Alain Bertaud, Order without Design ****

Order without Design is a book about urban planning written by a research scholar and published by MIT Press. You will not be surprised to learn that its prose and organization are academic.

I am fascinated by the way organization emerges from the interaction of simple principles, and that is what Order without Design is about.  If you think of a city as "primarily a labor market" whose success depends on the proximity of jobs and homes and on the ease of transportation between them, you can understand how cities end up organized the way they are. You can also see what determines land prices, housing costs, and usage of various forms of transportation.

Bertaud's stated purpose is to encourage collaboration between urban planners, who make normative policy recommendations, and urban economists, who analyze descriptive data about day-to-day operations. His more fundamental purpose, though, is to argue for a libertarian approach to land use regulation and transportation planning. The libertarian bent becomes pronounced in the last couple of chapters.

Viewing cities as simply labor markets works well as a way to focus the discussion in the early chapters. In the later chapters, however, it becomes clear that mayors and city planners have many more goals to take into account and that those other goals justify some of the practices that Bertaud rejects as hubris or counterproductive. For example, he objects to regulations that raise land prices and reduce affordability, but many of them are in place for reasons beyond the purely economic. He acknowledges the success of regulations in Paris designed to retain its historical character, but considers it an anomaly. He considers some slums in Indonesia as a success story because of their market-sensitive use of land.

Lew Bryson, Tasting Whiskey ****

Tasting Whiskey is a guidebook to whiskey whose name popped up several times in the footnotes for Bourbon Empire. Bryson writes in an accessible style with an encouraging tone, the illustrations are well-designed and clear, and the book covers everything from the art of distilling to the regional styles of whiskey (or whisky).

I was most interested to learn about all of the various factors that influence the taste and smell of the spirit. The source grains, obviously, the barrels, the age, and the blend, but also the amount of reflux during distillation, the location of the barrel in the warehouse, the strain of yeast. I'd never thought about the fact that distilleries need to make decisions about taste and amounts several years in advance of actually delivering the whiskey, a process made tricky by the fickle tastes of the public.

The chapters describing the major whiskey-producing countries (Scotland, Ireland, United States, Canada, Japan) gave a sense of what made each distinctive, but were spotty in their coverage. For example, the Scotch chapter identifies the different regions but only includes sidebars about Islay and Speyside. I would have liked more detail about Japanese whisky in particular.

Now to put Bryson's advice into practice. Sláinte!

Mariam Toews, Women Talking ***

Eight Mennonite women meet in a hayloft to discuss how to respond to repeated violations by the men of their community. When the men return from the city in two days time, the women will be forced to forgive their attackers unless they decide to leave.

I appreciate the concept of the story but feel that Toews made a few poor narrative choices. The most damaging is introducing an educated male narrator. August Epp de-centers the story from its proper place with the isolated illiterate women, and allows Toews to sneak in too many literary and worldly references. Also, the women's perspectives felt rather more modern than I would expect them to be.

Women Talking would work better as a play. It takes place in a single location over a short time period and consists entirely of dialogue. Actresses would be able to embody the diverse personalities better than dry descriptions.

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai ***

The Last Samurai is an ambitious novel about an intellectually curious single mother raising her genius son. Applying parenting methods from the fathers of John Stuart Mill and Yo Yo Ma, she teaches her son several languages before the age of six, worrying all the while that she might make mistakes that thwart his potential. The son wants to know who his father is, and at age 11 goes on a quest to find him, a quest inspired by the gathering of the samurai in the film Seven Samurai.

I was very impressed with the first third of the book, told from the mother's point of view. Her perspective is intriguingly odd. The prologue, about how her parents' lives took unexpected turns, grounds her concerns about her son's development. I was especially interested in her thoughts about how Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony might apply to language(s).

I lost enthusiasm fairly quickly once the son took over as narrator. In the early going his thoughts are mostly about how impressed people are by his achievements; during his quest to find a suitable father figure, his interactions with candidates are unbelievable and all over the place thematically.

Nicos Hadjicostis, Destination Earth * 1/2

I was looking forward to this "New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler," anticipating that it would alter my thinking about travel and enhance my future traveling experiences. The Foreword by Hadjicostis' traveling partner offered promise when it correctly noted that "errand days gave us a unique view into everyday life and ended up being just as fascinating as our exploration days." Not a new insight for me, but the kind of suggestion I was looking for.

Alas, the book was filled with proclamations that the author believes to be profound but which are trite, condescending, and entitled.

Hadjicostis takes a basically Buddhist approach to his subject, presenting travel (at least "four-dimensional travel") as transformative, allowing the traveler to live in the moment, connect with his fellow humans, and "capture the soul" of a country.

Wait, what's that last one? Sounds kinda colonial. for a free spirit like our traveler. His examples of soul capturing are cringe-worthy: he embodies the spirit of the Vietcong by arguing with his cab driver, gets in touch with his inner cannibal by properly eating the head of a roasted pig in the Solomon Islands, and climbs aboard an Indonesian truck to help students with the call to prayer and "have a unique interaction with Muslim youth!" He frequently defaults to the notion of the noble savage, for example explaining how cultures that eat with their hands are less mediated than ours.

Most of the time he extols the virtues of the whole world and its people, but then he says something like this:

Definitely not all regions of a country or the Earth are worth visiting. Athens is a sprawling metropolis of four million people, but its important attractions, architectural beauty, historical monuments, and cultural life are all concentrated in the four square kilometers around the Acropolis.

What happened to the spirit of the place? Now who is promoting "one-dimensional travel"? 

César Aira, The Hare *** 1/2

The cover of The Hare aptly calls César Aira "the Duchamp of Latin American literature." The story of an English naturalist searching the Argentine pampas for the possibly legendary flying Legibrerian hare, The Hare whipsaws between realism, symbolism, and absurdity in a disconcerting but entertaining manner. The language is a unique delight that never reads like a translation; full props to the translator Nick Caistor.

He sat motionless for a moment, lost in the contemplation of his own grandeur.

The narrative follows a wandering path and is filled with developments that feel like improvisations. The naturalist's search takes him to an Indian village, where he comes to suspect that the hare is not a creature but a metaphor; the village chieftain disappears and the Indians recruit the naturalist to help find him; the naturalist's guide turns out to be heir to a great fortune if he can reach his half-sister in the mountains before the month is out; and so on. Which made it quite surprising when the final chapter ("Happy Families") ties up all of the threads like the end of a romantic comedy.