Barry Recommends...

Leave it to the folks at DK to transform mathematics education into a brightly colored, visually elegant, indisputably spiffy barrel of computational fun. This book provides such a user-friendly refresher course that it could have easily been titled Help Your Kids With Math And, In Doing So, Come To The Realization That You've Retained Way More Math Skills Than You Might Have Previously Thought. Fortunately, DK went with something a little less clunky.

If you love great reference books as much as I do, you may find it impossible to do without this staggeringly wide-ranging, 1067-page guide to the numberless ways in which the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome has influenced the post-classical world of the last 1500 or so years. Organized like an encyclopedia but not intended to be exhaustive, The Classical Tradition includes articles on all the usual suspects (Hercules, Cupid, Helen of Troy, monsters, Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar), as well as on many less-obvious topics: comic books, Marxism, Pablo Picasso, plague, veterinary medicine, fascism, Martin Heidegger, American founding fathers, and Armenian Hellenism. Lots of entries having to do with sex, but you knew that.

Some 30 years ago, I spent 15 or 20 minutes in a Harvard Square bookstore, paging through a book called Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. It was unlike anything I'd ever read, seemingly a groundbreaking work, but I came to the conclusion that it was way over my head. I never did read it.

Last year, feeling uncharacteristically brave, I decided to tackle Hofstadter's 2007 book, I Am A Strange Loop, which had been billed as a continuation and elaboration of some of the themes he introduced in Godel, Escher, Bach: What is the nature of human consciousness and self-awareness? What, really, do we mean when we say, "I"? Can we reject the traditional religious concept of a soul but still maintain that the term "soul" has a different kind of validity? And do humans have anything that can justifiably be called "free will"?

Bottom line: I'm immensely grateful that I followed through and read this book cover to cover. Not an easy read, but an affecting, provocative, and persuasive one.

This is a volume in an Oxford University Press series aimed primarily at adolescent readers, but it is so informative, accurate, authentic in tone, and generous in spirit that I can enthusiastically recommend it to any adults who want to learn about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). (At the Booksmith we shelve it in the psychology section, rather than with the children’s books.) The Thought That Counts is structured as a memoir in six chapters. Each chapter is divided into two main parts, entitled “My Story” and “The Big Picture.” In the “My Story” sections, Jared recounts his experiences with OCD in a roughly chronological narrative, beginning at age 11, when he was first diagnosed as having the disorder, up to the present day. (He is now in his mid 20s, has a BA in English and creative writing, and works as a clinical research assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital.) The “Big Picture” sections, also in Jared’s voice, expand upon issues that were touched on in the previous autobiographical part. The book’s organization is logical and adolescent-friendly and, along with the crystal-clear prose, serves to maximize its accessibility and overall usefulness. Right now, Jared Kant’s book is the only one in this series that we have in stock, but we’ll be happy to special order any of the others. If we get multiple requests for a particular title, we’ll start carrying that one too. We stock the OCD volume because one of our booksellers has a personal interest in the topic, having lived with the disorder for about 35 years. As some of our long-time customers already know, that would be me. One more thing: all the books are priced at $9.95. That’s cheaper than a half-dozen oysters or a decent lobster roll.