Reading Lamps and Smoking Jackets

[Redleaf]

“weirder than I assumed. I obsessively read books cover-to-cover”
That’s generally how I read as well. Over the years I have given up on a few books that just got too stupid or bizarrely badly written. I also prefer to read one book at a time with the exception of a bedside book with short anecdotes or brief histories that don’t captivate me and lead to all night reading sessions.

 

[deluxestogie]

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, by Mark Pendergrast. (1999).

When I was on a Scout camping trip at the age of 14, I brought along a small jar of Medaglia D'Oro instant espresso coffee (smuggled out of my home), and made myself my very first cup of morning coffee. I thereafter considered myself to be an adult. That was the early 1960s. At the time, I did not realize that instant coffee had only become widely available in the US a little more than a decade earlier.

This book is entirely about coffee. Where did it come from? How did its plantings spread throughout so much of the tropical world? And how did it become a beverage consumed nearly everywhere?

This book is about slavery and indentured labor. It is about wealth and poverty. About land reforms and land confiscations. It is about international relations and international commodity exchanges. It is about the brutality of economic cycles. It is about democracies and (mostly) dictatorships. It's about politics and the power of consumers. And it's about a commodity considered critical to the deployment of military troops abroad.

This book is about health claims—both the valid and the silly—that first appeared hundreds of years ago, and continue to this day. It's about coffee shops that served as breeding grounds for philosophy, immoral behavior, and anti-government conspiracies.

Above all, this is a book about marketing—successes and failures. If you have ever spent more than $3 for a fine cigar, then you will quickly recognize the marketeering manipulations, the hype, the claims of exclusivity, the shell games, the misrepresentations and the outright deceptions. There are classic visual signals for triggering a purchase. While the book is discussing coffee marketeering, it certainly brings to my mind cigars that bear multiple, elaborate cigar bands, plus a ribbon at the foot. (The art of today's cigar boxes and cigar bands may be originating from the very same advertising agencies paid tens of millions to create the visual presentation of coffee container colors and logos and slogans and spokespersons and TV jingles.)

Over the course of the book, you will read both familiar and unfamiliar names of brands and people. (The older you are, the more easily you will recognize the extinct brands of coffee.) And you will surely learn more about the nature of coffee bean growing and harvesting, coffee bean processing, and coffee bean varieties as well as their sources.

Bob

 

[DaleB]

Nothing quite so historical, I’m afraid. I just finished Redshirts by John Scalzi. Entertaining enough, and I’ll admit that the very last page brought a little tear to my eye.

 

[44Smokeless]

Book data reveals most readers quit almost immediately
"Those impressive-looking hardcovers on your shelf? Statistically, you probably stopped reading them around chapter two."
Book data reveals most readers quit almost immediately

I'm apparently weirder than I assumed. I obsessively read books cover-to-cover. That is not true of my assorted reference books (e.g. dictionaries, CRC Handbook, etc.), but for every other book, I can't touch the next book until I've finished the current one. [For unfathomable reasons, I purchased a used copy of Differential Equations for Dummies last summer. I made two separate efforts to read it, but just couldn't bear continuing beyond about the first 30 pages.]

Over the decades, I've found that even books that feel taxing or boring early on will usually blossom into something meaningful, enlightening, or entertaining further on.

Bob

Well Bob, I've read a lot of books that just weren't worth the time finishing, sadly a lot of those books written in the last forty or so years. But I'm still working on Beowulf and the Greek classics.

But...I've got two books that are guaranteed to sit on the shelf but provide years of returning to read and guaranteed to inspire.They are related in that both explore the human mind's approach to problem solving.

The first is mandatory reading for any young person that will ever use math, not sure if they still use math; Morris Kline's CALCULUS: An Intuitive and Physical Approach. I still occasionally return to this book, admittedly around bedtime with that last smoke of the evening.

Kline approaches the whole of calculus from the derivative to the differential equation, Taylor's Theorem and Keppler's Law of Motion as progression of mathematical problem solving. He does a wonderful job of explaining both the context of how calculus builds on itself as well as a thorough job of explaining equations. Anybody that has ever read a college level calculus book, or physical chemistry book, will appreciate the detailed job Klein does of explaining the step by step process of solving for ...

The second book is Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, by Robert Buckminster Fuller; an interesting thinker who made up his own language and redefined our approach to thinking based on universal principles of geometry and science. Fuller has many real accomplishments including the geodesic dome, nano-tubes and Bucky balls, carbon fullerene chemistry is named after him.

There are numerous ytube videos of Fuller giving lectures, I recommend listening to a couple. He has a very interesting approach to life which started at a young age and questioning not just the content of information but the architecture of the thinking underlying a society. He's a colorful guy and the book works back and forth from geometry and math, to sociological observations.

In discussing nature and knots, Fuller notes that while primates hold hands which is form of knot, only humans can tie knots, thus his quote "the mind saw the knot but the monkey did not".

The book can be an intense read on geometry and its consequences, including concepts like "Tensegrity" which are now the basis for robotic suspension systems and modern architecture. But it is also an interesting read in that Fuller explores the role of geometry and physics as it is integrated into life itself as an organizing principle.

And so on this balmy Chicago Christmas Day 2025, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday, Good Reads and Good Smokes

Cheers

 

[deluxestogie]

Amazing. My very first Calculus book was the same Morris Kline book, back in 1967! Another of his wonderful books (which I see high on a bookshelf in my study right now) is Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times.

I have always regarded Buckminster Fuller as one of the cultural "outsiders" (alluded to in Toynbee's A Study of History) that episodically disrupt the inevitable stagnation of societies. At one time, in the distant past, I had planned a small education and housing complex of interconnected, ferrocement domes at the summit of Mourne Brigand, in northern Haïti. That never went beyond the sketch stage.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Medieval Persia:1040-1797 by David Morgan. (1988)

This little book contains only 167 pages of text, plus another 35 pages of back matter. I questioned whether or not to post a review of it, since the topic seems a bit esoteric.

Over the decades, I've studied the history of medieval Europe, as well as that of the Arab world during that same period. I've read about Genghis Khan's conquest of much of Asia and the Middle East. So, what happened in Persia after the Mongols took over?

My guess regarding this particular book is that it was intended for university students who signed up for a course on such a narrow subject (perhaps taught by the author?). It is terse, and loaded with barely pronounceable names as well as dates (always displayed as both the Islamic date and the Western, Gregorian year. A date range might look like (431-485/1040-1092). This is tedious to read.

As I read, I realized that nearly each and every nomadic tribe in western Asia (there were lots of them), at one time or another—sometimes multiple times, invaded the areas that are now Iran and Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and eastern Turkey. Almost 700 years of non-stop invasions. And today, many of those tribes have their own, defined countries (Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, etc.).

In any world history class, we hear of Timur (Tamerlane), but don't really get to see the intense, non-stop pillage and destruction he seemed to enjoy. It is surveyed here.

The author also explores the apparent fluidity of religions that swept, wave after wave, through Persia.

While this book is not particularly fun to read, it's short. So the pain doesn't last for too long. And you may come away with a better appreciation for the enduring chaos in that part of the world.

Bob