Inasmuch as…

I first saw this book when someone was reading it on the train a couple of years ago. The title, Who needs Irish?, was intriguing, so I borrowed the book when I saw a copy in the Skerries Library. The publisher describes the book as “a collection of essays in English for all those interested in the Irish-language today.” However, maybe the title should have been “Why you need Irish” since all of the essays are in favour of Irish. (more…)

For the second time in four months, I went to Boston and come away with a 900-page book. The second visit was a W3C XSL FO subgroup meeting, and the second book was Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment (2nd Ed.) (ISBN 0-201-43307-9).

The book is exceptional, and it has already been useful on one of my client projects. The only possible downside is that delving into this 900-page book further delays my completion of the other 900-page book.

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (ISBN 0-262-22069-5) is a big book at 900+ pages, and it covers a lot of ground. I expect it will take about two years to get through it, depending on how many of its exercises I do and how many other books I read at the same time.

It is natural to compare this book to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) (ISBN 0-262-51087-1). That is the book that I still wish I’d first read in 1981 rather than in 2001. This book is not giving the same aha! moments (maybe just because I have read SICP). This book may in the end be of more practical use than the mind-expansion induced by SICP, if only because this book covers constraint programming, which I will find useful for xmlroff.

Now, the programming concepts book that I really want would be the successor to Lisp in Small Pieces (ISBN 0-521-56247-3), but AFAICT, it hasn’t been finished.

This is the second time that I’ve picked up a Tom Keneally book at Sydney Airport for the long flight out of Australia. The other was The Great Shame, and the great shame there is that I didn’t get around to reading it until several years later. By that time I was living in Ireland, so at least I could then better understand the Irish aspects of that account.

The Commonwealth of Thieves covers the period just before to just after the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay. I enjoyed it, and I look forward to the likely future editions covering the next stages in Australia’s history.

The only reason that I am not overawed by the depth of knowledge and sound advice in Code Complete, Second Edition (Steve McConnell, ISBN: 0-7356-1967-0) is that I bought the second edition because the first edition was so good.

I both enjoyed reading Andrew Haslam’s Book Design (ISBN 1-85669673-9) and found it useful. And I dare say that Andrew Haslam must have enjoyed making it, particularly the sections demonstrating paragraph styles and text alignment styles.

I like Book Design because it covers a lot of ground and covers it well. It provides more narrative and examples than, say, Pocket Pal from International Paper but more practical details than, say, Richard Hendel’s On Book Design (ISBN 0-300-07570-7) and covers more of the book than does the type of typography book that I more often read.

An unrelated exposition on right-wing thought is the novel “Attila” by William Napier that I coincidentally borrowed from the library at the same time as “Right-Wing Ireland?”. Yes, it is historical fiction about Attila the Hun. Quite good. Now I just have to wait for the second book in the trilogy to be published next year.

I’ve just finished reading “Right-Wing Ireland? The Rise of Populism in Ireland and Europe” by Michael O’Connell (ISBN 1-094148-34-4). While the book mostly discusses Euro-scepticism and rascism, the best line in the book, in the section on the effect on the political climate of an economic slump, is:

There are few more reactionary forces than a million p*ssed-off yuppies who can’t meet their mortgage repayments.

However, the book quotes surveys that indicate that people with less income and less education (which may have contributed to their less income), not the yuppies, that feel threatened by immigration since they see themselves competing with immigrants for both jobs and social welfare.

The book also makes several points about immigrants and crime, or of crime statistics, that I found noteworthy. The book was timely since just last week I saw a newspaper headline saying that 25% of the prison population are immigrants. A similar headline from 2003 — “One in five sent to prison non-nationals, study shows” — from the same paper, I believe, boiled down to closer to 17% being non-nationals, and 17% of those non-nationals being from the UK or elsewhere in the EU rather than being the stereotypical immigrant evoked by the headline.

As to why there is a high proportion of non-nationals in Irish prisons, several pages of discussion of studies of crime and racial groups in multiple countries is summarised thus:

Higher levels of offending by non-nationals, while far from inevitable (given generational and cultural differences) are possible, in the context of the economic and social disadvantage of many newcomers, as well as low self-esteem, alienation, cultural problems, possible trauma, the experience of racism and discrimination, as well as the systematic exacerbation of the situation caused by apparently neutral legal practices.

I don’t have an answer. The book refers to policies in Sweden that “have contributed to keeping second-generation immigrant crime low.” From this remove it would appear that those sorts of policies seem to be in place in Ireland, but the tone of the book would indicate that that not enough is being done.

I have just finished reading “De Valera: The Man & The Myths” by T. Ryle Dwyer. I’ve read a few Irish history books since moving here, but I still have trouble sorting out who’s who, who was on which side with whom in what, and any one person’s position on an issue — privately, publicly, at the time, and after “mature recollection” — but with each book I come closer to wearing a groove in my brain such that I can remember some of these details.

While it’s almost true that everything I know about Irish history I learned from Tim Pat Coogan, I did learn a few things from this book. I certainly picked up more about the relationship, or lack of it, between de Valera and David Gray, U.S. Minister to Ireland, 1940-47, and the book reinforced my opinion of Winston Churchill. However, after reading books by TPC, I was surprised that this book made no mention of how de Valera arrived at the money to found the Irish Press. Also, I don’t know that the author, a historian, is sufficiently qualified to repeatedly assert how the psychology of de Valera’s relationship with his mother affected de Valera’s actions.

In summary, a useful book to have read. I consider that recent Irish history is too complex and multi-faceted for anyone to trust their own opinions after reading only one author on the subject, so this book is doubly useful to me for providing a second (or fifth or so) perspective on events.