Research scientist and bona fide musician Daniel J. Levitin is out with a new book, “The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.” VeryShortList wonders out loud, “So ‘Baby Got Back’ is in the Love category? Comfort? Knowledge?”

Those would be three of the six categories. The others are Friendship (”Can’t We Still Be Friends”), Joy (um, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?) and Religion (”God Save the Queen”). But seriously, Levitin takes an earnest look at condensing the human experience with music into understandable stanzas, so to speak.
Reviewer Theodore Rushton writes at Amazon.com:

“Exquisitely written, it is really about ourselves because we are such a musical species. It makes me wonder: What if humans had never learned to talk, but merely communicate through music? It seems far more reasonable than merely talking without understanding — at which we’re all too expert.”

Getting back to the headline above: There have been some profoundly angry songs over the years: “Four Dead in Ohio” (About the 1970 Kent State shootings, which anger an entire generation to this day), “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (Massacre in Northern Ireland), “Horse to Water” (from REM’s most recent CD, “Accelerate”). Maybe the next edition will include a seventh category.

For more, CLICK HERE.

“Black & White and Dead All Over,” a murder mystery set in a modern newspaper newsroom, features plenty of gallows humor in ‘John Darnton’s new novel. USAToday says, “Drawing on his storied career at The New York Times, Darnton delivers a well-turned whodunit that reads like The Front Page with additional reporting by Evelyn Waugh and Agatha Christie.”
A colorful cast of characters populates the novel, including reporters and a certain New Zealand publisher whose name rings vaguely familiar: Lester Moloch (almost rhymes with Murdoch).

To read all about it, CLICK HERE.

In “The Gridlock Economy,” Michael Heller says that having too many owners holding a piece of the economic pie causes the whole system to shut down, hurting everybody involved.

He gives the example of an entity trying to obtain several parcels of property by eminent domain, only to be stymied by one owner who holds out, either out of a desire to keep the property or to extract a higher price. The project never gets completed in some cases, or spends years in court.

The basic thrust of his book is that, in many cases, a monopoly is more efficient than competing mini-monopolies constantly undermining one another and by extension hurting the consumer. A monopoly assures its future health by making sure its consumers remain healthy enough to continue buying its products or services.

To read a more extensive review of “The Gridlock Economy,” CLICK HERE.

The AMC cable series “Mad Men” might have limited exposure, but its influence in pop culture runs deep. The cigarette-smoking, martini-swilling culture and its clothing fashions of the’60s (no, not that hippie stuff) has touched off a wave of nostalgia (and a little hostility in some corners) for all things 1960s. Even a book of poetry has gotten an unexpected boost from the show. Says Advertising Age:

“(Fashion designer )Michael Kors isn’t the only one getting inspired by ‘Mad Men.’ Don Draper is also responsible for sparking a revival in sales of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. After a few moments of exposure on a recent episode, sales of ‘Meditations in an Emergency,’ a book of poems published in 1957, skyrocketed, perhaps proving that for budget-starved book publishers, one smart brand integration can make all the difference.

“Eric Price, associate publisher at Grove Press, would not reveal exact numbers but said that sales for the O’Hara book increased more than 218% compared with this time last year. Those are remarkable numbers for any book — and unheard of for a collection of poems by an author who died more than 40 years ago.”

For more, CLICK HERE, scroll down to the second article.

It seems that the Ayatollah Kohmeini wasn’t the only party writer Salmon Rushdie annoyed.

In his autobiography, “On Her Majesty’s Service,” former Special Branch detective Ron Evans wrote that the author of “The Satanic Verses” so infuriated his British protectors that they once locked him in a cupboard while they went out for a pint or two at a nearby pub. No wonder that comedian Dennis Miller once joked that Rushie was in a “rush to die.”

Rushdie, whose book was seen by some to blaspheme Islam, led the Iranian Ayatollah to issue a fatwah for Rushdie’s death in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He had a knack for annoying the people who were supposed to protect him.

Writes the Telegraph of London: “Evans paints an unflattering picture of Rushdie as tight-fisted, rude and arrogant, and claims the team of protection officers nicknamed him Scruffy because of his unkempt appearance.”

Nobody said protecting the First Amendment (which doesn’t apply in England anyway) was easy.
For more, CLICK HERE.

Randy Pausch, a well-regarded scientist who rocketed to even greater fame after the publication of “The Last Lecture,” has died.
The Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science in Pittsburgh died Friday, 10 months after he was told he had a few months to live. What started as an actual lecture after learning of his terminal condition, word of his inspiring words went viral and propelled Pausch to unexpected fame outside of academic circles. The book adaptation, “The Last Lecture,” was a New York Times No. 1 best-seller.

To learn more, CLICK HERE.

Jim Holt had a serious assignment from The New Yorker: “Why does humor makes us laugh?” Along the way he learned that there have been non-laughers in history: Sir Isaac Newton was always serious, and Josef Stalin was no day at the beach (or the comedy club). The assignment grew into a life of its own, and now you have the book.

His book, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: The History and Philosophy of Jokes,” manages to be funny even as it helps explain the mechanisms allow humor to makes us laugh. Writes Very Short List:

“Freud’s take on jokes was interesting (he saw them as a release of inhibitions) but his delivery absurdly terrible (’An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance . . .’).”

http://www.veryshortlist.com/vsl/daily.cfm/review/512/Book/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-a-history-and-philosophy-of-jokes/?tp

Dissecting the feminine psychology

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com

The other day I won a bingo-like game during one of the summer courses at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. I was the first to call out four corners – which meant I got first pick of several books spread out on a table. For my prize, I chose a thin paperback titled She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, by the psychologist Robert A. Johnson.
After class, the instructor’s husband, a defense attorney from the Buffalo area, whispered that I had picked the best book there.
Interesting paradox, right off. First, a book written by a man about understanding women. (Are we not sufficiently unpredictable to remain a collective mystery?) And second, another man saying “right on.”
OK, enough of the jibjab. Johnson is a noted lecturer in the teachings of the late psychologist Carl Jung, and this Buffalo defense lawyer is married to an expert on Jung and he, along with his wife, studied at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. The book She examines the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche and what it says about the universal challenges that women face.
My revised edition, published in 1989 by HarperCollins, is only 80 pages, so it didn’t take long to read. For me, not every point was easy to understand. But it was well worth getting through the occasional difficult passages to discover the many precious nuggets of timeless wisdom.
Take this little tip as an example: “If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life.”
Or this: “For a young woman to cope with her mother-in-law’s power system is to attain feminine maturity.”
The myth of Amor and Psyche is one of those stories you can spend a lifetime studying and still not uncover all the nuances. In the broadest sense, the story deals with the suffering that Psyche must endure to come into her own, be the authentic person she was meant to be, and reach her full potential in life. The process requires Psyche to meet challenge after challenge, until finally she must travel to the underworld. Yet as painful as her journey is, there is reward in the end. She ultimately marries Eros (or Amor, depending on your version of the story) and the two give birth to a daughter named Pleasure.
And the mystery of women? Near the end of the book, when he describes Psyche emerging from Hades, Johnson addresses this point:
“The deepest interior mystery for a woman may not be named or given any label,” he writes. “It is the essence of that feminine quality which must remain a mystery, certainly to men, and hardly less so for women. It is not less than the element of healing itself.”
Also, you might be interested in a couple of companion titles by Johnson: He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, and We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.

Tor, the sci-fi imprint of Macmillan, is ending its weekly giveaway of e-books, but not before unleashing one final giveaway bonanza.
Says Publishersmarketplace.com:

“This has had some odd side-effects, such as convincing some people that the name of the site you are now looking at will be ‘Watch the Skies,’ or that its main purpose will be to give away free e-books, perhaps along with free cars, savings bonds, real estate, a pony, etc.” The site has now turned into a sci-fi community vertical, with regular news and blog posts and an extensive message board.

“But they are ending the program in a blaze of free-dom: through Sunday, site visitors can still download any or all of the 24 books (plus a batch of free wallpapers) in formats that include HTML, PDF and Mobi.”

Scoop ‘em up while you can, before they’re gone. The cover art is interesting too. To visit the site, CLICK HERE.

I was half-listening to the NPR guy talking about three must-read baseball books, and my ears perked up when I heard Veeck — as in Wreck.” It’s a funny title based on the whacky baseball life of an unapologetic baseball huckster. He left his mark with the Cleveland Indians, among other baseball franchises. I remember seeing it on my dad’s nightstand in the last year of his life. My dad grew up in the Cleveland area, Solon mostly, moved to Columbus when he was in high school and went to Ohio State (as did I — go to Ohio State, that is, not grow up in Solon). But he always had great affection for all things Cleveland, including the Indians and the Browns. Both teams had good years, and they had interminable stretches of being either mediocre or downright awful, especially the Indians.

Veeck (rhymes with wreck) was one colorful character connected to the Indians, staging goofball promotions and fielding funny characters in the games — anything to put butts in chairs, as the expression goes. As far as I can tell, he was not connected with the 10-cent beer fiasco of the early-mid ’70s, one of the most infamous riots in sports history.

But that radio commentator declaring Veeck — as in Wreck a must-read seemed to create a connection to a memory that had begun to fade.

Brought a smile to my face. The reason Alan Schwarz of the New York Times liked it and the other two titles so much is that they didn’t get all nostalgic about the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent — because it wasn’t. It was racist, for starters. As Lou Brock told him a while back, baseball tends to reflect society as a whole. Baseball in the ’40s was segregated, observing the same ugly Jim Crow laws American society honored. To look back at the ’40s and ’50s and see segregation viewed as something that’s normal is as foreign to today’s kids as is the concept of slavery. It simply does not compute.

So yeah, maybe you could get a bag of peanuts for a nickel and a beer didn’t cost $8 (or more), but there are some things in baseball’s history that we ought not be so proud of.

Kind of got off on a rant there, didn’t I? Oh, well.