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

 

[deluxestogie]

Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, by João José Reis. (1995) Translated from Portuguese.

In a news story from January 4, 2026, the headline read:​

Nigerian village raid leaves at least 30 dead, others abducted.​

This sort of event used to happen in every part of the world, in every culture, and with regularity, ever since tribes of humans began to bump into one another. Although it is not as widespread as it used to be (mostly as the result of the political and social consolidation of power into the hands of elites), it is still reported pretty much on a weekly basis somewhere—and not just in sub-Saharan Africa.

Once Europeans developed the ability to sail to and from the African coast (about 600 years ago), African tribes discovered that it could be quite profitable to sell their captives to European traders. Likewise, European traders cashed in on the profit of selling those captives as slaves in Europe, and eventually in the newly colonized lands of the Western Hemisphere.

This book discusses a significant number of slave uprisings in the area of Bahia, Brazil, during the early 1800s. The text is what I will charitably call "data rich", that is, it presents far more detail, and quite specific details—including data tables and graphs, than what I would expect from a typical history book. This is because the content is a lightly edited doctoral thesis, which the author submitted to complete his Ph.D.

Within the United States, we have always harbored the notion that African slaves were ignorant, wild savages, brought to the Americas from the jungles of Africa. While tribal warfare in Africa did generate the supply of slaves, these captives were often from urban populations of quite civilized, well educated cultures. Islam (and its accompanying mandate of literacy) had spread through much of Africa long before the start of the Atlantic slave trade.

In Bahia, Brazil, even as recently as the early 19th century, many of the wealthy, powerful, white, slave holding, Portuguese plantation owners (growing sugar cane, tobacco, etc.) were uneducated and illiterate. By contrast, quite a number of their slaves were educated (prior to capture) and were literate. Slave owners were alarmed by discovering slaves passing written messages in a script that the whites were unable to decipher. The educated, Portuguese officials in the towns were also unable to read it. It was Arabic script!

I found it curious that many of the black slaves of Bahia expressed enmity not only toward Portuguese and whites in general, but also toward free-born blacks, freed slaves, free mulattoes and even currently enslaved mulattoes. There is seldom a purity of cause in a revolt or revolution.

From a sociological standpoint, it is not surprising that slaves from different African "nations" tended to congregate with others of the same ethnic background, distrusting outsider groups. We, of course, saw the same thing among free immigrants to the US, over the centuries. Those from different countries tended to live and socialize primarily with fellow countrymen.

The massive, repressive response to this failed rebellion in Bahia is thoroughly documented here. The final chapter has a contemporary, familiar feel.

[Slavery did not officially end in Brazil until 1888.]

Just as a side note: the used copy of the book that I read contained pen or pencil underlining, marked by different hands, but they abruptly end after page 124—just past the half-way point. Apparently, the weight of detail and of sociological discussion must have bored previous readers.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

A Natural History of Empty Lots: field notes from urban edgelands, back alleys, and other wild places, by Christopher Brown. (2025) ppb

You are familiar with the kinds of places explored in this book: unmowed right-of-way margins of roads, ragged patches of weeds and trees behind industrial buildings, land surrounding abandoned buildings, woods-like areas that nobody has "maintained", and even abandoned house properties within urban decay. This book mostly focuses on such areas at the edge of Austin, Texas, but the discoveries are equally applicable to at least some areas around most cities.

This is generally enjoyable reading. The narrative hops back and forth in time, ranging from Iowa to Texas. It's part biological discovery, awe, and autobiography. Christopher Brown is a lawyer, an accomplished writer, and a social oddball, deciding to build a house at the edge of a crumbling, industrial wasteland.

In addition to the wildlife and other biology, we can see the connections between corporations and banking interests on the one hand, and local political decisions regarding land use on the other. We also see a typical human life stumbling through marriage, divorce, child rearing, job choices and disillusionment. There are influences of the real estate collapse of 2007, all the way to the much more recent impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It might also clarify our odd sense of satisfaction in the dirt connection required by our attempts to grow our own tobacco and vegetables.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being. by Marc G. Berman. (2025)

Who wouldn't appreciate a boost in cognitive, physical and social well-being?

The book focuses on the notion of our finite pool of "directed attention", needed, for example, to complete a task, read a book, study for an exam, or follow a conversation. When that pool of directed attention begins to deplete, we find it difficult to focus, and our minds wander. Our directed attention must be periodically refreshed.

That is contrasted with the attention demanded by intrusions into our awareness by sirens, blinking SUBSCRIBE buttons, new email notifications, a bear wandering into the neighborhood, and a thousand other impingements that startle our attention. [Nearly everything about an urban environment, or a TV, or smartphone, is ranked among that latter group.] This is our intrinsic "fight or flight" reaction.

I feel rejuvenated by sitting out on my front porch, with a pasture in front of me, a ragged tree line to my right—with its usual abundance of birds and critters, as well as the endless variations of the sky.​

In this exploration of the recently invented, Environmental Neuroscience, "invented" by the book's author—as he boastfully, repeatedly proclaims throughout the book—attempts to show that it is not only sleep, but exposure to nature that rejuvenates our directed attention, and seeks to determine what specifically it is about nature that rejuvenates us. A few of the candidates are:

• particular colors
• color transitions
• curves vs. straight lines
• fractal visual impressions
• both the pitch and fractalness of sounds
• aromas

There is an abundance of truly interesting information and speculation in these pages.

The author is a psychologist with the math and engineering skills to utilize functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRI) in conducting some of his studies. As with nearly all published studies in psychology, there are a lot of squishy correlations that imply causality, but never adequately prove causality.

The book is as much about the process of discovering connections as it is about the actual findings. Embedded within all this is the authors autobiography.

As an editor, I sense a sloppiness about the book. Chapter after chapter feels like an audio recording of a casual lecture or conversation. I suspect that the printed text is actually a transcription of such lectures, and minimally edited into book form. Not to worry. It's a short book.

The final chapter is pie-in-the-sky optimism about our wondrous future as a species.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

I recently saw a video of a 9 year old pet cow using an assortment of appropriately selected tools (sticks, poles, and long-handle brushes, held in its mouth) to intentionally scratch itself in various body parts. Apparently, we've never allow cows to grow old enough to fully develop their brains' potential. Cows can meaningfully use tools! They can't play a flute, but they can cleverly scratch what itches. An elderly neighbor of mine, who spent most of his life dairy farming, said that cows are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. And apparently some dogs can learn to understand hundreds of words!

Those notions may have been what triggered my purchase of these two used textbooks on animal behavior.

Principles of Animal Behavior, second edition, by Lee Alan Dugatkin. (2009)

Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach, ninth edition, by John Alcock. (2009)

Each of these books is a large (9"x 11"x 1"), floppy, full glossy color interior paperback that weighs about 3½ pounds. Since they were both inexpensive, used books, and I couldn't decide between them...well...I bought both. After reading both of them, I have no regrets. Besides, what else is there to do during a month of relentlessly horrid, winter weather?

The subjects discussed range from surprisingly "intelligent" insect behaviors, behavioral causes for bird feather coloration, the difference in size of fish offspring that are determined by their predation threat, mating habits vs. male aggression, monogamous voles vs. polygamous voles, the benefits of infanticide, all the way to brain changes in various birds exposed to different sound environments. And there are the ducks that sleep with half their brain, while keeping one eye open. Why do animals play? How do they know they are just playing? What are the benefits of suicidal mating?

A brief taste: Among macaques (a type of primate) in a zoo setting in Japan (i.e. food is provided, no predators, lots of leisure time available), a 4 year old female initially collected some rocks, and developed the personal amusement of piling, stacking and rearranging them in various ways. Many other macaques there gradually began to do the same thing with rocks they had collected themselves. All of those who joined the recreational fad were younger than the originator. None of the macaques who were older paid any attention to it.

My pleasure in reading about these studies actually increased as I continued to read further. If you have had a biology course during the last few decades, you should have little difficulty in understanding the text. (Their rare, math outbursts can be comfortably ignored.)

Which of these two books should you choose? They offer their discussions of assorted behaviors, using different teaching approaches. My preference is for the Alcock book.

Alan Dugatkin's book presents mostly the proven hypotheses on animal behavior, as well as the specific studies that support them. It has a somewhat stuffy, British university feel. But it is filled with sometimes surprising information.

John Alcock's book, by contrast, is written in a more relaxing style. (He spent his entire career at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff.) For each behavioral category (e.g. display, foraging, predation, mating, communication, etc.), it explores the characteristics of a specific behavior, then puts forward all the likely hypotheses that might explain it—some of which must be incorrect. This is followed by the studies that either support or disprove each of the likely hypotheses. So the reader gains a better sense of the working methodology of animal behavior science, rather than just a collection of conclusions.

Bob

 

[BarG]

Ok , here's a book related to Texas history and a property my family currently owns. When Santa Anna defeated the Alamo, settlers were running from his burn everything, there were few areas to escape. Depending on location. One was called paso tomas located on our property across the Trinity river.. until he was defeated at San jacinto. There were 30000 people bogged down in the mud with their wagons waiting for the river to subside from flood stage in and around the area of the crossing. It was given to me by an historian researching the actual physical spot where the crossing was in 1836. His relative lead the charge at San jacinto so he's done a ton of research and convinced that it was on our property.

He's got a son qualified to fly drones , I've been letting him, and he's been using ai for his research for maps and topological views, and affiliated sites to research. As I said, he has vested interest.

The original owner of our property, his son was killed by indians on the river, not far away, every one got across but him he was shot with an arrow by commanches

Every since it's been referred to as the old Bozeman place.

We got a big as canyon dug by treasure hunters looking for his buried money, my great grandma said, I quote, and I never even got a can of worms from it. Lol

My barg Bull stuff, till next time, strange but true.

 

[deluxestogie]

A Fish Caught In Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg. (2001)

Several decades ago, my son (then in high school) and I went for dinner at a restaurant serving a seafood buffet. Among the items offered was a breaded, deep-fried, whole catfish. My son laughed at it, and said, "It looks like a coelacanth." He and I have laughed about it ever since.

During the early 1800s, a remarkable fossil of a primitive fish was discovered in rock layers dating back to 400 million years ago. The fossil fish appeared to have four legs, with fins at the end of them. For context, that's twice as old as the dinosaur era. Earth was different back then.

Britannica.com

In 1938, a living coelacant was caught off the coast of South Africa. This set off a frenzy of accusations, denials, diplomatic threats, and a bevy of half-crazed scientists, seeking more coelacanths.

This small book is a chronologic story of mini-biographies of all the people (and governments) obsessed with the fish. So, although the book is about a fish, it is more about people—lots of crazy people.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, by Mark W. Moffett. (2010)

This delightful book, by a National Geographic photographer and ant scholar is not only loaded with stunning, macro photos, but also presents ant colonies as "super-organisms", which utilize the unique sizes and distinct functions of their various labor casts in much the same way that the diverse, dumb tissues of a mammal's body (say, a human body) work together to define an individual animal. And ants have been doing this successfully for many of millions of years.

A weaver ant uses one of its own larvae like a glue gun, to squirt silk that will bind two leaves together.

We encounter some amazing things here.

• omnivores
• strict carnivores
• absolute vegetarians
• animal husbandry and herding
• meticulous housekeeping
• gymnastics
• complex communications
• sustainable harvesting
• ant-plant partnerships
• fortifications
• the massive wave front of marauder ants surging forward
• the focused line of attack of army ants
• leaf cutter ants tending their fungus gardens, and taking out the garbage
• raids by one ant species on the nest of a different ant species, in order to kidnap and enslave their captives
• war and peace
• methods of attack and methods of defense
• different species of ants living peacefully at different levels of the same tree
• ants of one species grooming the warriors of a different species
• the birth and death of ant colonies
• elderly and injured ants cast out of the nest to die (i.e. no retirement allowed)
• fleeting pheromone trails and durably constructed highways
• the book's author getting repeatedly bitten by ants, as he studies and photographs them

As with most of the (usually used) books that I purchase, this one was found on thriftbooks.com.

Bob

 

[yesrepeatno]

Loving the book reviews from you Bob, thanks for sharing. I just finished rereading Blindsight by Peter Watts, a book that gets more and more relevant by the day. It's set in a post-scarcity future where natural humans are practically obsolete, vampires have been brought back to life on purpose and an alien civilization has just made itself known to our solar system. Highly recommended to any fans of science fiction in general.