Robert Reads

Monday, July 24, 2006

Convenient Books for an Inconvenient Truth

I was sitting in the Union League Club library in Chicago reading Jim Hansen's New York Review of Books article The Threat to the Planet. In that very good article Hansen reviews 3 new books on global warming and other climate issues we may be facing:

The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore

In the review of those 3 books Hansen also mentions Bill McKibben's seminal The End of Nature.

posted by Robert Baird # 3:11 PM 0 comments

A Whole New Mind

Lanny is currently reading and recommending A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

posted by Robert Baird # 1:11 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 22, 2005

Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles

Sean, The Martian Chronicles is an easy book for kids, but also hard. It uses lots of styles and genres to tell its many short stories. These stories are all a little different, in part, since Bradbury wrote them at different times and for the scifi magazines that were the main place to publish scifi. So, The Martian Chronicles is really a collection of short stories around an idea: the colonization of Mars by humans.

Here are some links that might help you develop a deeper appreciation for the book:

http://www.raybradbury.com/articles_lamonintor.html

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/martian_chronicles.html

http://www.scifi.com/set/playhouse/martian/

http://www.raybradbury.com/articles_nyt_mag.html

http://www.raybradbury.com/articles_county.html

posted by Robert Baird # 12:13 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 11, 2005

Strategy by Design

Strategy by Design

cited at Educause--need to read this.

posted by Robert Baird # 10:15 AM 0 comments

Friday, June 24, 2005

One World, Ready or Not

One World, Ready or Not

A quick and interesting read on books on globalization. I like the reviewer, Franklin Foer, and have read his How Soccer Explains The World. He's a good, fun writer who makes interesting connections to very serious issues. I like, too, the general approach of this book, which is to debunk the platitudes and easy rhetoric that tends to dominate both academic and journalistic headlines these days, or what I call the bumper-sticker thought. Save Us, Not the Whales.

best

Robert

posted by Robert Baird # 12:17 PM 0 comments

Thursday, May 26, 2005

gladwell dot com / The Vanishing

This book review is doubly fun for me. I'm still trying to finish Diamond's Collapse, which I love, and the book review here is done by Malcolm Gladwell, whose The Tipping Point I had just read previously to Diamond's Collapse. What's great about this review is that Gladwell really gets what Diamond is up to and uses his review to basically slap contemporary thinking upside the head. This head slapping centers on a quote Gladwell pulls out of Diamond's Collapse, a quote that might be one of the key ideas of our age:

"The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."

gladwell dot com / The Vanishing

posted by Robert Baird # 1:45 PM 0 comments

Observer Blog

What is cool about The Observer Blog is that this is a newspaper that has been in publication since 1791, and they now have a blog and they are having fun with it and also (sort of) serious about blogs as something new that they recognize as "competition." Anyway, the Brits have a good sense of humor and I take it that The Observer Blog lets its hair down more than THE OBSERVER.

best

Prof. Biff

Observer Blog

posted by Robert Baird # 9:56 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

GREEN Merging with Traffic / San Francisco bicyclists become part of the City's transportation establishment

GREEN Merging with Traffic / San Francisco bicyclists become part of the City's transportation establishment:

"'My first Critical Mass was really an eye opener,' Leah Shahum told me. 'I had never thought of bicycling as a political thing, as a part of a social movement. Riding with a
thousand people just felt so empowering. It felt different: I felt safer, I felt more confident. These were good feelings.'
That was 1996, shortly after Shahum had moved to San Francisco a few years out of college. It was the period when Critical Mass established San Francisco as the epicenter of militant bicycling culture, as thousands of bikers swarmed in a usually joyous and always chaotic monthly leaderless parade. A decade later, Shahum is executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the public face of a new kind of grown-up bicycle activism. "

My friend Rick Langlois pointed me toward this article about bikes in San Francisco, a contrast with the rather limited encouragement of bikes in our own college town of Urbana/Champaign, Illinois. Rick and I both ride bikes to work and wish others did. I tend to ride on sidewalks because, once off campus, it's hard to find bike lanes. Hopefully, San Francisco points toward a larger pendulum swing that is going on nationally, away from car-only or car-centric planning and toward pedestrian and cycling-friendly planning.

best

Robert Baird

posted by Robert Baird # 3:20 PM 0 comments