Reader’s Diary

Evan I. Schwartz

L. Frank Baum tried – and failed at – a number of careers before writing one of the most popular books of all time.   Schwartz interprets Baum’s life as an example of Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey.   He also uses Eastern religious ideas as found in Theosophy (Baum’s mother-in-law was, in addition to being a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, and active Theosophist) to frame Baum’s life as a search for his true self.

Imposing these structures on his subject makes for an interesting book but one which is almost entirely about Baum’s pre-Oz life.  I would have liked more detail on the actual writing of the Oz books and felt that Baum’s post-Oz years were shortchanged in service of Schwartz’s narrative scheme.   It’s also the case that Schwartz sometimes seems to stretch a little far to fit Baum’s life and times into his theme. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting book and Baum’s life provides a good framework for looking at the America’s Gilded Age.

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Matthew B. Crawford

This is a small book that contains a lot.  It’s hard to describe.  The title implies that it’s about eduction or the value of work and the cover implies that it’s a romantic tale of blue color virtue.  It is instead a very serious philosophical inquiry into what makes work satisfying.

To Crawford a key characteristic of satisfying work is that it is directed at a measurable goal: the motorcycle that is properly tuned or the electrical conduit properly bent.  He suggests that it is the lack of such goals that make corporate workplaces so unsatisfying and contrasts the job site “crew” to the corporate “team”.  In the first, success based on competence leads to mutual respect; in the second, survival depends on how one constructs a workplace personality and navigates a territory with an ambiguous map.

Crawford’s antidote to the depersonalization of work and the corporate severing of work from the community and, even, the product, is to find work that site-specific.   The person who has to be with his work, whether he be a teacher or a plumber, has an advantage in a world where (as Crawford points out) “workers of the world unite” has become not a revolutionary battle cry but a description of globalization’s race to the bottom.  Not only will the site-specific worker survive economically, but he may well have a more satisfying work life because his contribution to a specific community is more apparent.

You could argue that it’s all well and good for Crawford to advocate finding work in a niche, but, after all, most of us can’t do that.  Still, it is better to understand the world one lives in and this book is a contribution to that project.  If it were required reading for high school seniors it might help many of them find careers that fit their dispositions instead of ending up in jobs that they are ill-suited for.

Ted McClelland

“The Third Coast” is a travelogue about a car trip around the Great Lakes.  It’s personal and engaging, with stories about people McClelland met along the way.  It isn’t as deep as a William Least Heat-Moon book, rather it’s more episodic and “newspaperish”.  While it’s very good, I do wish it were longer and that he had written more about the trip itself and about the driving and places in between the subjects he focuses on.

I especially liked the way he captured the feel of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which may be the most franchise and chain free area left in the United States.

John Marchese

Sam Zygmuntowicz is a Brooklyn violin builder who says he is “no Gepetto”.  This book is about him, about violin making, and, specifically, about the building of a new violin for Gene Drucker of the Emerson Quartet.  It’s an interesting look at a a technology that depends not on innovation but on the perfection of craft.  For Zygmuntowicz, part of the fascination of that craft is the question of “what do we really know” and the secret of Stradavari violins is that there is no secret: he was simply the best luthier – the best craftsman – of his day.

Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy was some of the first adult science fiction I read when I was a kid.  Revisiting it was like meeting an old friend at a reunion. This prequel to the series, written 35 years after the trilogy but previous to it, tells of the early life of Hari Seldon, the man who invented “psychohistory” and lays the foundation (sorry) for the later books. The revelation about the nature of some of the characters surprised me.  Asimov was a master pulp craftsman and this was a fun read.