Stanley Fish, Winning Arguments ***

The title and packaging of Winning Arguments suggests a manual for prevailing in fights with your spouse, but I've read enough Stanley Fish to know that's not what it offers. The quote from Richard Rorty on the dedication page nicely summarizes the book's theme: "There is no such thing as non-discursive access to truth." Or, as Fish puts it in his introduction:

Knowledge and truth rather than presiding over the field of argument are what emerge in the course of argument, and because it is argument and not Reality with a capital R that produces them, truth and knowledge are always in the process of being renegotiated. 

Fish outlines numerous attempts across the ages to escape from this conclusion, because transcending it is a fundamental human desire.

Fish's writing style has become less thickly academic in recent years, and he draws examples from pop culture to supplement his references to Milton. So Winning Arguments may be better targeted at a general audience than his earlier books. However, its arguments are less forceful as a result. 

Ben Lerner, 10:04 **** 1/2

It's hard to say what 10:04 is about, even harder to say what the title means. The book has a plot of sorts, but it approaches its true subject obliquely, like The Rings of Saturn. I'd say it's about the interplay between art, memory, and personal identity. Sounds pretentious, no? I suppose it is, but it kept my mind buzzing as I read it.

The book is filled with subsidiary stories in which characters find the world rearranging itself around them. A woman becomes an Arab-American activist to honor her Lebanese father, only to learn that he isn't her real father; the narrator was motivated to become a writer by seeing the Challenger explosion live, but realizes he couldn't have; a man supports his girlfriend through her cancer treatments until she admits to never having cancer at all. Our personal identity derives from stories we tell ourselves about our past, which are just as constructed as any other art.

For me, the first two-thirds of 10:04 were a full five-star affair. The final sections, starting with the narrator's visit to Marfa, weren't bad but they lacked the flair of the earlier sections.

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Causation ** 1/2

I like Oxford's Very Short Introduction series for the way that they present the basic research topics in a subject area concisely and entertainingly. I've been impressed by the clarity of many of them, even in subjects I know well enough not to need an introduction.

Causation introduces the fundamental questions about the nature of cause and effect, but in a way that makes them feel academic (in the sense of not being relevant for anyone but professors). It presents arguments for the various points of view, but not very clearly.

Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City ** 1/2

Based on the title and semi-academic cover design, I was hoping that A Burglar's Guide to the City would provide a distinctive new way to look at buildings and urban design, the way Edge City or Infrastructure did. Instead, it is largely anecdotes about wild burglary techniques with an overlay of pseudo-Jameson architectural argle bargle. The only part that approximated what I was looking for was the burglar who could determine the interior layout of a building by looking at its fire escapes (and the city fire code).

Manaugh talks about a Canadian artist named Janice Kerbel whose work sounds intriguing. Her piece called 15 Lombard St. explores what it would take to rob a bank in central London, resulting in notes that span from floor plans to London traffic patterns. 

Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost *** 1/2

Independence Lost is a history of the American Revolution told from the perspective of people living just outside of the thirteen rebelling colonies, on the Gulf Coast. Florida was a non-rebellious British colony; the Spanish has recently taken Louisiana from the French, and various Indian Nations were trying to maintain good relations with the various empires that surrounded them. How would the rebellion affect the livelihoods of all these constituencies?

This unique perspective provides an enlightening contrast to traditional accounts of the war. For one thing, it reminds us that the revolution was part of a wider war between the European powers: Spain took advantage of Britain's distraction to win back parts of its empire. It also shows how unlikely American success was, even after the war was over.

On the downside, however, DuVal's writing style often sounds like a high-school textbook. Lots of sociological generalization ("Men and women depended on a web of economic, social, and political connections that provided stability and opportunity even as they limited complete freedom of action") and fact clusters that sound like the answers to questions on the weekly quiz ("Behind Galvez's back, Pollock urged Congress to use Willing's brief 1778 seizures of Natchez and Manchac and Captain Pickles's success on the lakes to claim ownership of what Spanish troops had just taken..."). 

Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief *****

The author biography on the last page says, "Martin Seay is the executive secretary for the village of Wheeling, Illinois. The Mirror Thief is his first novel." Seay's lack of literary pedigree makes The Mirror Thief an even more impressive achievement.

The Mirror Thief tells three connected stories. In 2003, an ex-Marine named Curtis checks into the Venetian in Las Vegas on a quest to locate a gambler who owns his employer money; in 1958, a younger version of that gambler has come to Venice California in search of the author of a mysterious book (called The Mirror Thief) that has captured his imagination; in 1592, the titular character plans to steal the secrets of mirror-making from the Republic of Venice. The stories echo each other both in terms of plot and of incidental images. Lots of reflections, silver, and water.

It's a long book (572 pages) with a complex structure, ambitious themes, and colorful prose littered with obscure vocabulary. This description makes it sound difficult, but I found it very readable. Many readers may feel like there's not enough action, but I enjoyed its world- and character-building. Almost every page had a sentence or image that caught my attention. Seay is particularly good at choosing metaphors that paint a vivid picture and deepen a character at the same time.