This time I look at a variety of books. I read several of them carefully with an eye toward writing full-blown reviews, but then decided that what I have to say about them doesn't warrant a complete column.
Infinity
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace (Atlas/Norton, New York, 2010, 376pp, ISBN 978-0-393-33928-4, www.wwnorton.com, 15.95)
David Foster Wallace was the author of Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996) and other novels. Many regard him as one of the great thinkers of our time. Twenty years of depression, however, led him to take his own life at the age of 46. This edition of Everything and More, appearing several years after Wallace's death, benefits from a foreword by Neal Stephenson, who, like Wallace, grew up in a midwestern American college town. Stephenson sees Wallace's writing about an abstruse subject in which he was not academically trained as a perfectly normal reflection of that upbringing.
Though his graduate degree was in fine arts, Wallace distinguished himself in his undergaduate studies at Amherst by writing a prize-winning thesis on the arcane subject of modal logic. Thus he was well prepared to examine the philosophical and mathematical precursors of Georg Cantor (1845 - 1918), who establised a consistent mathematical basis for studying the infinite. Cantor died as a result of mental illness, as did Kurt Gödel after him. Wallace considers this evidence of the dangers of abstract thinking. He defines sanity as the ability to cut off a line of abstract thinking that won't end.
Wallace has stylistic quirks that make him difficult to read. He seems obsessed with saving space. He uses abbreviations frequently. For example, he may mention the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem in one paragraph, then without warning refer to it as the BWT a few paragraphs later. He also uses footnotes extensively for digressions. He provides codes designed to help you decide how important these digressions are, but it's safer to ignore the codes and read all of the digressions. He begins the book with a "Small but Necessary Foreword." Unfortunately, none of the chapters have titles, and the transition from the end of the foreword to the beginning of the first chapter is so slight that I read hundreds of pages thinking I was still in an ironically named foreword.
Cantor's work comes at the end of a long journey that begins with Zeno's paradoxes. Wallace follows the philosophical, logical, and mathematical paths that lead from antiquity to Cantor. If you enjoy reading about modern mathematics, you'll enjoy this fascinating story.
Friedman Again
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Created and How We Can Come Back by Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2011, 396pp, ISBN 978-0-374-28890-7, www.fsgbooks.com, $28.00)
In earlier columns I reviewed two of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's books: The World Is Flat (May/June 2005) and Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Jan/Feb 2009). This time Friedman teams up with his friend Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy. The book returns to many of the themes of Friedman's earlier books. Unlike those earlier books, this one explicitly explores the implications of the authors' findings for American domestic policy.
Both men grew up in 1950s middle America and are alarmed at some of the changes they see. They identify four major challenges facing us, and they prescribe a return to the formula for success that they believe the country followed in the days of their youth. The challenges are as follows:
- Adapting to globalization.
- Adjusting to rapid advances in information technology.
- Dealing with deficits, debt, and future obligations.
- Dealing with energy consumption and climate change.
The formula, based on the principle of using public funds to share burdens, is as follows:
- Provide public education for all.
- Provide and maintain infrastructure.
- Assimilate substantial waves of immigration.
- Support research and development.
- Regulate private economic activity.
That Used to Be Us shows how to apply the formula to the challenges. The details are political as well as technical. It's an easy read and well worth your time.
Teaching by Manga
Manga are, in essence, comic books done in a specific style. Developed in Japan, they are now popular in America and elsewhere. The following books exploit manga conventions to convey serious messages.
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel H Pink, art by Rob Ten Pas (Riverhead Books/Penguin, New York, 2008, 160pp, ISBN 978-1-59448-291-5, us.penguingroup.com, $15.00)
Trained as a lawyer, Daniel Pink served as a speech writer during the Clinton administration. Now he publishes books and articles on business and technology. In 2007 he won a fellowship to go to Japan to study the manga industry. When he came back, he worked with a manga artist to write a self-help business book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. I bought this book on the recommendation of my friend Andrea Ames, a senior technical staff member at IBM.
Johnny Bunko is new to the workforce. He likes art, but on his dad's advice, he majored in accounting so he would always have a job. Now, as a clueless new accountant at the Boggs Corporation, he is floundering. Eating Japanese takeout at his desk late at night, he discovers that by snapping apart his wooden chopsticks, he can make a magic career consultant appear. To make a long story short, she leads him through a series of work situations, each of which teaches him a new lesson. The lessons are as follows:
- There is no plan -- you can't predict what's going to happen, so you might as well do what you like.
- Think strengths, not weaknesses, that is, you're better off developing your strengths than trying to shore up your weaknesses.
- It's not about you -- focus on your customer.
- Persistence trumps talent -- keep trying and eventually you'll get there.
- Make excellent mistakes -- it's better to try something big and fail than to be too cautious.
- Leave an imprint -- don't wait until your career is over to ask what you'll be remembered for.
The manga tells a coherent, engaging story that drives these lessons home. It's well worth the hour or so it might take to read it.
The Manga Guide to Statistics by Shin Takahashi (No Starch, San Francisco, 2008, 224pp, ISBN 978-1-59327-189-3, www.oreilly.com, $19.95)
This is one of a series of Manga Guides to technical subjects -- not the newest, but the one judged by my in-house manga expert (my daughter) to be the most successful of the lot because it is both a good manga and a good textbook. Bright, boy-crazy high school girl Rui decides that she wants to learn statistics because her father's handsome young employee, Mr Igarashi, is a statistics whiz. Her father agrees to have her tutored in the subject but to her disappointment substitutes another young employee, Mr Yamamoto, whose most prominent feature is his nerdy eyeglasses.
Yamamoto teaches her all about statistics using believable examples from high-school life. She learns about numerical and categorical data, distributions, probabilities, correlations, and hypothesis testing. If she reads the appendix, she also learns how to use Excel to store and manipulate data. In the end, Mr Igarashi turns out to be married. Yamamoto's eyeglasses break, and Rui sees his face for the first time and falls for him instead.
If you know any manga fans who want to learn basic statistics, get them a copy of this book.
Publishing Effective Books
The next two books deal with the art and craft of turning thoughts into professionally published works.
Developmental Editing by Scott Norton (Chicago, 2009, 252pp, ISBN 978-0-226-59514-6, www.press.uchicago.edu, $35.00)
Many factors go into making a good manuscript -- the writer's knowledge, perceptiveness, and imagination to name some important ones. But the step from a manuscript to a successful book requires a different talent, one that many writers do not have. That is where developmental editors come in.
Scott Norton is developmental editor and project manager for science at the University of California Press. As Norton points out, the process of developmental editing is not only complex but also difficult to illustrate by simple examples. He creates several extended narrative examples and uses them to illustrate different aspects of the process he follows when working with manuscripts. The narrative examples are sufficiently detailed to illustrate his processes yet much easier to work with than actual manuscripts.
The intricate way Norton put this book together enables him to convey a lot of material in ten short chapters. Creating the examples was a deceptively difficult task, which he accomplished highly successfully. The book is worth reading simply to admire the craft with which Norton constructed it.
The craft of developmental editing, as Norton presents it in this book, can be learned. If you are doing other kinds of editing and wish to branch out, this book will help. If you are an author who reads this book in order to work more effectively with developmental editors, you may find that Norton's perspective helps you improve your writing. In fact, if you have anything at all to do with writing and publishing, I think you'll enjoy this book. I have done developmental editing, but I still learned a lot from reading it.
The IBM Style Guide: Conventions for Writers and Editors by Francis DeRespinis et al (IBM Press/Pearson, Upper Saddle River NJ, 2012, 416pp, ISBN 978-0-13-210130-1, www.ibmpressbooks.com, $39.99)
Style guides have an important role in any publishing process. Even a single work by a single author can benefit from a brief list of names, product terminology, or style choices, so that they remain consistent throughout the work. Several writers collaborating on an online help system for a large software package need more substantial lists, and corporate style guides arise from such needs. These guides are often amalgams of style rules, publishing procedures, and guidelines for using software packages or markup languages. Creating a corporate style guide can be a long and acrimonious process that duplicates a lot of work that others have done better.
The style guides of large organizations like the University of Chicago Press or Microsoft often receive wide distribution outside those organizations and establish standards for whole industries. The most successful corporate style guides delegate most style decisions to such standard guides and focus on styles and terminology that are important in their product documentation. The IBM Style Guide follows this model to some extent, delegating many decisions to the Chicago Manual of Style. But it also covers a wide range of material of interest to others in the computer industry. Because it is clear, consistent, and thorough, it seems likely to become an industry standard.
Style guides can turn arbitrary choices into annoyingly rigid rules. The IBM Style Guide presents the reasons behind its choices, and I haven't found any choices that would bother me if I had to follow them. The explanations also make it easier to make good decisions about issues that the guide does not address. The guide is exceptionally well written -- not always the case with style guides -- though I did notice one dangling modifier in a table in an appendix.
I have seen many computer industry style guides. I believe that the Microsoft guide is the most widely used, but The IBM Style Guide has a good chance to supplant it. I do not like the early versions of the Microsoft Manual of Style. I have seen previews of the upcoming fourth edition, and it looks much better. If you are writing about Microsoft products, that is an added reason to use the Microsoft guide, so I'm sure it will remain popular. Nonetheless, The IBM Style Guide is superior to any version of the Microsoft guide that I have seen so far. If you are part of a writing group looking for an industry standard style guide, consider this one.
