"A Measure of All Things," by Ian Whitelaw

Humanity loves to quantify things. Measurement is a way of exerting order over an essentially chaotic environment. From the earliest days, we have sought ways to nail down just how big, or long, or tall, or fast, etc., something is. It’s a subject capable both of being fascinating and of being deadly dull.

So on that day in the dollar store when I found my copy of A Measure of All Things: the Story of Man and Measurement, by Ian Whitelaw, I was hopeful that I’d found a book and an author that took dry data and presented it in an appealing way. I was also worried that I’d found a book and an author that took dry data and dried it out more.

A quick perusal of the dust jacket gave me hope: Whitelaw is also the author of a book called Habitus Disgustica: The Encyclopedia of Annoying, Rude, and Disgusting Behavior.  I admired the minimalist simplicity of the cover design and dove right in.

Several hours later, all I could say was, “Why, oh why didn’t the dollar store have a copy of Habitus Disgustica on the shelf instead?”

Nibbling on a Ruler

Don’t get me wrong. A Measure of All Things is far from an awful book. On the contrary, Whitelaw has assembled a collection of measurement-related information that can be genuinely interesting. He begins with some background, examining some historical systems of measurement and continuing with a discussion of current systems, paying special attention to the rise of the metric system (and its failure to catch on in the U.S.).

Subsequent chapters examine measurements of length; area; volume and capacity; mass; temperature; time; speed; force and pressure; and energy and power. The final chapter serves as a sort of grab-bag, examining such miscellany as the heat of chili peppers, typography, ring sizes, and more.

Along the way, Whitelaw gives us some history, a smattering of explanation of how a given measurement is calculated, definitions of terminology, and an assortment of helpful diagrams. Most sections of the book give pride of place to the ways things are quantified by the Système International, or SI (the global system of measuring pretty much everything, which has its roots in the metric system but expands on it).

How to Measure This Book: By Its Breadth, Or By Its Depth?

After reading A Measure of all Things, I was left with a feeling of wistfulness for the book that it could have been. The book that it is has its rewards, to be sure — I’ll keep it on my shelf for those times when I need some piece of the information it contains — but Whitelaw has missed a golden chance to make the world of measurement entertaining instead of just informative.  We’re rarely told why a given measurement is called what it’s called, for example. Bottles of champagne that are larger than standard have a series of colorful names, many of them Biblical (e.g., the “Nebuchadnezzar,” which is a bottle that holds 15 liters of champagne, or the equivalent of 20 standard bottles); A Measure of All Things  lists the names and their capacities, but doesn’t tell us how those names came to be used. A missed opportunity, and one among several.

Moreover, the book feels a bit padded. Illustrations abound, some of them useful and necessary, but many of them superfluous (do we really need an illustration of a rectangle to show us the layout of an acre, for example?) In the end, it’s a useful book, but one that just doesn’t quite measure up.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

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Worth a buck?

Yes, if only as a reference tool.

Worth full price?

Sadly, I don’t really think so. The missed opportunity stings too much. Fortunately, it’s easily findable at a deep discount.

Who would like this book:

Data geeks, guys looking for new ways to measure… things… to make them sound bigger, laymen with scientist friends whose cocktail conversation they’re struggling to understand

How to get it:

Widely available online.

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"Buttered Side Down," by Edna Ferber

This dollar-store book-review project has really brought home to me the fact that dreams have a shelf life, and sometimes that shelf life is painfully short. Still, writers have to keep on setting down words in a row, hoping that they’ll beat the odds and become a household name, a writer so well known that she needs no introduction. A writer whose career is so storied that no less an authority than the New York Times describes her as “among the best-read novelists in the nation.” A writer whose name echoes down through the generations. A writer like…

…Edna Ferber.

I sense a few readers nodding in recognition, and a whole lot more readers with their heads cocked to one side like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. To that second group: really? You don’t know who Edna Ferber is? The woman won a Pulitzer Prize, for heaven’s sake. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Still nothing?

Okay, have you heard of the movies Giant and Show Boat? Those movies were both adaptations of Ferber’s work. In fact, she was a best-selling writer whose career spanned more than fifty years. And yet, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that many contemporary readers haven’t ever heard of her. For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work — or those of you who know only her novels — the 1912 short-story collection Buttered Side Down showcases another side of the prolific writer.

“Happily Ever After”? Not These Folks

Ferber got her start in journalism, working for the Milwaukee Journal. Her first piece of published fiction, in 1910, was the short story “The Homely Heroine” (which is one of the 12 stories included in Buttered Side Down). That story was a harbinger of Ferber’s stories to come; it featured several elements that turned the storytelling of the time on its head. For one thing, it rejected the impulse to make its protagonist a typically lovely, delicate flower of a woman, instead making her — well, let’s let Ferber tell it:

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“She is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin.”

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That kind of arch, we-both-know-you’re-reading-a-story quality is characteristic of Ferber’s short fiction. She breaks the fourth wall with gleeful abandon in a way that will be familiar to fans of Scrubs or Neil Simon plays (not to mention this blog).

Also characteristic of her work is a rejection of the stereotypically happy ending. As the collection’s title suggests, Ferber’s characters don’t live happily ever after — at least not where we can see them do it. On the contrary, many of them turn away from storybook denouements in favor of their ordinary workaday existences. In her foreword to the collection, Ferber says, “[living happily ever after] is a great risk to take with one’s book-children. These stories make no such promises. They stop just short of the phrase of the old story writers, and end truthfully, thus: And so they lived.”

Slices of Life, Sliced with a Razor-Sharp Edge

Indeed, so they lived. Ferber’s characters include retail clerks, traveling salesmen, stenographers, ex-cons, and the like — not a single charming prince or fairy godmother among them. Moreover, the way they talk and look rings absolutely true (admittedly, these stories were written a hundred years ago, so the reader of today perforce must look at them through a haze of years; the time period is long enough to make them seem at once familiar and exotic). Sure, the dialog crackles with the rat-a-tat-tat energy often on display in old movies — I kept hearing Ferber’s heroines speaking with Katherine Hepburn’s voice — but it never sounds fake. The stories in this collection will leave you savoring the tart taste of vignette vinaigrette.

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Buttered Side Down
By Edna Ferber
© 1912

Worth a buck?

Absolutely. It’s like a time capsule of witty repartee.

Worth full price?

It’s hard to say. My hardback Signature Press edition from the dollar store doesn’t have a price on it, and other hardback editions I’ve priced seem excessive for such a slender volume. However, the paperback price is quite reasonable, and the e-book price even more so.

Who would like this book:

Fans of slice-of-life fiction, fans of metafictional flourishes, fans of snappy banter

How to get it:

Widely available online.

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"Strange and Dangerous Dreams" by Geoff Powter

This was the book that taught me the importance of reading the inside flap of the dust jacket.

I mean, just take a look at the cover. That’s Aleister Crowley, famous occultist and mystic, striking a dramatic pose while some sort of eldritch spiral … well… spirals out from his face. Add in the title (Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness), and one could be forgiven for thinking this book is about Crowley or the occult. It turns out, however, that the most important visual element on the cover is actually the mountain behind Crowley (who was not only a sex-magick practitioner, cult leader, and enthusiast of recreational chemistry, but also an accomplished mountain climber); Strange and Dangerous Dreams is a collection of stories about the dark side of wilderness adventuring.

Why Climb Mount Everest? Because It’s There. Also, I’m Nuts

Author Geoff Powter — both an adventurer himself and a practicing clinical psychologist — has gathered a collection of eleven tales about people whose personal demons both drove and overshadowed their desire to conquer the wilderness (a desire that ultimately destroyed them). He divides them into three categories according to the driving issues and forces behind their characters:

• The Burdened were tormented by horrendous pressure to succeed in their attempts to conquer the wild — either pressure put on them by others or by themselves.
• The Bent appear to have been drawn to adventure and to have behaved as they did because of some fundamental flaw in their own psychological makeup.
• The Lost seem to have drifted into adventuring with the same lack of purpose that characterized other aspects of their lives.

Some of the adventurers Powter includes in Strange and Dangerous Dreams are famous, or notorious, figures whose exploits remain well-known to this day. Others are obscure footnotes in the history of wilderness adventure, now largely forgotten. All, however, are fascinating case studies in what can go wrong when an adventurer’s drive comes from a place of obsession, naiveté, arrogance or despair.

Strange and Dangerous Dreams: A Rogues’ Gallery

Some of the luckless adventurers Powter includes in this book include the following:

Meriwether Lewis

Lewis is well-known as one half of the exploring team of Lewis & Clark, whose expedition explored the territory of the Louisiana Purchase and also the Pacific Northwest. Readers whose knowledge of Lewis begins and ends with the expedition will be surprised to read that his life ended in suicide following what he saw as his failure to meet the expectations of his mentor and father figure, Thomas Jefferson.

Maurice Wilson

Powter calls Wilson’s attempt to scale Mount Everest “an elaborate suicide.” With an almost complete lack of preparation — he acquired no climbing equipment and his training consisted of little more than reading, along with walking several hundred miles from London to his family’s home town of Bradford. There’s no question, however, that he was an innovative thinker; his plan for conquering the mountain included intentionally  crashing his plane as high as possible on Everest’s slopes to save time in the ascent.

Robert Falcon Scott

Scott’s name will be familiar to readers as the leader of two ill-fated expeditions to Antarctica, the first of which accomplished much of scientific interest but failed to reach the South Pole. Scott’s expeditionary force did succeed in reaching the South Pole on his final voyage — only to discover that another team, led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, had been there first. Moreover, he and his team all died on the return journey. Scott’s journals reflect a quintessentially British mixture of fatalism and heroic adherence to an ideal of manly adventuring. As Powter notes:

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“If there was madness in the man, wasn’t there also a touch of madness in his nation’s deification of self-destruction? Amundsen certainly understood the pattern when he wrote this blunt assessment of Scott’s decision to walk to the Pole: ‘Never underestimate the British habit of dying, the glory of self-sacrifice, the blessing of failure.’ ”

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What is Wrong With These People?

Powter acknowledges that many members of the wilderness exploration community have little but contempt for the kind of ill-prepared, possibly crazy, gravely naïve people discussed in Strange and Dangerous Dreams, and in fact feel such people aren’t worthy of being included in the annals of heroic adventure. Powter clearly disagrees, finding that the impulses that drove these admittedly extreme examples of the adventuring mindset cast light on the motivations of their more common brethren. After all, Powter points out, many of these colossal failures would be considered in a very different light if their mad attempts had succeeded; as he puts it:

“Lit by the favorable spotlight of conquest, ragefully obsessed sailors become ‘driven,’ suicidal climbers are reinvented as ‘committed,’ and the arguable immorality of extreme risk gets re-spun as heroic dedication. But when the climber falls, the sailor disappears, or the desert explorer perishes of dehydration, then the verdict is obvious: The person was mad for having the dream in the first place, or was foolish for having pursued it.”

Whatever one might think on the subject, it’s well worth an expedition through the pages of Strange and Dangerous Dreams, if only to marvel at just how nuts people can be (and to feel better about our own safe but boring lives).

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Worth a buck?

Yes, for the chance to look through a peephole at a mindset that’s completely alien to most.

Worth full price?

Probably not, but it’s worth at least half price.

Who would like this book:

Fans of aberrant psychology, fans of wilderness adventure, fans of schadenfreude

How to get it:

It’s available through Mountaineers Books; you might also look around the base of a mountain, although a copy you find there will probably have “This is NOT me!” scribbled on it.

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"Auto da Fay," by Fay Weldon

With any work of nonfiction, the question arises: “How factual is this?” In the case of biography, the question becomes important, because what is the value of a biography that doesn’t jibe with the facts?

With autobiography, however, the question more properly becomes “How true is this?” Most autobiographies are by nature selective with the facts, because people, and especially writers, have an irresistible compulsion to edit their own histories to make them more entertaining, or cast themselves in a better light, or protect themselves and those they love. Despite this compulsion, however, the truth of an author shines through in a good autobiography, even if some of the facts are missing or altered.

In the case of this week’s book — Auto da Fay, by English author Fay Weldon — the truth of the narrative is so much in evidence that the factuality is almost beside the point. Besides, Auto da Fay is a memoir, a subset of autobiography that’s even more selective than usual, promising only to cover the specific things the author wants to reminisce about.

A Bit O’ Bio

For those of you who are now saying “Fay Weldon? Wasn’t she that actress King Kong took up the Empire State building with him?” I’ll trot out a bit of biographical data myself. The first bit I’m quoting comes from the dust jacket of Auto da Fay: “Born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, Fay spent most of her life in New Zealand.”

“Wow,” I said to myself. “Fay Weldon was born a man? This book is going to be GREAT!” (Of course, as it turns out, I was mistaken; despite being an authentic girl, Weldon was named Franklin for numerological reasons. The book is great anyway.)

Weldon’s writing career spans some five decades; her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. In addition to about 30 novels, she has also published several collections of short stories and written for television, magazines, and newspapers.

Where to Begin? At — No, Before the Beginning

And how much of this illustrious career is covered in Auto da Fay? Well, none of it — and yet all of it. Instead of beginning at the customary point (birth), Weldon takes us back a few months before that, to an earthquake she experienced in utero. The last pages of the memoir show us Weldon as she first embarks on her writing career.

In between, we learn about Weldon’s early days in New Zealand, torn between a charming but philandering father and a mother determined to raise Fay and her sister Jane alone, in a time when single motherhood was a far more difficult prospect than it is today; her school years, feeling out of step, sharing little in common with her classmates; the wrenching dislocation of a move from New Zealand to England in her teens; her own period of single motherhood, followed by a disastrous first marriage of convenience and then a second one to the man who gave her the last name by which we all know her.

Woven all through these memories are themes that would later surface again and again in Weldon’s work: the mutual support of a strong network of women like the ones who raised her; men as occasionally useful but ultimately unreliable and rarely faithful creatures; the casting off of the shackles of traditional gender roles, first by necessity and then by preference — in short, the foundations of feminism (a movement with which Weldon and her work are intimately identified).

The Power of the Word: Weldon and the Writing Life

Weldon’s love of the written word also surfaces throughout Auto da Fay, going back to her youth, as this quote about her school days demonstrates:

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“Write and then rewrite: it was like bringing a piece of sculpture out of dead stone: you could make things more real than real, make something where there was nothing before; you could have new people come to you out of the steam, make them do what you wanted, send them off again into the mists and they’d go on walking for ever.”

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For Weldon, of course, writing became more than just a source of private pleasure — it was the key to survival as a single woman supporting not only a child but also a parent. Weldon reminisces about her days in the advertising industry with wry fondness while remaining quite clear-eyed about the pedestrian utility of it. We’re talking about a woman who, as a copywriter, tried to convince a vodka company to advertise its wares by pointing out that “vodka gets you drunker faster.” (I think that ad would have sold vodka by the tanker-truckful.)

The Memoir as Confessional: Auto da Fay as An Auto da Fé

The title of the book is a reference to the “auto da fé” of the Spanish Inquisition. The term is generally associated with the burning at the stake of an accused heretic. Its original form, however, is that of a ritual of public penance for sinners accused by the Inquisition. In Weldon’s hands, the idea becomes a confession of the “transgressions” she committed against the mores of society during her younger days — but not a confession with any particular penitence attached to it. Rather, it’s a celebration of the steps, and missteps, that led her to where she is.

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Auto da Fay
by Fay Weldon
© 2002

Worth a buck?

Absolutely. Weldon has a born raconteur’s willingness to edit her own life for entertainment purposes.

Worth full price?

It’s certainly worth the paperback price.

Who would like this book:

Fay Weldon fans (and if you aren’t one, you need to get cracking on her bibliography); students of feminism; fans of irreverent smartassery

How to get it:

This one was still at the dollar store the last time I was there.

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"50 Books for 50 Bucks" is now on Twitter!

Just wanted to let everyone know that having this blog has finally given me a reason to join Twitter. I'll be tweeting when I post here, as well as the odd random tweet -- and by "odd," I think you know what I mean.

Find me at http://twitter.com/#!/50books50bucks and follow me like you're from Hamelin and I'm the Pied Piper!

Okay, that was probably too nerdy. Follow me anyway. :^)

What do you think?

By the way, folks, I'm interested in your opinion of the sidebar I added this week at the end of my review of Turning Tables. Feel free to comment here and tell me if you thought it improved the review, if there's something you'd add to the list or take off, etc. Lay it on me!

"Turning Tables" By Heather & Rose MacDowell

We live in a society that worships the new. From design to entertainment to — yes — restaurant food, “innovative” and “unexpected” are high praise, while “predictable” and “formulaic” are most often delivered with a sneer. And yet there is comfort in the familiar; formula can have its good points. Consider baby formula, for example.

So when I say that Turning Tables, by Heather and Rose MacDowell, is formulaic, don’t be too quick to write it off. If it weren’t for formula, there would be no genres, and how would we know what we like? The genre in question here is chick-lit, and Turning Tables is a shining example. I’d say it’s about the restaurant industry, but that’s not quite correct; it’s set in the restaurant industry, but like all chick-lit, it’s about romance, empowerment, and self-actualization. The MacDowell twins (yes, they’re identical — and judging from their author photo, they look like the kind of girls Fonzie might have asked out on a date) have leveraged their experiences waiting tables at some of the best (and worst) restaurants in Manhattan, Nantucket, and San Francisco into a bitingly funny tale of the delicately braised underbelly of fine dining.

The Waitress as Actress: Fake It ‘til You Make It

Erin Edwards has a problem. In a town where you can survive without brains but not without money, she’s been laid off from her job in the marketing industry. Four months later, she’s desperate enough to work family connections to get a job waiting tables at Roulette, a top-tier Madison Avenue restaurant that’s the sort of place she once might have wined and dined a client. Before she knows what hit her, Erin is thrust into a life where comfortable shoes trump Jimmy Choos, where a customer’s every preposterous whim is law, and where she’s disastrously, hilariously in over her head.

Erin’s tendency to screw up puts her at odds with the restaurant’s egomaniacal chef, who makes no attempt to hide what an imbecile he thinks Erin is; the outrageous Italian wife of the owner, who treats the restaurant’s staff as serfs put there to do her bidding; and the owner himself, who may be reluctant to fire her, but has no problem trying to make her miserable enough to quit. Fortunately for Erin, she charms Cato, an experienced waiter who immediately sees through her fabricated claims of experience but can’t resist the urge to play Pygmalion and rebuild her as the perfect waitress — pulling a fast one on the management in the process. Under Cato’s tutelage, Erin begins to evolve into a consummate service professional — part psychologist, part babysitter, and part mind-reader, all the while helping fools and their money to be soon parted.

  

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“For the rest of the shift, I try to think of myself as the benevolent ruler of a five-table kingdom. I move from guest to guest, not as an impostor with a stalled marketing career, but as a born server determined to entice, coax, and sweet-talk every guest into dessert and after-dinner drinks.”

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Give Me a Man… Make It a Double

Of course, Turning Tables wouldn’t be chick lit if there wasn’t romance — preferably two romances, one with the wrong guy and one with the right guy. Turning Tables doesn’t disappoint, first sending Erin into the arms of a member of the kitchen staff (a fling that, true to formula, goes spectacularly awry), and then a suave, rich, handsome television producer who’s one of the restaurant’s regulars. Also true to formula, Erin’s relationship crumbles over misunderstandings and a man who Just Doesn’t Get It, Does He; moreover, her continuing series of disastrous missteps at the restaurant send her life spiraling ever closer to the drain. Will the chef and the owner get her to crack and quit, or give up and fire her? Will she let her pride strip away her job, her home, and her chance at love? And when a sudden lifeline appears, will she grab at it, or will she discover that after all she’s learned, her heart’s desire has changed along the way?

You Girls Want a Tip? Write Some More Books

In the end, Turning Tables is better than it has to be. From its title, with its sly double meaning, to its entertainingly flawed heroine (who unquestioningly brings much of her misery on herself), the book is a tasty soufflé of a read that whisks the reader along from page to page. (Yay, culinary metaphor!) Even if chick lit isn’t to your usual taste, you might want to give Turning Tables a nibble.

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Worth a buck?

Sure. It’s sudsy chick-lit fun.

Worth full price?

Maybe, maybe not – fans of the genre won’t have buyer’s remorse, though.

Who would like this book:

Fans of chick-lit, fans of the first two or three years of Waiter Rant, readers looking for a restaurant-themed riff on The Nanny Diaries

How to get it:

(coming soon — check back)

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