Dex Plus
by Dex Yellow Pages
(www.dexknows.com)
Free
Page count: 632
The bang was so loud I nearly crapped my pants. More than a foot
thick and tucked in a bag destined to live forever in a landfill, our
new Dex phone books—all three of them!—landed on our porch
shortly before dawn on a sunny summer morning.
Along with our new yellow pages and white pages, we also got a copy
of Dex Plus, a smaller, more compact yellow pages. “Convenient
& Portable,” reads the copy on the cover, perfect for our “vacation
home.” We don’t own a vacation home, sadly, but we were heading to the
beach for a week when our new phone books arrived, so I tucked Dex
Plus into my bag.
It had been ages since I cracked open a phone book. Why would anyone
use a phone book when Google can locate any number you need in .28
seconds or less? I may be the first person ever to read a phone book
for pleasure. (The first person without autism, anyway.) My beach reads
tend toward vaguely trashy biographies of European royals, like Eleanor
Herman’s Sex with the Queen. (Read it, loved it.) But there
was something seductive about Dex Plus.
Dex Plus has some pretty maps at the beginning, and its
community pages include colorful seating charts for Safeco Field,
KeyArena, Qwest Field, and Husky Stadium. In the directory proper,
there are significant omissions—Dale Chihuly isn’t listed under
“Glass Blowers,” and I couldn’t find the local chapter of Fist Fuckers
of America listed under “Fraternal Organizations”—and some red
meat for conservatives. If you’re an anti-immigrant Republican
conservative who longs to see white people working again as gardeners,
house painters, roofers, and home health-care workers, the photos in
the ads in Dex Plus will show you a vanished America.
But what I most enjoyed about Dex Plus were the
pages—pages and pages—of escort ads. College Girls, Seattle
Hotties, Airline Escorts (“Specializing in Sea-Tac Airport &
Surrounding Areas!”) made me feel a lot better about the place I work.
If escort ads are appropriate for a publication that every parent in
the Puget Sound area keeps in his or her home, then they’re appropriate
for a free weekly newspaper intended for adults. DAN SAVAGE
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer
(Simon & Schuster) $25
Page count: 1,249
The definitive history of Germany’s Nazi era, written by William
Shirer, a CBS reporter who lived in Berlin for most of Hitler’s reign
of terror, vividly describes a terrifying world in which sadists and
illiterates had total control; in which ordinary Germans looked the
other way while German traditions, culture, and human rights were
systematically dismantled; and which, ultimately, crumpled under the
weight of its egomaniacal leader’s own fanaticism. First published in
1960, Rise and Fall lacks the emotional and historical
distance of later books about Hitler and the Third Reich; but its
shortfalls (a Christian distaste for the homosexuality, a somewhat
dismissive view of women) are more than made up for by its
unprecedented sweep and textural richness. Vivid descriptions and
reportorial details make the pages—more than a thousand—fly
by. ERICA C. BARNETT
Within a Budding Grove
by Marcel Proust
(Modern Library) $14.95
Page count: 784
The second section of the second volume of Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu is a fabulous beach read—sunny,
summery, and oh so French. Cheekily entitled “Place-Names: The Place,”
this section is set on the seashore, in the trendy 19th-century resort
town of Balbec, with its Grand Hotel, its golf courses and tennis
courts, and a surrounding countryside littered with charming churches
of architectural interest. Our narrator (young, infirm, romantic) is
preoccupied with a posse of flirtatious teenage girls, at the center of
which preens Albertine, with her famously wandering beauty spot and
endless sass.
Of course, the winner of the 1919 Prix Goncourt is also a meticulous
investigation of the social and political moment of Belle Epoque
France, with its official disgust and secret worship for the displaced
aristocracy. Proust goes into palsied throes of etiquette as regards
the appropriate dinner hour for the bourgeois Parisian family and the
proper mode of address and decor for a former courtesan turned
respectable salonnière. The modern reader will tiptoe through
difficult-to-parse discussions of anti-Semitism, wade through page-long
sentences, and relive the hormonal haze of adolescence in exquisite,
agonizing detail.
It is, nonetheless, indubitably, set on a beach. ANNIE WAGNER
Science of Logic
by G. W. F. Hegel
Translated by A. V. Miller
(Humanity Books) $45
Page count: 844
Hegel’s Science of Logic is the kind of book that gets
you thinking about things. Though a little long, it’s not really that
hard to understand. What it wants to make clear to you is the logic of
the categories that make the world, as well as experience, possible.
The only thing you need to know before reading the big book is this:
Hegel’s categories are very much like Kant’s categories. If you know
what Kant means by categories, then you will know what Hegel means.
There is, however, one important distinction. Kant’s categories make
only human experience possible; Hegel’s, on the other hand, make the
whole world possible. This means, Kant’s categories are not
ontological; Hegel’s are ontological. Kant’s categories are not
ontological because they are transcendental. And the transcendental
logic of human experience is that before experience can happen, the
categories must be there first and always. Kant moves from
transcendental aesthetic to transcendental logic and finally to
transcendental dialectic. Now, where transcendental dialect ends is
where Hegel’s logic begins. And he begins with being, which is one of
the categories—the conceptual structures that are not only the
world-as-known-by-us (phenomena) but also Ding-an-sich (noumena). And
that’s basically it! If you know the meaning of Kant’s categories and
the limits of his transcendental dialectic, Hegel’s Science of
Logic is a piece of cake. CHARLES MUDEDE
Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville
(University of Chicago) $22
Page count: 722
Who needs a summer fling when you can have two sordid
volumes—93 chapters total—packed with descriptions of the
one-night stands of the most virile French aristocrat to ever mount an
American milkmaid? The author of Memoir on Pauperism and
The Old Regime and the Revolution is at his most potent in
this 1835 bodice-ripper about his jaunt across the Nubile States of
America. The pleasures of breezing through Democracy in
America are many. Our Mutton-Chopped Monsieur is dispatched, at
the tender age of 27, to study the American prison system. (Hot.) He
gets more than he bargains for. Fueled by Gallic wiles, an
out-of-control libido, and more Château Margaux than you can
imagine, Tocqueville works his slatternly charm across the new nation
(not to mention a Girls Gone Wild weekend in Tijuana). Keeping
things outrageous is a cast of supporting characters that includes a
coke-addled drag queen and a burro named Philippe. But this arousing
memoir isn’t all tits and libertines. Along the way, Tocqueville and
his motley crew learn about America—the chapter “How the
Enlightenment, the Habits, and the Practical Experience of the
Americans Contribute to the Success of Democratic Institutions” will
coax a heartfelt tear from the most jaded eye—and they learn
something (spoiler alert!) about themselves. BRENDAN KILEY
Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
(Penguin Classics) $16
Page count: 721
“Literature breeds publishers!” “And journalists!” decry two of the
beautifully illusioned writers in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a
699-page novel followed by 22 pages of notes. For these two main
characters—Lucien Chardon, who dreams of being a poet, and his
closest friend David Séchard, a provincial printer and aspiring
inventor—writing and publishing breeds nothing but humiliation,
of the extremely protracted sort, the sort that everyone else can see
approaching and that many wait for, mouths watering.
But this novel is not just about publishing. It’s also about
banking. The friends endure twin fates, each one compromised by his
ambitions, bespeaking a mad ambivalence on Balzac’s part
vis-à-vis the 19th century. He sends Lucien into Paris to make
his fame, only to deliver him into hackery, bankruptcy, and a Faustian
bargain. While the writer Lucien is steadily eroded in the first half
of the book, the publisher David toils toward his ruin in the second.
David’s invention is stolen from him in an elaborate, assiduously
detailed series of complicated legal and banking schemes set in motion
by Lucien’s expensive misfortunes in Paris. The differences between the
banking laws in Paris and the banking laws in the provinces are
helpfully enumerated.
One of the crown jewels in Balzac’s 92-novel oeuvre La
Comédie Humaine, Lost Illusions is satire, not
tragedy, but this being Balzac, it’s also a revelation about the ways
that people casually abuse each other. The men survive; their dreams
don’t. The book took Balzac six years to write and it took me a year to
read. I can think of no better way to spend a year on the beach. JEN
GRAVES