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[CCBC-Net] what book has changed your life?
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From: Edward DeButts <EDeButts>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 20:17:38 -0400
Fiction read in childhood: Tom Sawyer. I read it three times, I think, between the ages of 10 and 12. I knew Tom's love for Becky. Huckleberry Finn was just as good. Then I found Booth Tarkington's Penrod, Penrod and Sam, and Penrod Jashber. They reminded me of Twain. Funny and full of insight about boys, with some disturbing racism. They deserve to be more widely known.
Nonfiction, major life changer, age 18: The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Editor Stewart Brand's access to (among other things) photovoltaic energy, cybernetics (the science of communication and control in animals and machines); poets Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder; and Gregory Bateson, who wrote, "Insofar as we are a mental process, we must expect the natural world to show similar characteristics of mentality." (Bateson was actually reviewed in The Whole Earth Epilog.) The Last Whole Earth Catalog also turned me on to Buckminster Fuller. He discovered that nature's geometry was not that of the ancients, who saw buildings as perpendicular to the earth and therefore parallel. Earth, however, is not a plane surface. Bucky wanted language to reflect reality: The sun does not rise nor set. Earth's rotation is what's going on, so I try not to use those misleading words (It's not easy.). Fuller's Earth: A Day with Bucky and the Kids, a great, suitable for young adults, introduction to his ideas (co-authored with Richard Brenneman), is out of print. That should not be.
Received on Tue 23 May 2006 07:17:38 PM CDT
Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 20:17:38 -0400
Fiction read in childhood: Tom Sawyer. I read it three times, I think, between the ages of 10 and 12. I knew Tom's love for Becky. Huckleberry Finn was just as good. Then I found Booth Tarkington's Penrod, Penrod and Sam, and Penrod Jashber. They reminded me of Twain. Funny and full of insight about boys, with some disturbing racism. They deserve to be more widely known.
Nonfiction, major life changer, age 18: The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Editor Stewart Brand's access to (among other things) photovoltaic energy, cybernetics (the science of communication and control in animals and machines); poets Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder; and Gregory Bateson, who wrote, "Insofar as we are a mental process, we must expect the natural world to show similar characteristics of mentality." (Bateson was actually reviewed in The Whole Earth Epilog.) The Last Whole Earth Catalog also turned me on to Buckminster Fuller. He discovered that nature's geometry was not that of the ancients, who saw buildings as perpendicular to the earth and therefore parallel. Earth, however, is not a plane surface. Bucky wanted language to reflect reality: The sun does not rise nor set. Earth's rotation is what's going on, so I try not to use those misleading words (It's not easy.). Fuller's Earth: A Day with Bucky and the Kids, a great, suitable for young adults, introduction to his ideas (co-authored with Richard Brenneman), is out of print. That should not be.
Received on Tue 23 May 2006 07:17:38 PM CDT
