If you’ve been reading this blog of reviews for a while, you’ll have realized that I am hardly an academic reviewer. I do not have any kind of formal training in reviewing or criticism, nor any in writing for that matter. I read a lot. I’ve taken the standard literature and creative writing classes that are required in a U.S. education, but nothing more. Now, I’m a bit of a snob. I do believe I got more out of these classes than many others. I can put together a coherent sentence usually, unlike many a blogger. Nevertheless, my reviewing is of haphazard quality. I would not be hired by the New York Times Book Review. I don’t lose much sleep over that though.

I do harbor aspirations to higher quality though. I often thought it would be through taking a class or two. Although I have plenty of free time these days, I do not have the ability to keep a regular schedule. So formal classes were out. I frequently perused the offerings of open courseware universities, particularly that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but never really found anything helpful. In addition, most open courseware sites do not include enough material to learn on ones own. They often lack detailed lecture notes.

Then I happened on a couple of books in the free pile at Michael’s Books. Have I mentioned this enough? I doubt it. One of those being Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles Bressler. Free. No lecture notes of course, but those are usually just a rehash of the book anyway. Where I wouldn’t have ordered a textbook on the subject because they are too expensive, free fits right in my price range. In addition, it’s a recent edition as well, published in 2007. I think Michael’s set it out for free because of extensive highlighting in the book. I can ignore that though. My only real worry is that Bressler’s Christian religion will mean there is some religious bias in the text. A quick glance at the section on queer theory and I see he calls one queer theorist profound so I may not have much to worry about.

So this entry is essentially my attempt to absorb some principles of literary theory so I can write better reviews. It’s being written over the course of many days. Think of the following pages as being both my reading notes (i.e., paraphrasing Bressler) as well as my own reactions and thoughts. A lot of that is all jumbled together, and is also my impressions, so don’t blame Bressler unless you read the textbook yourself.

Well, I’ve finished off the entire book now. I’m glad for having read the book as I certainly feel more educated. On the other hand, a lot of the theories were quite obtuse. I can’t say whether that is due to the theories themselves or to Bressler’s descriptions. I’ve got a feeling a lot of them are very hard to follow, basing that assumption off having tried to read a few philosophers in the past. Bressler largely fails in trying to make them understandable.

I’m quite disappointed at the chapter on Reader Response, as that is the theory I think I would most likely embrace. Bressler seems to focus very much on the abstract there rather than the practical. Again, that might be because academics are way more abstract.

It’s not all negative. For every literary theory, Bressler gives a set of questions that proponents of that theory would ask about literature. I think those are bet at giving he flavor of how to proceed under that guise. Since this is designed for an introductory course, to be an effective theorist, one would have to read a lot more than this.

A lot of the literary theories discussed later in the book seem to be less about literary criticism than about using literature in broader cultural studies. My purpose is to become a better reader (and reviewer). So the uses described here aren’t helpful to me.

There are probably better surveys of literary theory out there so I can’t really recommend this book. If you are coming from a background of near zero knowledge like I am though, you might still get something out of it.

For those reading this in feed readers, there are another 10 pages of reading notes and thoughts on each chapter available on the web site. Click through if you are interested.

Title: Literary criticism: an introduction to theory and practice
Edition: 4th
Author: Charles E. Bressler
Cover creator: Kristen Ankiewicz (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall / Pearson Education
Format: Paperback
Length: 370 p. (includes glossary, index, and other material)
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-10: 0-13-153448-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-153448-3
Subject: Criticism
LC classification: PN81.B666 2007

I confess that I didn’t read this because I wanted to write about history. I haven’t taken a history class since the 1980s, so a guide to writing history term papers is something I very much do not need. I’ve a few books that I acquired after others’ decisions to divest themselves of their collections. I’ll often take the collection lock, stock and barrel. Which is where I got this one. It’s sat on my shelf unread for half a decade. After reading Cannery Village I poked around my book collection and noticed this thin volume sitting there. So I decided to read it to see what rules Cannery Village should have followed to improve the tale.

Now, K. Mack Campbell’s history of upcoast canneries of British Columbia isn’t a history essay. And it’s not something being turned in for a grade. It’s not even someone’s Ph.D. thesis. So the directions in the book probably aren’t going to apply 100% to what I read. But I figured there might be a clue or two. So here’s my two critiques of Cannery Village after reading this guide.

First, the chapter on modes of writing about history would have helped Campbell a great deal. According to Marius, there are four modes of writing about history. And while an essay can use multiple modes, a hodgepodge makes a paper less readable. Those four modes are description, narrative, exposition, and argument. Description is an account of sensory experience. Narratives tell stories, and narratives are the bedrock of history. Expositions explain something. And argument is taking a position on a controversial subject. The biggest problem with Cannery Village was that it centrally was a description, even for things which aren’t centrally a sensory experience, like dates and names. I think Campbell would have been much better off writing a narrative and occasionally breaking off to relate a description of something such as a Saturday dance, or an exposition such as how a cannery worked. In his writing though, there was little narrative.

Second, he didn’t have a thesis. This is the first thing Marius writes about, so my guess is that his opinion is this is important.

Everything in your essay should contribute to your thesis. Don’t meander. Don’t put in interesting information merely because it is interesting. … Readers unconsciously expect every detail in an essay to contribute to the topic the author has announced.

I think a good thesis would have been something along the lines of upcoast canning grew in importance from nearly nothing to peak in year X, and thereafter faded until nothing remained. In that order, and focusing on the who, what, where, why and when of the growing in importance and the fading into nothingness. Deemphasize details that don’t contribute to why the industry was growing or fading. Sure, they should be included, but they shouldn’t be given a prominent role.

The advice in the book seems pretty sound, though it seems to focus a lot on non-history related details like the formatting of the paper, the proper marks for insertion and deletion, and grammar. While important for writing a good paper, it seems very much to me that the important part is mostly the writing about history, and leaving the rest to the English classes. I had to pass English 101 and 102 first thing in college. But it isn’t tough to skip those parts and focus on the meat of the history writing chapters.

One note: I have the first edition. The current edition is the 6th. I have no idea if what’s out now even resembles this one anymore.

Title: A short guide to writing about history
Author: Richard Marius
Publisher: HarperCollins
Series: Short guide series
Format: Paperback
Length: 261 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 1989
ISBN-10: 0-673-39998-2
Subject: Historiography
Subject: History — Methodology
Subject: History — Research
Subject: Authorship
LC classification: D13.M294 1989

Last year I took a microeconomics class and signed up for a macroeconomics class. After purchasing the textbook, Seattle Central cancelled the class. Still, I needed to learn more about macroeconomics as what I know is kind of random and lacks building blocks that would help that knowledge make more sense. So I started reading through the text and occasionally working the problems.

I liked this textbook much more than I did my microeconomics textbook. Mankiw explains things much better than Paul Heyne did. Terms are clearly defined. Mankiw focuses much better on topics. It has a much better focus on explaining the facts and theory than on making pronouncements that capitalist market economics is the pinnacle of economic thought. Heyne would get in subtle digs about how market regulation would lead to incorrect outcomes. Mankiw simply shows how to measure things like dead-weight loss from taxation and lets you draw your own conclusions about whether the dead-weight loss might be worth the gains from the programs funded. Considering he chaired Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (and is thus going to be on the conservative side of things) I’m quite surprised that he’s restrained himself from being a polemicist.

In addition to better knowledge on how taxes and other government policies affect the economy (theoretically at least), i learned a lot about how to calculate the G.D.P., how savings affects productivity, how the Fed manages the money supply, and how international trade works macro-economically. All in all, I learned a lot from the book, without ever once feeling preached at.

The latest edition is the 4th edition. For all I know the entire third edition was gutted and replaced with silly putty. But if you are looking for it, Amazon also has it.

Title: Principles of macroeconomics
Edition: 3rd
Author: N. Gregory Mankiw
Imprint / publisher: South-Western / Thomson
Format: Paperback
Length: xxxi, 546 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-324-17189-7
Subject: Macroeconomics
LC classification: HB172.5 .M356 2004

I suppose I should put in something about my economics text, seeing as how I did read the whole thing for my class. Paul Heyne lectured at the University of Washington until his death in 2000. I’ve read that he was an excellent teacher, but at least this edition of his book is crap at least for learning well. Heyne presents concepts in a breezy, loosely structured manner. It doesn’t make well for trying to apply the concepts, though it does do a pretty good job of imparting the gist of things. Perhaps it is perfect for an Econ for Jocks class. But I often found myself thinking, but I need clearer directions on how to apply this concept, or, I wish I had a definition for this term. Throughout the book are lots and lots of subtle and not so subtle conservative views embedded within the text. Heyne takes the view that absent compelling reasons otherwise, capitalist economics should be unregulated and unfettered. An example is the minimum wage, about which Heyne weaves an argument that raising the minimum wage results in lay-offs of lower-wage workers. The studies I’ve read don’t support that. Or in an end-of-chapter question where he asks the question Why are the renters in New York City so rich? when in fact the data show that renters in rent-control apartments are overwhelmingly poor. There are some pretty good arguments against rent control (and I’m generally not in favor of the idea), but that isn’t one of them.

Title: Microeconomics: the economic way of thinking
Edition: Fifth edition
Author: Paul Heyne
Cover artist: Juliana Heyne
Publisher: Pearson Custom Publishing / Pearson Education
Format: Paperback
Length: 348 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 1997
ISBN-10: 0-536-01907-X
Subject: Microeconomics
LC classification: HB172 .H525 1997

I took Economics 200 – Micro-Economics last spring at Seattle Central Community College. It was an online course; my only trips to campus were for the mid-term and final exams. I didn’t really expect the class to be tough. Instead I was using it as a way to get myself back into the swing of a college routine. But I digress before I even start. The Economics of Public Issues was one of the two required texts for this class. Sadly, we did not use this book for anything in class. Though several topics in the main textbook were also covered in this, and using information from this book in my answers would have added a dimension that others didn’t. As it was, I only did that for the first couple of chapters and after that I didn’t read this book until yesterday.

This book is a series of short chapters on various public issues, like tobacco, trash collection, and electric deregulation in California. It’s all standard market economic theory. For the most part fairly informative and gets one thinking about how incentives work. However, particularly in the case of deregulation of electric utilities in California, the authors wrote their chapter too soon. Though standard market economic theory would still probably explain what happened, their explanation doesn’t take into account the chicanery found to have been used by the energy trading companies like Enron and Dynegy.

I really wish they had explored the practical aspect of information disparity. The class’s main text dismissed it with the admonition that information is another good and this shouldn’t be regulated. Therefore, according to that author’s analysis, the fact that Enron knew how to game the system was just fine. This book touches on it briefly in the context of illegal goods and how in a market for illegal goods you can’t build up a reputation for quality because sellers have fewer ways to protect trademarks, which can represent quality. In other words, if you are a seller of quality crack, there’s no such thing as a Consumer Reports rating of your crack, and you can’t keep someone else from selling King Rat’s Most Excellent Crack®. And buyers can’t sue in court for breach of warrantee of fitness for a purpose. So sellers have an advantage in that they can sell sub-standard crack cause of the buyers less effective ways to determine what is quality crack. It’s an informatin disparity. I wish this book had covered more cases of that.

For a bit about the biases of the authors though, Daniel Benjamin is affiliated with the Property and Environment Research Center, which thinks it can save the environment through property rights. Their web site says that 92 percent of their funding comes from foundations, but they don’t say which ones. Douglass North won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Though it isn’t part of the regular Nobel Prizes, it’s still pretty prestigous. He won for his study of economic history. Not sure what insight he brought to that field that made it worth a Nobel though. The Nobel committee didn’t say on the web site.

Authors: Roger Leroy Miller, Daniel K. Benjamin, Douglass C. North
Title: The economics of public issues, 13th edition
Imprint / publisher: Addison Wesley / Pearson Education
Format: Paperback
Length: ix, 230 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-321-11873-1
Subject: Economics
Subject: Industrial policy
Subject: Economic policy
LC classification: HB171 .M544 2003