strnbrg59blog: 2003

יום ראשון, 13 באפריל 2003

Stanley Williams, Life in Prison

The intended audience of this book is young men who admire prison convicts and aspire to put a prison experience on their own resumes. If you are such a person, yes, by all means do read this book.

But this is a good book even for those of us who are, at best, minimum-security material. The most impressive part, for me, was what Tookie has to say about loneliness, isolation, lack of privacy, lack of control over one's schedule, and the gradual disappearance of personal connections to people outside the big house.

(amazon.com: "49 people found this helpful")

Gary V. Vaughn, Gnu Autoconf, Automake and Libtool

As a guide to Gnu autoconf, automake and libtool, this book is quite useless. It is utterly and totally disorganized, and much essential information is just not there at all. There is amazingly little in the way of examples. So don't bother with it if you want to learn about any of those subjects. The book is not entirely without merit, however. Its redeeming features are scattered sensible comments about software portability and software architecture.

The authors are obviously very knowledgable and experienced about software. I encourage them to "throw this one away" and try a rewrite from scratch. Short of that, they could provide a road map through their book; first read this chapter, then skip to the second half of that one, etc.

The sad news is that there may not be any good guide to autoconf etc anywhere yet. Like the DNA in your body, all autoconf files are very likely descended by an evolutionary process from a few original viable specimens.

(amazon.com: 18 people found this helpful)

Thomas Sowell Inside American Education

The quality is uneven; a few chapters are very good while others disappoint. Sowell is at his best when he looks at universities and their incentives from the point of view of an economist.

In "Damaging Admissions" he takes apart the "Tuition only covers 2/3 of the cost of educating you" nonsense. (What the 2/3 number really means is, "From sources other than tuition, we are able to raise 50% more.") The picture emerges of (some) universities as the venal oligopolists they truly are.

In "New Racism and Old Dogmatism" he explains how the policy of racial preferences has radicalized the beneficiaries of that policy; unable to compete on conventional academic criteria, students -- as well as their professors -- rationalize their academic shortcomings by dismissing academic standards altogether and blaming racism in often absurd ways. At the same time, a vicious campaign of intimidation and ostracism targets those blacks who do not toe the ideological line. I have not seen a more forceful condemnation of "Affirmative Action" anywhere.

"New Racism and Old Dogmatism" and "Ideological Double Standards" are rich sources of anecdotes about the hypocrisy and intolerance of the campus left-wing establishment. This is very good stuff, if not as wide-ranging as Dinesh D'Souza's _Illiberal Education_.

Some chapters are not so good. "Impaired Faculties" is about the intellectual poverty of Education Schools, their professors and their products (schoolteachers), but it's mostly too vague. The same can be said of "The Empire Strikes Back", the chapter on schoolteachers'unions. The chapters about political indoctrination of schoolchildren are specific enough, relating some truly outrageous anecdotes, but I was left unsure if these are the exception or the rule.

(amazon.com: 33 people found this helpful)