Category: dewey decimal project

Found magazine is one of those concepts that I wish I’d come up with: publishing the strange and unusual artifacts that end up as the detritus of civilized life. In this case, Rothbart, the editor of Found canvassed assorted celebrities and civilians (as near as I can tell, this designation is for those people who are […]

Some time after college, I realized that drunk and stoned people were not all that fun or interesting to be around. This, in the end is the big problem with Hunter S. Thompson’s book. On the flip side, the narrative voice here is so compelling that it’s hard not to read on. The second part […]

When the current craze for memoirs struck, I kept finding myself wondering who these people were and why we should care about their lives? It seemed to me that having done something notable with one’s life was a prerequisite for a memoir being worth writing, let alone being read. Janet Groth falls on the edge […]

As a child, one of the treats of the year was members’ night at the Field Museum. We’d get to go to the top floor of the museum where the researchers worked and see the stuff that wasn’t on display, that was being actively used in research. More than anything else, what remains in my […]

Here’s a rule: If you’re going to put together a humorous collection of facts, it should be (a) humorous and (b) not contain unintentional mistakes. Matalon and Woolsey manage to miss the mark on many fronts, with factual errors that were unintended (e.g., saying that Bohemia became part of modern-day Austria) and having humor which […]

A series of meditations on libraries, public and private, personal and universal. Manguel’s writing meanders on occasion, but even in meandering it has a light poetic tone. As an Argentine living in France, he could reasonably be expected to write in any language but English, but as near as I can tell, this is the […]

I knew that there would be decades in the Dewey Decimal System like this one. Where the books are nearly all dry reference materials forbidding linear reading. I hope that when I reach dictionaries, it will not be restricted to dictionaries in its span of the shelf. 01x is bibliographies and most of the books […]

There’s an almost nihilistic undercurrent in David H. Freeman’s book, the idea that experts are often wrong (perhaps more often than not), and there’s really no good way to tell which is the case. Certainly the contradictory nature of expertise is obvious to anyone who has done a deep dive into anything beyond the hard […]

The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at us on which were printed ‘the’, ‘cat’, ‘rat’, ‘man’, and ‘you’. No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic reve lations in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught […]