Acute Angles  - Update On The Literary Scene

by David Fidelman

This year’s reading list reflects a new literary trend.    For years, high school and college students have been able to avoid reading their assigned books by going to the abridged versions in Cliff’s Notes. Now the trend has gone mainstream. More publishers are entering the abridgment field because so many readers in the general population don’t have time to read whole books, but still want to be able to discuss them intelligently at their book clubs, or in conversations with friends and colleagues, or at cocktail parties, or want to read the book before they see the movie.

In the past, the emphasis has been on the classics and the major works of literature that English teachers thought were important. The new move is to current books and best sellers. This column has always been ahead of the trends, keeping its readers au courant with capsulized versions of the important literary works they should know about. Politics was big this year. Bestsellers have been written by people on the left, the right, the middle, and one by a writer who went from right to left. For some reason, they’re listed as non-fiction.

Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right  is the conservative answer to the liberal media. She’s one of those right-wing skinny blondes you see on the talk shows all the time. She reveals the facts about the liberal media, that all they do is tell lies about the Republicans, and she documents the intellectual poverty of the liberal arguments. She points out that liberals have been wrong about everything in the last half century. One reader thinks the book is a well documented expose of the damage the liberal progressives do to U.S. policies, should worry every elitist, limousine liberal, hypocritical leftist, and may finally help bring to account the liberals and the sycophant media publishing the liberal agenda. Fans of Rush Limbaugh will love it.

In Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative David Brook tells the story of his conversion from right-wing scandal reporter to born-again liberal. He tells how he used to be one of the key members of what Hillary Clinton called the vast right-wing conspiracy. He trashed Anita Hill and wrote the Troopergate story, and says he was “a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine” which he now accuses of lies, perjury, smear campaigns, hypocrisy and hatred on the part of self-proclaimed guardians of morality, decency and democracy. He saw the light after he was dumped by his conservative friends when the book he wrote about Hillary Clinton turned out to be fair instead of a hatchet job. It’s hard to know how far to trust a repentant sinner, but so far none of the people he called liars, crooks or pornographers have sued him for libel.

Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men  became No. 1 on the bestseller lists within days of its publication. It’s satirical, irreverent and as crammed with infuriating facts as any right-wing bestseller. According to Moore, “Old white men wielding martinis and wearing dickeys have taken over the nation’s capitol.” He claims that we are no longer able to hold free and fair elections, that we need UN observers and UN troops. Also that blacks should put inflatable white dolls in their cars so racist cops will think they’re chauffeurs, and that the ever-more-Republicanesque Democratic Party should be sued for fraud. One reader complains that during the election campaign Moore stated that George W. Bush was functionally illiterate, but when Bush became President and it became obvious to the world that he could read, Moore still did not retract his grossly irresponsible statement. Whatever your politics, you’ll find something to be offended by in this book.

In the science department we have A Beautiful Mind, the story of mathematician John Nash, whose contributions to game theory won him the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics, who suffered from and eventually recovered from schizophrenia. This column wishes people wouldn’t be so cavalier in their use of the word “genius” and wouldn’t confuse genius with brilliance. Not all Nobel Prize winners are geniuses. Considering the current state of the stock market and the world’s fiscal condition, winning a Nobel Prize in economics may not even be such a big deal.

This year’s science sensation is A New Kind of Science by physicist Stephen Wolfram, who became rich by developing the Mathematica computer language. He has now developed a theory that will revolutionize our thinking about science and will lead to a completely new understanding of the nature of the universe, which he explains in this easy-to-read 1200 page book (illustrated with more than a thousand pictures) so that scientists and non-scientists can participate in what promises to be a major intellectual revolution. His great discovery: The simple can lead to the complex. If you accept this theory, you can understand how all the great works of English literature can be derived from properly arranged sequences of 26 simple alphabetical symbols plus a few things like commas and periods.