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I don't know where I heard about Paula Scher's book "Make it Bigger", but I'm glad I did. Most books surprise me in some way, but this one was more surprising than most, from the very first page. Most surprising was the clarity of her writing. This book would be great if it were just a compendium of her designs, but it's more than a graphic design memoir. This is a full life in design, with clear views of the value and power of graphic design. Paula Scher is right at the top of her form, too: I've seen two New York Times Op-Ed page pieces (designs) of hers in the past year or two, and I remember them both. They're reproduced in the book.

Positioned as a 'process' book on the client-designer negotiation, "Make it Bigger" is a to-the-point description of the power and value of design, graphic design in particular. Paula Scher also shows how and why good designs can be diluted or fail to survive. Be forewarned!

An essential concept is introduced, and I'll just mention it because you might miss it in context when you get the book: Defending the Design. If there is no one to defend the design, it will fail. Why? Because the design is too "something". In other words, it does not look like something else that is then current, and will be rejected. This is another version of the sociological insight "Any excuse will do," which I learned about in graduate school. (Too bad for me, but that's another story.)

Paula Scher's case is fairly strong for design as problem solving. Design is not just a competent rendition of some graphic or typographical style. In her view, consumers of graphic design are coming NOWHERE NEAR CLOSE to taking full advantage of existing design talent.

The format of this book is unusual: it's about nine inches across by six inches down. Coincidentally (?) this is about the same size as a common direct mail advertising piece: the nine-by-six postcard. The type in the book is small; you will be reading this in direct light or better yet sunlight. Interestingly, you will be able to read it nonetheless. A sardonic way of putting it: the book was not designed to be unreadable.

Best of all, Paula Scher has a sense of humor, both in her writing and in her graphic design.

You could do much, MUCH much worse than to Make It Bigger [definitely buy at amazon] . by Paula Scher, currently a partner at Pentagram

I'm sorry I forgot to mention that some of the art in this book is breathtaking: her maps in particular you will never forget, even though they are reproduced here in miniature.

A crash visit to the Beverly Hills Library (free books, free parking!) netted two finds, Yogi Berra's collected wisdom (written with) and Richard Marcinko's Navy Seal thriller 'Violence of Action', (written without)

I'm not a big baseball fan, but I found the title to Yogi's book irresistable: "What time is it? You mean now? Advice for life from the Zennest master of them all." [buy at amazon] . by Yogi Berra.

Each chapter is one of those sayings Yogi is famous for, listed in alphabetical order according to the most loose of possible rules: the saying had to have the letter of the alphabet in it. When I have time a little later on today, I'll come back and type in the table of contents for the book.

The Marcinko was gruesome and not for the squeamish, but still had moments of unsurpassed outrageous crudeness that were so outre that you just had to raise your eyebrows and crack up laughing. I know some of you won't be happy if I don't put in the link because you want to read it anyway, so here it is but I think you'll be happier if you check this icky book out of the library instead of buying it. For one thing, it solves the problem of what to do with the book after you're done with it.

Here's Yogi's Table of Contents, all quotes:

• I Ain't in a slump, I'm just not hitting
• Baseball's different today, but it isn't.
• If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.
• Are you dead yet?
• When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
• You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going because you might not get there.
• Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.
• I really didn't say everything I said.
• Why be jealous over things you don't have?
• Little league is good because it keeps parents off the street and kids out of the house.
• Little things are big.
• We made too many wrong mistakes.
• It's so crowded, nobody goes there.
• It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I've had a couple of those.
• If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
• If you ask me a question I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
• Congratulations - I knew the record would stand until it was broken.
• Someone's got to win and someone's got to lose, and that was us.
• Pair up in threes.
• The future ain't what it used to be.
• It's deja vu all over again.
• The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.
• He's learning me his experience.
• I looked like this when I was young, and I still do.
• You saw Dr. Zhivago? Why? Aren't you feeling well?

As a rule I try to avoid reading fiction that gives people nightmares, so I haven't read a lot of Stephen King. In fact, I'm not sure why I picked up his memoir "On Writing." Whatever the reason, I'm glad I did. This book made me laugh out loud, just simply guffaw, throw back my head and bray. How often do you get to do that? I think it's because Stephen King is basically a wise-ass funny guy with a sardonic irreverent sense of humor, and you just laugh along with him.

You just do, whether you're going to write a novel or not.

Plus, there are two essential pieces of advice for any writer. First, "You must not come lightly to the blank page."

And second — well, it's nasty I know, but for any further wisdom you'll have to consult On Writing [buy at amazon] . by Stephen King.

I was lying in bed at midnight just getting started on Ruth Bloch's book "Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture 1650-1800". Suddenly I heard mysterious music start to play. It was mysterious, because it sounded like it was coming from inside the house, and at midnight everyone was asleep. Maybe there was a party downstairs, just outside an open window?

Actually, I had a pretty good idea what was happening. Earlier in the week my son's smart-boombox had eluded its programmer's intentions and started playing tunes at midnight. In that episode, I got up and turned it off before it woke the house.

Last night I said goodbye to the presets and pulled the plug.

I was enjoying Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture 1650-1800" [buy at amazon] . by Ruth Bloch

If Steven King wrote a book on writing, would you read it? The reviews of his book "On Writing" all said "There isn't any new material in this book, it's previously published essays." ** For a while I avoided buying "On Writing", until finally I realized I hadn't read these essays in the first place.

Steven King has an engaging style, kind of like Dave Barry's writing. In fact, I know of no evidence that Dave and Steven are not the same person. Except supposedly (I mean purportedly, really) they played together in a rock band with Barbara Kingsolver on keyboard and Amy Tan (with two other chicks) in a three-chick chorus. This book is funny, although perhaps it is not for the tykes. As far as I've gotten, I really am enjoying On Writing [buy at amazon] (I've read one half chapter) . by Steven King.

Another book that came in the mail is the only book on writing that Steven King recommends. I recommend it too: The Elements of Style [must-buy at amazon] . by Strunk and White. Anyone who has ever read anything by E.B. White already owns this book and treasures it above all other books on writing. Other treatises are all larger; buy this one instead.

** Special editor's note: as it turns out, this isn't really true.

A week ago we went to see Chicago, the murderous musical. Chicago the city has always had a niche in the popular imagination; I remember my grandfather telling us a story about being asked where he was from by some men in Italy. When he said "Chicago," they all ran away. Being from Chicago, I enjoy a good murder mystery set in Chi-town, but are there many? Sara Paretsky to the rescue, with her series of V.I. Warshawsky adventures. If there's one thing you can count on in a V.I. Warshawski mystery, it's this: there's a lot happening in the first few pages, and all the way through rest of the book.

I'm sure that one of the reasons I like V.I. is that she argues with practically everyone she meets. Friends, enemies, possible allies, former friends, witnesses both hostile and friendly, cops: practically everyone involves her in a continual conversation of challenge and counterchallenge.

Another attraction is her charming mix of wily competence and circumstantial ineptness. Although adept with a set of lockpicks she doesn't do too well with a cellphone. She's constantly letting its battery run down, or, for better or for worse, ignoring it altogether. People are always quite annoyed with her because they can't get in touch.

Then there's the gun. She occasionally carries her gun, but I don't recall any novel in which she has ever used it to effect.

Well, that's some of the local color. Now, what about the plot? This is one of the best-plotted V.I. the P.I. mysteries yet. More than just a who-done-it, this is a full-blown novel about Holocaust survivors and the moral obligations of insurance companies (?!). It takes place all over Chicago: North Side, South Side, West Side, Loop, with a short Michigan dunes vacation and a little Springfield thrown in for good measure.

Chicago's a great city, and this is a great novel, with a gripping account of a young girl's wartime experience, a good deal of suspense, and some surprising action which I wouldn't dream of giving away. Total Recall [worth buying at amazon] . by Sara Paretzky,

A friend of mine recently read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and observed "You know it looks like a lot of people have been reading Fast Food Nation," referring to the slump in fast food sales.

"This book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year", I joked in return, "which would certainly indicate that a lot of people reading it."

The pervasive effect of the fast food industry on wage earners is so obvious that maybe it's a good thing (for the industry) that a war comes along from time to time to distract everyone from the minimum wage, and what it really means to the economy. Consider this quote from the introduction of the book:

"The restaurant industry is now America's largest private employer, and it pays some of the lowest wages. During the economic boom of the 1990's, when many American workers enjoyed their first pay raises in a generation, the real value of wages in the restaurant industry continued to fall. The roughly 3.5 million fast food workers are by far the largest group of minimum wage earners in the United States.

Actually, to get a flavor of Schlosser's writing style and what he has to say, you might consider reading the entire first chapter online right now.

Fast Food Nation is informative bedtime reading for your kids, but there's a magic window between the time they are old enough not to be affected too much by the sad parts (there are a couple of deaths in the book, and some pretty bad injuries), and still young enough not to be too teenager-savvy to resist it.

We highly recommend Fast Food Nation [buy at amazon] . by Eric Schlosser, which we have previously reviewed on this site.

---

A quick visit to the Beverly Hills Library has turned up a copy of Sara Paretsky's latest V.I Washawski Novel, Total Recall, 12th in the V.I. series. You may remember Lottie Herschel, a physician friend of V.I.'s from some of the other books. This book begins with her story as a child in Nazi Germany, and how she escaped with her brother, but not the rest of her family, in the Kindertransport program to Britain.

The passage is unavoidably moving, and augurs well for some real issues to be turned up in this detective novel, which I've just started reading. Total Recall [buy at amazon] . by Sara Paretsky.

The sociologist Emile Durkheim introduced the concept of 'normal crime' into the social science lexicon. His basic idea: it's not possible to eliminate crime, it's part and parcel of any society with a legal system. Indeed, on this view it may be a mistake to try to eliminate ALL crime, since you will just end up with millions of people in prison, many for relatively minor offenses. Sound familiar? As I look out my window and see a television antenna which has been repaired in the past week, I wonder if the idea of 'normal war' will also enter common parlance.

The television antenna, which frames two oil wells pumping away on a distant hill here in Los Angeles, had been blown over in a high wind about a week ago. Now it stands tall once more, a symbol of our need to be entertained, and perhaps a symbol of order in the midst of chaos.

The science ficton writer Jerry Pournelle, a writer who has invented many wars and battles in the great beyond of science fiction's outer space, believes that There will be War [buy at amazon] . by Jerry Pournelle.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television [buy at amazon] . by Jerry Mander.

Soon Baghdad residents will have their broadcasts once again, pending resumption of their electrical service, because War eliminates Television, but, we would assert, only temporarily. Maybe they will be tuning in to 'Friends', or has that been cancelled?

When Apple's Mac first came out, Bill Atkinson had something to do with it. He wrote a lot of (maybe most of?) the graphics display routines. Then he invented a little deal called Hypercard. It was similar to the world wide web packed into your computer. You could create links, but you didn't require an internet connection.

Now Bill Atkinson is a nature photographer. You should see what he has captured on his website: billatkison.com by Bill Atkinson. (p.s., because his website will "capture" you, we open it as a new window, so you won't lose track of where you came from).

I don't know how you feel about Elmore Leonard, Dave Barry, and Stephen King, but if they have one thing in common, it's that two of them are extremely funny writers. Well, Dave Barry has now written a novel that the other two guys regard as the funniest thing they have read in ninety years, if my math is correct (50 for Elmore, 40 for Stephen).

When I saw 'Big Trouble' on sale for seven bucks, it was too much to pass up, especially when I realized that I had already read several pages on a prior visit to the bookstore.

This is a very funny book, possibly the third-funniest book I have ever read, but what Dave says about it in the introduction is true. This book is not for youngsters. It's not that what the characters say is all that crude (well, of course it is), it's just that 'youngsters', as he so quaintly puts it, would probably not be as amused as you or your brother who lives in Miami will be, when you read this book.

Through the miracle of the internet, now you can purchase Big Trouble [buy at amazon] . by Dave Barry, for approximately three times what I paid for it on the Barnes and Noble remainder shelves. But it's still a better deal than the movie.

I was sorry and surprised to read the obituary of Harold Coxeter in the New York Times yesterday. Well, I needn't have been surprised: he was 96 years old. According to the obit, he inspired Buckminster Fuller to invent the geodesic dome, was pals with M.C. Escher, suggesting some geometric patterns when Escher got bored with drawing fishes and birds swimming against each other, and took Ludwig Wittgenstein's math course at Oxford.

I never knew all that. For me, he was just the guy who wrote Regular Polytopes [buy at amazon] which describes all of the regular solids of greater than three dimensions. Although the book 'Regular Polytopes' was not of immediate utility when I was writing my four-dimensional polytope display and manipulation computer program, it was incredibly interesting. I notice you can buy it for five or ten dollars now on Amazon, and I recommend that if you have the slightest interest in higher-dimension geometry that you grab a copy. Because later on, when you have developed a visceral need for the information, chances are that the book just ain't gonna be there.

(We) just picked up the omnibus edition of all five novels in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, which tried to lend a new meaning to the word 'trilogy', but failed after the final volume three was superseded by volume 4, and then 5. It was a bargain price, though, too difficult to resist.

However, now I'm not so certain it was a good idea. Why was the Hitchhiker's Guide so popular, second only to the Encylopedia Galactica? On every cover you could find the instruction "Don't Panic."

Just two words, but so important. And each of the five volumes had similar packaging. So now, what happens when the covers are gone, the messages with them? Is time to worry, Hein? Perhaps not, for the books' introduction carries the only true story of the creation of the hitchhiker stories, plus the full (yet still brief) rationale behind the naming of the curiously named Ur-Narrator* Ford Prefect.

Don't Panic, don't delay, grab your towel and an emergency copy of The Hitchhiker's Ultimate Guide to the Galaxy [buy at amazon] . by Douglas Adams, which you need now more than ever. This deluxe edition is presented with instructions on how to leave the planet, complete with the relevant phone numbers (Nasa, White House, Kremlin, and Vatican).

* special editors note: We have no idea what Ur-Narrator might mean, but it sure sounds impressive, don't you think?

There's a reason they call it being 'Away.' When you first live in Maine you are just living there, like anyone else lives wherever they live, except for it being exciting (especially when Winter is over). But as the convention goes, when you move away from Maine, rather than living in a new place that is fully equivalent, you are living 'Away."

This morning as I was rushing off to work, I quickly checked my mail to find an email from my college classmate Kala Ladenheim, a newly minted PhD (Congratulations, Kala!) saying that she was looking for work in Maine. Indeed, the very first thing she did after defending her dissertation (on federalism and content analysis) was to write this poem: Letter from Exile. If you read the poem, I think you will understand why Kala wants to move back to Maine.

Continuing to implement the site redesign, I put four reviews into the new format. I'm proceeding according to the Toyota Production System philosophy of "Just In Time", on the basis that these are among the most searched-for (and found) books on the site. They're great reads, too.

Here they are, for your reading pleasure (in search-order priority), reviewed on thedailychannel.com:

Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
The Slum by Aluisio Azevedo
The Flu of 1918 by Gina Kolata
Holes by Louis Sachar

I recommend them all, especially 'Danny' and 'The Slum' - which sounds like a book title all its own - but I'd say Gina Kolata's book is of special importance, given the rapid spread of a new disease.

Look I know it's that special day, but this really is true. I was happily re-reading some of the better book reviews of the past couple of years, and I ran across one of my favorite books: Mosquito: A natural history of our most persistent and Deadly Foe. And you thought it was Al Quaeda! I recalled that just a couple of days ago I stumbled across the dead bird reporting website. Here's the deal. If you live in Los Angeles and see a dead crow or raven, you can call 1-877-WNV-BIRD to get it picked up and examined for West Nile Virus. No, I am not kidding.

If you don't believe me, you can search on the internet for the phone number, or just go click on this link: What To Do If I Find A Dead Bird. Hey! Who says Gray Davis is not a good governor?

If you just want some good summer reading, check out Mosquito. I guarantee it has geopolitical significance.