perhaps baldly genetic) bias towards recognition of the importance and function of the social in survival.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy is more technical, a bit more densely written though still accessible to the careful reader. However it does appear to be more of an insider challenge, and a resource for scientists and science students. This intent is reflected in the physical book--sturdy binding, slick paper, it's built to last on the office shelf and be passed along through a few generations of students. It is an impressively useful volume, readable in its efficient prose and relatively modest length.

Why We Cooperate is even more accessible to the general reader, and clearly is meant to be. As a book, it is small and handy, about the size of a quality paperback but a sturdy and handsome hardcover. It's the kind of book you want to carry around. The prose within it answers this invitation--from Tomasello's essay to the responses, it's close to conversational, though it's a logical and informed conversation.

Readers will find entering that conversation inviting, or at least this one did. There is some eye-opening research presented in both these volumes, though the limitations of such research are also exposed. Of all the motivations for children cooperating in games, for example, I didn't detect much awareness that they are doing it because it's fun. A game without rules everyone cooperates in maintaining just isn't fun. Lots of animals play. Even scientists. Maybe they could augment their laboratory experiments by playing with children, and later, reading some literature. Lots of science I read in this field seems to be painstakingly and awkwardly coming to conclusions that storytellers came to long ago, and then announcing it timidly, as it is might be received as heresy.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy will interest students of neuroscience and psychology. It's also one of those landmark books that's apt to become a kind of classic in the field, until (and if) the next steps are taken. Why We Cooperate is for an intelligent but at least somewhat wider readership, as well as those in fields of psychology, evolution and child development. Together they are part of a dogma-slaying new paradigm with far-reaching implications for how humans think about themselves and their roles in the world.

An O'Keeffe Christmas? A new book on Georgia O'Keeffe is a top contender for art gift book of the season. See post below. The painting is The Red Hills with Sun (1927.)

Georgia O'Keeffe Abstractions
Barbara Haskell, editor
Yale University Press 246 pages

This coffee table sized book is officially the catalog of an exhibition of this name, cosponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. Gorgeous color illustrations of familiar and less well known but often even more spectacular works provides only one reason for O'Keeffe fans to want this book. Edited by Barbara Haskell with her usual rigor and taste, and with essays by Haskell (one of my favorite writers on art) as well as Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bruce Robertson and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, it tells a compelling story of O'Keeffe's development as an artist within the context of her times.

For the idea of abstraction in art was just blossoming as O'Keeffe was discovering it, and this young woman from the hinterlands pushed it further in some respects than more vocal and renowned artists of the world's art capitals. Haskell's opening essay tells this compelling story, which also defines O'Keeffe's formal contribution: "As would often happen over the course of her career, a visual image, sound, or experience would trigger intangible, inexplicable emotions, which she would try to clarify for herself through shape and color."

This volume also includes photos of O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, including the nudes. What might seem at first cynical glance as an attention-getting addendum is justified by the importance of these photos to O'Keeffe's own work, as she followed them through the process, learning about creating and focusing images with cropping, and by studying the forms in the photos themselves. She later had to downplay these photos, and her relationship with Stieglitz, to shift her image to an American artist rather than a woman artist.

This book is delightful in every detail. Its references are orderly and informative, and the essays are user-friendly (the pictures are most often very near the text discussing or referring to them.) Its illustrations are sumptuous, and both words and pictures tell an absorbing story, with wonderful use of O'Keeffe's letters. So it is the perfect gift book for both the casual and serious O'Keeffe admirer, as well as for those interested in twentieth century art and American art.

Yale Press has also recently published another O'Keeffe book which I haven't seen: Dove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence.

The latest novel by Richard Powers, generously reviewed below.