Prophets of the Marginal Revolution (POTMR).
Alain Mabanckou, Dealing with the Dead. Most African fiction does not connect with me, and there is a tendency for the reviews to be untrustworthy. This “cemetery memoir,” from the Congo (via UCLA), connected with me and held my interest throughout.
Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. I was in the mood of thinking I don’t need to read another book about these people. Yet this one was so good it won me over nonetheless.
Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: A Life in Music. A fun book about one of America’s greatest guitarists. Watson was blind from an early age, and he was collecting state disability benefits until he was 40 — a classic late bloomer.
Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington. Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative. It induced me to buy another book by him. The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me.
Carlos M.N. Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Ross Douthat recommended this one to me. It is well done, and worth reading, but I don’t find it shifted my priors on whether “impossible” events might have really happened.
I agree with the central arguments of Samir Varma’s The Science of Free Will: How Determinism Affects Everything from the Future of AI to Traffic to God to Bees. I was happy to write a foreword for the book.
Kathleen deLaski, Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter. One of a growing chorus of books suggesting higher education is on the verge of some radical changes.
There is Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin. It is good to see him getting more attention.
There is also Brandy Schillace, The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story.
1969
1969 was a big year for me. Most of all, we left Fall Riverand moved back to New Jersey, but this time to Bergen rather than Hudson County — Billy Joel comments. I’ll cover Bergen County another time, here were three other developments of import in my seven-year-old life in 1969:
1. The United States landed a man on the moon.
My parents let me stay up late to watch this, thank goodness. Of course I was very excited, and we heard all about it in school. This event drove my later interest in science fiction, space exploration, and also travel by jet. None of those were directions my career or writings went in, but they were early intellectual influences. At this point in the game, how could you not watch Star Trek reruns?
Back then, we all knew something special was happening, even I knew at age seven. I also began to understand that the United States was the country that did this, and what that meant. So I became more patriotic. The command center at NASA seemed to me a great achievement, in a way more impressive than the spaceship.
2. The New York Mets won the World Series.
Alas, I was no longer a Red Sox fan. The important thing here is that the New York Mets season, along with the moon landing of that same summer, was the first thing I truly followed with all of my attention. I learned how to keep on top of something, at least to the greatest degree possible given my constraints (which were extreme, starting with no internet but hardly ending there). In 1968 I watched baseball games, but in 1969 I followed The New York Mets and absorbed all of the available information about them, including reading newspapers, listening to radio talk shows, and digesting statistics on a regular basis.
That is a tendency that has stuck with me, and I first practiced it then and there.
3. I received my first transistor radio.
I don’t hear people talk about this much any more, but for me it was like the arrival of the internet. All of a sudden I was in regular touch with a big chunk of the world. I could hear the new music that was out. Could listen to the news. Find out sports scores. Hear talk shows. Or whatever. The menu was very America-centric, and the sound was terrible, but none of that mattered. The information superhighway had been opened for me.
I heard the Jackson Five song “I Want You Back,” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Those tunes bored me quickly, and I returned to them and their excellence only later. But I knew they were out there, and I knew they were important. At least early on, I preferred The Archies “Sugar, Sugar,” Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy,” and oddities such as Zaeger and Evans “In the Year 2525.” How about “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”?
In fact they did not take me away, rather they ensconced me securely in New Jersey, in the momentous year of 1969.
