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Bosco Ho's Profile
Customer Reviews: 19
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Reviews Written by
Bosco Ho (San Francisco, USA)
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Peering Awkwardly over the Generation Gap, June 9, 2008
I read Jean Twenge's "Generation Me" as a broadside swipe at Howe and Strauss' theory that the rising Millenial generation will be a great civic generation. Instead Twenge argues that the Millenials, who she calls Generation Me, are a bunch of selfish narcissists, disengaged in the body politic, and will have their unrealistic expectations cruelly dashed by the real world, leading ultimately to a generation of depressed dysfunctional adults.
To lead off the bat, I don't buy Twenge's argument. Nevertheless, I found her book a fascinating assemblage of statistics, social science and anecdotes, based in large on the research that Twenge has conducted over the last few decades. Like any other social science book, the strength of the argument depends on crisp definitions of crucial ideas and in order to make her argument, Twenge has done something quite unusual - she has conflated what most other researchers consider two separate generations into one single generation. That is, she defines Generation Me as the cohort born from 1970 to 2000, a very long 30 year generation. Other researchers typically define Gen X as those born from 1968 to 1980, and the Millenials as those born from 1980 to 2000.
Twenge doesn't really give an explicit reason for defining GenMe as such except for a curt "it's clear that the GenX description is incomplete and misguided." But her very own argument later in the book would argue against her very own definition. The narcism that Twenge describes in GenMe is traced to the wholesale introduction of the self-esteem curricular in schools in 1980. This would immediately suggest that there is a generation gap born before 1980 (GenX) and after (Millenial). Indeed, reading the book, Twenge constantly admonishes the younger members for being self-absorbed, optimistic, painfully open about their problems and non-deferential to authority. She castigates the young for being completely different to her own remembered childhood in everything from movies, tatoos, music, sex, relationship to parents, scholastic attitudes and attitude towards authority.
Indeed, Twenge spends a great part of the book dispensing relationship advice to the young. It is apparent that Twenge believes that loneliness for a single person is the greatest danger to await the tender arms of the young. Her greatest fear is that the exaggerated sense of entitlement for the young will prevent them from finding a satisfying life with a partner. In short, Twenge is practically screaming out a generation gap between her and the kids she describes, even though they are supposed to be in the very same generation as herself.
So why did she define GenMe like that? The reason, I suspect, is that Twenge's argument about the nature of GenMe completely falls apart if the distinction between those born before 1980 and those born after are made clear. If read carefully, her statistics about GenMe being a generation of criminals, low civic engagment, and depression (compared to the previous Boomer generations) are only drawn from statistics about "the first third" of Generation Me. In other words, it is precisely Gen X who are disengaged with politics, commit more violent crimes, and suffer much greater rates of depression. But we already knew that.
Twenge's basic argument about the younger half of GenMe (those born after 1980) is that the self-esteem movement would lead to more narcism, more selfish behavior and disengagement with politics. The greater sense of entitlement would lead to greater disappointment when arriving in the adult world and thus lead to depression. Except this argument doesn't account for why those born in the 1970's (GenX) suffer these same effects without having been brought up under the self-esteem movement, but more importantly, her statistics don't support this argument.
If we take Twenge's own date of 1980 seriously, we have to consider those born after 1980 differently to those born before. Since Twenge uses the statistics of GenX'ers to describe the future of the Millenials, she has put the cart before the horse. In fact, she has even had to massage her own data to come up with this conclusion. If you read her own data carefully, you will find that the cohort classed as Gen X definitely has incredibly low voting participation and community service, but the next generation down shows a marked increase. Since this doesn't fit into Twenge's argument, she dismisses is the young kids being susceptible to lame "Get out the vote" campaigns, and argues that the increased community service is a forced-fed reaction to the school system. Her condensencion to the younger generation is particularly acute.
Indeed, in trying to argue that the Millenials, or younger half of GenMe is violent due to their greater sense of entitlement, she doesn't use any statistics but just cites the Columbine shootings and darkly suggests that the self-esteem movement has created an army of little Columbine killers. This is a shockingly poor argument.
Still, I found the assemblage of statistics from a broad range of areas stimulating to think through, and it clarified a lot of my thinking about the Millenial generation. Even though this book is in the end, one woman's misunderstanding of the widening generation gap between her and the next generation, the collection of statistics and analysis is well worth the effort in dissecting.
Twenge's analysis of the effects of the self-esteem movement is colored by her GenX values. All she sees is disaster lying in watch for the future generation. Self-esteem, she argues, leads to narcism. However, the one thing she misses is that the Millennial generation is an incredibly gregarious generation, from im, sms, summer camps, myspace. They are connected in a way that Gen X never was. The millennials maraud in groups as every narcissist needs a crowd. It is precisely this social aspect of mutually re-inforcing mountains of self-esteem that dampens the negative aspects of excessive self-esteem. It would be interesting to see a deeper analysis of how this group dynamic will play out in future years. One possibility is that the Millennials, when they hit the world in the coming years, will demand the best from society, whether through the voting booth, or community service, or changes in the workplace. I sincerely hope that they don't accept their lot as an army of temp workers and disposable mcjob components that has become Gen X. Instead of analyzing the Millenials through their worst tendencies, what would you see if you looked at their best?
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Beauty in the Eye of the Programmer, December 3, 2007
Beautiful Code is a unique book. It is not bound by a particular system, or programming language, or methodology. Instead, it tries to straddle the entire field of programming with the ostensible aim of exploring beauty in computer code.
What we get is a smorgasborg of essays that posits competing definitions of technical beauty in very different pieces of code. As such, the book becomes a dialectical argument between different conceptions of technical beauty. It may even serve as a rorsarch test to your sensibilities as a programmer. In the process, you may discover algorithms that are startling in their beauty and ingenuity.
Given the broad sweep of the book, the quality of the essays is somewhat of a crap-shoot. What I found more interesting was working out why I found some of the essays elegantly persuasive, whilst others, I found to be a turgid sludge to wade through. In the end, it becomes almost impossible to separate the quality of the writing from the definition of beauty defined in the essay.
Technical beauty is a very strange beast. It is different from the kind of beauty that resides in the curve of Scarlet Johanssen's lips. In physics and maths, there is a tradition of invoking beauty in certain equations. Einstein's equations for general relativity surely merits that description, as does Euler's formula. For me, technical beauty refers to that rare fusion of concision, efficiency and surprisingly deep connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
I found that the essays that I liked were the ones that focused on very specific pieces of code. These essays would carefully explain the problem that the programmer was trying to solve, articulate the constraints, and show the straightforward (and usually less elegant) alternatives. They would then go through all the blind-alleys before unveiling the final solution, which would be as surprising as it was elegant. After all, the father of the essay, Montaigne, coined the term "essai", which means attempt in french.
The essays that didn't work would try to describe how the software worked, and skip over the details. But these are technical essays, after all, and without a careful consideration of technique, all that is left is flabby writing. Surprisingly, there were quite a number of essays devoted to scientific programming, with contributions from the writers of BioPerl, Numpy, LAPACK, and the NASA Mars module. Most of these I found rather unsatisfactory, the kind of flabby essays that skipped over interesting technical details. They offered no fundamental insight to how the code was implemented other than the fact that these packages have stood the test of time. The exception was Trevor Oliphant's essay on Numpy, which showed how a powerful iterator implementation can dramatically simplify the organization of a linear algebra library.
How detailed were the techniques? In Henry S. Warren Jr's essay, he describes how one might count bits in C. It's a marvelous essay because through the description of such an elementary operation, Warren illuminates just how close to the metal one can go in a low-level language like C. At the other end of the scale, Jeffre Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, engineers at Google, describe the MapReduce algorithm, part of the secret sauce that squeezes out information from Google's gigantic parallel arrays of hard-disks and processors.
There is a the famous dictum attributed to Fred Brooks that if you know the data structure of a program, you will know how the program works. The design of the key data structure reveals the inner workings of a piece of software better than any flow-chart ever could. Greg Kroah-Hartman describes an object-oriented design right in the heart of the Linux kernel driver, written in nothing less than C. Here is found one of the scariest looking C macros that I have ever seen. In one of the most twisted pieces of logic, Kroah-Hartman argues that by not simplifying the macro (including such hand-holding as run-type checking), it keeps away people who don't know what they are doing from touching the code. That, for Kroah-Hartman, is beautiful code. Andrew Kuchling's essay explained how dictionaries are implemented in Python. In the process, I finally understood how dictionaries underpin virtually everything in Python, from objects to locally scoped variables. That's why dictionaries in Python need to be as fast as they are.
Two essays introduced me to some radically different programming techniques. Charles Petzold's essay on writing fast image filters shows how you can do custom compilation on very small pieces of code for incredible speed gains. The essay by Andreas Zeller described perhaps the strangest algorithm in the book. He was working a GNU debugger GUI front-end that got broken after the back-end debugger was upgraded to a newer version. Rather that go through each of the 10000 different patches individually by hand, Zeller came up with a perversely beautiful technique to systematically identify which patch broke the GUI front-end.
Some of the essays flew straight over my head, but such is the nature of such an eclectic collection as this. Beauty, some might argue, is the ability to see hidden patterns in the world, so it seems appropriate to mention Brian Kernighan's essay on a terse 35 line C-program that implements a regular expression matcher. It makes extensive use of recursion, of course.
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62 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
Some major leaps in the AQAL model, December 7, 2006
In one of his previous books "Sex Ecology and Spirit", Ken Wilber introduced a wildly ambitious schema that (as one previous reviewer accurately calls it) attempts to butt-weld western psychology onto eastern spirituality. His All-Quadrant-All-Levels (AQAL) model is a dizzyingly complex schemata that tries to appease, well, pretty much every major thinker in the eastern and western canon.
Despite the ponderous weight of "Sex, Ecology and Spirit", there were major holes in his exposition, and "Integral Spirituality" was written, I suspect, to plug some of those holes. I believe that there are 2 major problems that Wilber addresses in "Integral Psychology". The first problem is that, although Wilber spent the bulk of "Sex, Ecology and Spirit" savagely critiquing the limits of a menagerie of postmodernist thinking, he did not incorporate the insights of postmodernism into his AQAL model. The second problem is that, in "Sex, Ecology and Spirit", even though he divides the world into four irreducible quadrants in his AQAL model (the individual interior, the individual exterior, the social interior, and the social exterior), he reads the history of the Enlightenment as the differentiation of only three spheres of values (aesthetics, morals and science). Clearly, one sphere of value missing.
Scholars of Wilber might find then, that the first 5 chapters of "Integral Spirituality" are a tedious re-tread of the AQAL model found in previous books. But this particular presentation of the AQAL model offers something fundamentally different. It embraces postmodern insights into its core, by providing a much more nuanced discussion of inter-subjectivity. That's why Wilber makes such a big deal, as another reviewer pointed out, of critiquing the "Myth of the Given" and the "Philosophy of Consciousness" in these chapters. These critiques encapsulate the basic insight of twentieth century postmodernism, and it is something that Wilber did not do in previous books.
One result is that Wilber argues that eastern traditions are blind to their cultural biases - biases that are fundamentally invisible to meditative introspection. These cultural biases can only be detected using hermeneutics/sociological techniques, the bread-and-butter of postmodernist thinkers. Wilber accuses every major meditative tradition of being naive (or monological) in their belief in the absolute reality of the cultural manifestations of their traditions. That is why many genuine teachers of Eastern traditions, might also be misogynists, sexual deviants and abusive figures of authority. This is a major clarification and culminates in a very satisfying chapter about the Shadow and the Self, or how western psychology might supplement meditative practices.
The other major problem tackled in "Integral Spirituality" resolves an anomaly in previous discussions of the european Enlightenment. In previous books, Wilber described the Enlightenment as the moment in western history when values first differentiated into the autonomous spheres of Art, Morality and Science. He calls this the differentiation of the Big Three. Wilber argues that the failure of the Enlightenment was a failure to integrate the Big Three. This has always been puzzling to me as Wilber makes such a big deal about the Four Quadrants in his AQAL model, whereas Wilber described the Enlightenment as the differentiation of only 3 spheres of values.
In "Integral Spirituality", Wilber resolves this anomaly between the Big Three and the Four Quadrants. He now finds that the Enlightenment failed because it failed to differentiate a Fourth sphere of values. He has tentatively identified this as the spiritual line of development, as described by James Fowler. This is admittedly vague, but represents a genuine change in Wilber's thinking. The failure of the Enlightenment is not the failure to integrate the Big Three, but the failure to differentiate into the Big Four, and that is what is preventing the next step in human evolution, the Integration that is yet to come. Based on this insight, Wilber offers some startling insights on the future role of institutionalized religions in the chapter "The Conveyor Belt". He argues that the world's religions must transform themselves to develop this fourth sphere of value, an enlightened differentiated form of spirituality.
Although Wilber doesn't pursue this, I'd like to offer a schema to map the Big Four onto his Four Quadrants. Art or Aesthetics is the values we use to describe our Individual Interior. Ethics are the rules and values, with which we relate to each other, forming the Social Interior. Science is the study of discrete physical things, essentially the Individual Exterior. And Spirituality or the Godhead, or the Ultimate, is how we relate to everything out there, and *that* is the Social Exterior.
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
Symmetries to make you weep, August 3, 2005
If physicists could weep, they would weep over this book. The book is devastingly brief whilst deriving, in its few pages, all the great results of classical mechanics. Results that in other books take take up many more pages. I first came across Landau's mechanics many years ago as a brash undergrad. My prof at the time had given me this book but warned me that it's the kind of book that ages like wine. I've read this book several times since and I have found that indeed, each time is more rewarding than the last.
The reason for the brevity is that, as pointed out by previous reviewers, Landau derives mechanics from symmetry. Historically, it was long after the main bulk of mechanics was developed that Emmy Noether proved that symmetries underly every important quantity in physics. So instead of starting from concrete mechanical case-studies and generalising to the formal machinery of the Hamilton equations, Landau starts out from the most generic symmetry and dervies the mechanics. The 2nd laws of mechanics, for example, is derived as a consequence of the uniqueness of trajectories in the Lagragian. For some, this may seem too "mathematical" but in reality, it is a sign of sophisitication in physics if one can identify the underlying symmetries in a mechanical system. Thus this book represents the height of theoretical sophistication in that symmetries are used to derive so many physical results.
The difficulty with this approach, and the reason why this book is not a beginner's book, is that to the follow symmetric arguments, one really has to have already mastered vector calculus. Ideally, you should be able to transform coordinate in your sleep, perform integrals without missing a beat, whether they be line, area, or path, and differentiate functions in many dimensions. The arguments are not sloppy, as some have claimed - it only seems so if you have not mastered vector calculus.
Tradition says that in Plato's academy was engraved the phrase, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here", so should the modern theoretical physicist, with Landau's bible in hand, march under the arches engraved with the words "Let no one ignorant of symmetry enter here".
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Colorful if a little confused portrait of Elizabeth and Mary, May 12, 2005
This is a solid, and at times fascinating, biography of the intertwined lives of Elizabeth 1st and Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth I, one of the great English soverigns, has exercised a long shadow over historians over the centuries. To distinguish her effort from others, Jane Dunn has focused on the contrast between the protestant Elizabeth against her life-long nemesis, the Catholic claimant to the English throne, Mary Queen of Scots. It is an effective strategy as many tart and pertinent comparisons are made between the English courts where Elizabeth grew up as an illegitimate heir, and the uber-sophisticated French court where Mary grew up as the future Empress of France.
I had come to this book hoping to learn about the singular effect of Elizabeth I over the English Renaissance, which spawned, amongst others, William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, the book does not touch on the cultural life of England. Rather, the focus is on the inevitable antagonism between the two Queens, one Protestant, and one Catholic - both queens drew support from the rebels in the other's kingdom. Dunn makes the simple but plausible case that the brutal childhood of Elizabeth prepared her for a life for effective governship, whereas Mary was brought up to be a trophy Queen, which left her utterly unprepared to weild power in Scotland, when the time came. The biography paints a lively portrait of court life, and follows the multifarious shifting political allegiances across Europe. The scholarship here is excellent, as many fascinating quotations make the point.
However, there are structural flaws in the biography. Although Dunn can tell a story when needed, Dunn continually interrupts the narrative to repeat her main thesis, as other reviews have mentioned. Such a thudding repitition is tiresome, at best, but worse, interrrupting a story, in order to reiterate a theme, dispels any tension that the narrative had been accumulating. More than once, I almost felt like blurting aloud that I already got the point. But perhaps another greater flaw is that she can't get get a consistent reading of the two women in her biography. Due to the comparative nature of the work, she paints Elizabeth as the level-headed one and Mary as the passionate impulsive ones. But many times during the book, she reverses this position, and then, reverses it again. Given the constant reiteration of the main theme, this gives an overall muddled reading of the character of the queens. Maybe with some judicious cutting, and a clearer reading of the characters, this book could have really uncoiled like a great novel of characters.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
A complex story well told, May 31, 2004
This is a ferciously well-written account of the race to map the human genome, one of the most sordid and expensive races in the history of science. Virtually alone amongst the books available out there on the genome race, this book tells the story from the point of view of Craig Venter. Not only that, but James Shreeve had a complete fly-on-the-wall view of the inner workings of Celera, allowing Shreeve to give a full-blooded account of the implosion of Venter's dream, that of becoming the Bill Gates of Biotech.Shreeve has done the impossible by pulling the threads of this immense story into a tight coherent narrative. At the end of the story, we understand how Venter ended up in the embarassing situation of negociating a so-called "tie" in the race for the human genome. Shreeve has a novelistic eye for detail in painting memorable portraits of the many people involved in the story. The science is vividly introduced when needed, but the complex financial and political moves are also explicated with authority. This is very very good writing. Although Craig Venter has often been demonized amongst scientific circles, it was always an open question whether Venter was the devil incarnate, or an incredibly naive scientist who made one stupid faustian bargain after another. While there is no doubt that Venter is a brilliant man, Shreeve' account portrays Venter as a financial masochist, a victim of financial forces beyond his understanding. In the preface, Shreeve explained that he had originally wanted a balanced account of the race as he tried to get access to the head of the public Human Genome Project, Francis Collins. He was refused. Because of that, Shreeve has structured the book as a character study of Venter, where we are privy to all his inner trials and tribulations. From being embedded in the private side of the race, Shreeve introduces a subtle bias in the account. The private researchers at Celera are fun and daring, even glamorous, whereas the public scientists are inefficient, stodgy, yawningly boring white-lab coats, especially when they talk about the ethical stuff. In my experience, it's been the opposite. I know researchers who have come back into academia because industry research was so achingly boring. One big gripe I have with this book is that Shreeve glides over why the public project was so fixated on trying to keep the map open, free and accessible. Shreeve makes the leaders of the public project sound like shrill ideologues, constantly harping on over some kind of utopian ideal. This subtle bias ignores the heavily documented, though much ignored, literature over the pathological behaviour of the pharmaceutical industry. A commercial monopoly over the human genome would have been a disaster for public health (as opposed to rich men's health), and Celera came close to destroying the fragile consensus in academia science. Apart from this gripe, I do recommend that you read this book if you want a sophisticated guide to one of the most fascinating collisions between commerical and public science, as well as a superb study of scientific ambition.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
A fine biography of one of the great crystallographers, April 11, 2004
I was initially drawn to this book (as will most other readers I imagine) by the controversy surrounding Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of the structure of the DNA helix. Instead, I was undeservingly rewarded with a fine biography of a character every bit as complex and fascinating as a heroine in a Henry James novel: a rich, head-strong English Jewish girl, blessed with a burning passion for science, talented but trapped in the chauvinistic world of post-war English science. She spent her life split between the sunny sophistication of France and the sobriety of England. Her professional life occurred through the Second World War, and the post-war period, providing a rich background for the biography.On the DNA controversy, Brenda Fox gives the most compelling account that I have read of what actually happened: if anything, Franklin was a victim of the fractious atmosphere created by J.T. Randall, head of the department of Biophysics at King's college. By not clarifying the working relations between Wilkins, Franklin and their students, Randall deliberately created an ugly turf war. That Watson and Crick got to see her data was a result of confusion rather than espionage. Yet, the question is often raised that Franklin was not capable of solving the structure on her own. To answer that question, one only has to follow her later career to find out that she was truly one of the great crystallographers. Her elucidation of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus was a technical achievement easily rivalling that of DNA, and might have led to a Nobel-prize if not for her early death. Indeed, her junior collaborator on the mosaic virus, Aaron Klug, would go on to win a Nobel prize himself, citing Franklin as his greatest mentor in his Nobel-prize speech (a high honour amongst scientists). Brenda Fox unearths a voluminous amount of material, which shows that Franklin was careful rather than unimaginative, as some have claimed. In a more supportive atmosphere, Franklin would have solved the DNA structure herself. However, Watson and Crick built on so many of Franklin's results (that DNA was helical, that the phosphates are on the outside, that there are 2 forms of DNA) that the real scandal is that they lied in their paper about having come to the model through pure theory alone. Brenda Fox paints a magnetic portrait of Franklin - a woman who was alternatively gregarious and witty, with a penchant for all things French (a very fine prejudice indeed), yet was also cold, hostile and aristocratically overbearing. Her relations with the men in her life were complex and dissected with sympathetic acumen by Brenda Fox. In short, I came away with the impression that Rosalind Franklin was someone I would have liked to have known. I can think of no greater praise for a biography than that. p.s. just a little note to a previous reviewer: crystallography in proteins is alive and well: the 2003 Chemistry Nobel-prize went to Rod McKinnon for the crystal structure of the potassium channel, in 1997, it went to John Walker for the structure of ATP-synthase.
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Investigations
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by Stuart A. Kauffman
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: $25.00 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting ideas but get this man a decent editor, March 10, 2003
Normally I'd dismiss out of hand anyone who claims to have found a fourth law of thermodynamics but from Stuart Kauffman, I'll hear what he has to say. I've been following Kauffman's work for years and his thinking is as engaging as ever. Unfortunately, his prose is not. Grandiose, clumsy and over-written, he sells his ideas short. The language is unreadably uneven as it ranges from patronising pop-sci gobbley-gook to technical minutaie of molecular biology. Kauffman attempts to articulate something that he calls "general biology". This is simply a dressed-up term for the classic problem of the origin of life. Unfortunately, his explanation also follows the classic pop-sci strategy of explaining one mysterious thing (life) by replacing it with other equally mysterious concepts (work and semantics). In this part of the book, the writing is woefully repetitive and elliptic. No real conclusions are drawn, which is a a monumental let-down given the ego-maniacally overblown introduction. There is an intellectual abyss between Kauffman's definition of life as auto-catalytic systems with one work cycle, and real cells that undergo reproduction and darwinian evolution. Nevertheless, there are many nuggets of gold in the later chapters. Probably the most interesting is the idea of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is the set of all possible chemicals that can be synthesized in one chemical step from all existing chemicals. Unlike other concepts introduced in the book, it is something that can be computed (though not exhaustively). Kauffman then proposes a fourth law of chemical thermodynamics: a chemical system advances into the adjacent-possible as fast as it can. Kauffman shows how this hypothetical fourth law can be analysed by relating this to his previous work on sustainable chemical diversity. Indeed, the best parts of the book are where Kauffman re-caps his previous work on auto-catalytic systems and genomes of real organisms, and then extends the analysis to explain his fourth law of thermodynamics. Kauffman makes some neat analogies between the chemical adjacent-possible with economics. He points out that classical economic models of pricing rely on the assumption of a finite prestable collection of goods and services. Instead, a more fruitful model for an economy of products can be made in analogy to the ever-explanding set of catalytic chemicals. There is also a great analysis on the limits of the economy of scale where Kauffman makes a analogy between the Ksat problem and the problem of producing diverse products in a single factory. And finally, in the grand tradition of pop-sci books, there is a final chapter where all the problems of quantum mechanics and cosmology are solved with the application of one special idea. Although this last chapter is pure science fiction, the book is worth perservering as some of the ideas are original, useful and genuinely thought provoking.
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3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
The piano is back, November 7, 2002
After dabbling unconvincingly with electronica and concept albums, Tori Amos has finally returned to the kind of intricate piano-driven ballads that made Little Earthquakes one of the great albums of the 90's. Although half of Scarlet's Walk still suffers from lyrical excess, the other half stands up to anything that she has ever written. For me, the standout tracks are the swooping "Taxi Ride", the melancholic "gold dust", the slow-burning "Crazy" and the ethereal "a sorta fairtytale". No coincindence that these are also the tracks that I found most comprehensible. Confession: I don't understand Tori most of the time - I tried once (even subscribing to rec.music.tori-amos) but in the end, I realised that a series of disjointed phrases, no matter how evocative, does not a coherent song make. As Tori is the kind of singer that squeezes every last drop of emotion out of every single word she sings, it can be mighty irritating if the lyrics don't quite come up to scratch. For an example of a perfectly-crafted piece of song-writing, look no further than "Taxi Ride". Through a deft mix of music and words, two distinct voices can be heard, ostensibly recounting a wild night out, but also revealing the contours of a complex friendship between two very different women (good tori v. bad tori?). Nobody does melancholy better - "gold dust" is a brooding piano ballad, here given the full orchestral-string treatment, that meditates on the shifting tones of memory. A straight narrative full of catching details, it drifts along quietly until the chorus where the narrator, channeling Emily Dickinson, implodes heart-breakingly on a single line. Sometimes the music and the marvellous vocal delivery overcome some really awkward lyrics, as in the slyly pulsating anti-god rant "pancake" or the unabashedly romantic "your cloud", possibly the only uplifting song about love that Tori has written. It's a mesmering melody that leaps around in unexpected directions, making up for some really clunky metaphors ("a horizontal line/ from the map of your body/to my heart"??). I have mixed feelings about "I can't see New York", on the one hand, it's an entrancing piano piece and I almost wished it was done as an instrumental (as in that cheeky B-side single "sister janet"). On the other hand, I find that the abtruseness of the lyrics jars with the theme of a woman falling from a plane on 9/11. Then there's the delightly whimsical "Wednesday" (shades of "Mr Zebra") with nonsense lyrics ("persian we call Cajun on a Wednesday") where at the end of the song, to my surprise, I find that the song is about "......a place called America"?.But credit where credit's due, Tori seems to tap into an inexhaustible source of inspired lines "first let's just unzip your religion down" in "Crazy".
Nevertheless, I feel the album is too long, too many indistinct pieces, and certain songs seem to cover the same territory (I-am-a-recovering-Christian in "mrs jesus" and "pancake", and break-up-song-involving-a-car-theme in "Crazy" and "a sorta fairytale"). However, Tori seems to have rediscovered discipline in her song-writing and best of all, she's brought that gorgeous piano back to the front of the mix, right where it should be.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
How street interactions create lively neighbourhoods, November 4, 2002
Death and Life is a book about how and why cities work. Written in 1961, this astonishing classic is just as pertinent today as when it was written. Steve Johnson's argues in "Emergence" that Jacobs was years ahead of her time in analysing city suburbs in terms of the emergent behaviour of micro-interactions at the street level. It is how the users of a neighbourhood are permitted to interact by the street that dictate what kind of neighbourhood results. The genesis of this book arose in part to Jacobs' own experience in preventing the razing of Greenwich Village, New York, into a series of housing projects. This kind of bottom-up thinking is complete anathema to city planners trained in top-down thinking. Indeed, Jacobs sharpens the knives for her one-time mentor Lewis Mumford and his idea of the Garden City, the intellectual model behind the hideous surburban sprawl of cities like Los Angeles and the crippling failures of low-income housing projects. Why have lively city neighbourings in the first place? In short, people like other people, lots of them and in as many different varieties as possible. Don't be fooled by the engagingly informal prose, inside this book are immensely sophisticated pieces of sociological reasoning, eg the integral importance of strangers in neighbourhoods, the nature of safety on lively public streets, the function of privacy in cities as oposed to towns. The book explains how lively city neighbourhoods are the engines of a city's economy, how slums are formed and more importantly, how slums can un-slum themselves. Jacobs argues that through this process of un-slumming "cities grow the middle class". If Jacobs is correct then neglecting the nurtue of lively city neighbourhoods is one of the greatest obstacles to eradicating poverty in our cities today. After a thorough analysis of the life of cities using a plethora of concrete examples, four simple rules of thumb are given to liven city neighbourhoods - short city blocks, mixed pattern of usage, high density of people and lots of old buildings. Mystified? Well then, read the book and find out why for yourself. Then these rules will just seem like plain common-sense.
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(San Francisco, USA)
