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Month: September 2007

The Golden Vanity, by Isabel Paterson

Cover of first US edition of The Golden Vanity

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


No, that must be wrong. One must make a life, out of the lump of raw commonplace, content with a kind of average return. Or fix upon some definite, tangible objective, and convince yourself that it’s worth your whole effort. Men did that, too, accumulated money and possessions and strove for importance. Mysie thought, at least Gina is successful; a great match is the legitimate traditional ambition for a woman, as much as place or power for a man. And Geraldine is successful, not because she has written a best seller, nor because she had got a husband; Leonard isn’t much; but she has made something out of their relation, out of her marriage and her children; they belong to her.

For herself, Mysie had decided some years ago, she would have to work. Work was all right of itself. It wouldn’t get you anywhere; she saw that. Presumably a career was as good for a woman as for a man, if no better; but she knew it would never be enough for her. After all, a man who has only a public life, even if he is a Napoleon, is somehow a poor creature, posturing and pathetic; and furthermore, Mysie had an inexplicable conviction that those apparently solid rewards were growing hollow, being eaten away by some spirit of the times, perhaps through being sought as an end in themselves. Everybody played the stock market for easy money; everything was flashy and tipsy and swift. And yet nobody really had any fun; there was always an aftertaste of bad gin in the pleasure. She did not like the way things were, the stupid drinking and promiscuous pawing and meaningless familiarity, in which all personal values went by the board and people seemed to derive an imbecile gratification from cheapening themselves. Work was better than that. Abstinence and virtue became attractive.

I suppose I’m a failure, Mysie thought. The simplest, most ordinary fool, crying for the moon…. But isn’t there something?

Editor’s Comments

Written in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, The Golden Vanity is at once a subtle social comedy of errors and mores and a deeply cynical view of the Jazz Age, shown through the lives of three very different women. Cousins of various removes, Gina, Geraldine, and Mysie (for Artemisia) are all living in New York City when the novel opens somewhere in the early 1920s.

The novel opens with Gina, secretary to the head of a social charity, being hired as a reader for Mrs. Charlotte Siddall, a grand dame “so used to the part of a great hostess that it had become second nature to her,” during a short loss of sight due to surgery. Mrs. Siddall appreciates Gina’s aid, tact, and striking beauty, but sees her as no more than hired help. Contrary to her intentions, however, Mrs. Siddall’s grandson and heir, Arthur, a quiet and sheltered bibliophile, falls in love with Gina. After several attempts to undo the alliance through emotional and financial manipulations, she concedes, and the two marry. Born into a ne’er-do-well family from a small Washington state logging town, Gina accepts her situation as some form of success, and adapts easily to the life of wealth, even though she never feels any real connection with Arthur.

Geraldine, on the other hand, achieves her success on her own, writing a best seller that enables her to pay for an apartment in the West Seventies, a cook, a housemaid, and a nurse for her two children. Her husband Leonard is another of Paterson’s thin, feckless men, a mediocre company man who speculates on Wall Street with Geraldine’s royalties.

Mysie, the third cousin, works as a press agent for a Broadway producer, rooms with Thea, the widow of a man who shot himself after an earlier stock market failure, and carries on an ambiguous friendship with Jake, a man who is both a gadfly and a deeply serious and intelligent writer … or might be, at least. Even though Mysie’s life seems, on the surface, to be quite unconventional, even bohemian, as the story develops, we come to see that she is most “grounded” (as we would say today). Indeed, although The Golden Vanity focuses on Gina at its start, Mysie emerges as the book’s center, observing and commenting with irony and skepticism on the lives and events around her.

As the Twenties unfold, Arthur and Gina have a son and Gina rises as a socialite, gaining some respect from Mrs. Siddall. Arthur dabbles in arts and politics, founding a small, left-leaning magazine that runs at a loss. Geraldine continues to write. Mysie becomes an actress, good enough to gain some small celebrity. She and Thea buy a small weekend house, not much more than a shack, out on Long Island. Jake gets a play produced, then another.

Meanwhile, the termites are at work. Hints are dropped — dropped and passed over — that the financial boom is built on deceit and sleight-of-hand. An acquaintance suggests to Mrs. Siddall that her impressive new office building is underwritten with junk bonds. Leonard’s stock buys get riskier. A play Mysie is cast in has to fold just before opening when the backer comes up short.

But the parties carry on. At one, Mysie flirts with a Frenchman and asks him, “I daresay New York strikes you as a madhouse?” “Not mad,” he replies, “but Atlantean. It confounds judgment.” In Paterson’s view, the Crash is inevitable, the consequence of lives lived without the motivation of need. “Wisdom and beauty are not to be had for nothing,” Mysie thinks at one point. “Work is something that must be done.”

When it comes, the Crash comes almost as an anticlimax: “… [A] breath brought it down. It was a soundless catastrophe.” It is also, however, an indiscriminate catastrophe. It hits new money and old. Leonard’s stock bubble bursts, the family is forced to cram into a small flat, and they live from sale to sale of Geraldine’s stories. She has a nervous breakdown and flees to Cuba, where she has a brief affair with a gangster than ends melodramatically when he is shot in their hotel room. “Geraldine saw she had never depended on Leonard,” Paterson writes, but we already knew that. Mrs. Siddall’s junk bonds collapse and her half-finished building consumes what’s left of her fortune. Reeling from the shock, she suffers a stroke and dies. Arthur and Gina’s son dies of a sudden illness. The brownstone mansion they shared becomes a shell.

Mysie goes on, though, as she must, being Paterson’s oracle. She’s become recognized in recent years as a pioneer of libertarianism, thanks largely to Stephen Cox’s The Woman and the Dynamo, and we can see her political views surface throughout Mysie’s commentaries:

Between the blasted reformers and the earnest immoralists a pretty good country has been darned near ruined. Neither will recognize that there really are different kinds of people. There used to be room for everybody to be what they were. Cities, small towns, suburbs, farms, backwoods. Rigid respectability with the alternative of doing what you pleased at your own risk. Take it or leave it.

This could almost serve as a gloss on libertarianism. Underlying these thoughts, however, is Paterson’s atomistic view of human existence:

Being what we are, we must each have a separate world. They tell us we are going through enormous changes, that everything will be different. But it will last our time; it must, for you create and hold your own world around you, so it can end only when you die. And none of us can know what the other’s world is or looks like….

“How difficult, how impossible communication is,” a character muses in Paterson’s Never Ask the End. In The Golden Vanity, Mysie thinks, “Speech is the distinguishing mark of human beings; and every word we use is charged with the whole burden of experience.” If this is, indeed, Paterson’s outlook, then libertarianism is not just a matter of making “room for everybody to be what they were,” but the natural state for us isolated, experience-charged particles.

Isabel Paterson circa 1930The problem with the Twenties, as Paterson characterizes it, was not a matter of “doing what you pleased” but doing what everyone else was doing, and doing it thoughtlessly. Despite her deeply individualistic view of life, she admires the Victorians for the effort they put into maintaining their structured morality: “Respectability is a genuine accomplishment,” Mysie says at one point, and of all the characters in The Golden Vanity, Paterson gives most credit to Mrs. Siddall: her attempts to manipulate Arthur and others is, at least, an active defense of the status quo.

For the generation that follows hers, however, there is no foundation to fall back upon when the bubble of the myth of success bursts. In the book’s closing scene, Jake tells a group gathered at Mysie and Thea’s house about an incident in which he and several others spent hours adrift in a boat, not realizing they were all the time within feet of the shore. “We’ll never touch our shore again,” Mysie thinks, hearing this. “That landfall is lost forever, down under.”

As interesting as the commentaries in The Golden Vanity are, though, they cannot hide the fact that, Mysie and Mrs. Siddall aside, this is a book populated by names more than characters. Gina is meant to be shown as superficial, but Paterson’s intent is undermined when Geraldine and others remain equally flat. Despite some fine passages and a strong underlying theme, The Golden Vanity seems to me incomplete, almost unfinished. Perhaps Paterson was dissuaded from making the book as indirect and experimental in its approach as Never Ask the End, but I suspect it would have been far more effective and coherent if she could have ventured further from the confines of a novel of manners. Paterson might have respected structure, but her personality seems never to have sat too comfortably with it.

This does not mean, though, that The Golden Vanity is not an entertaining and enlightening book, more than worthy of resurrection in print. If Dawn Powell can rate two volumes in the Library of America, Isabel Paterson at least deserves some serious critical attention for more than just her political writings. Although I can hardly claim to speak on their behalf, I suspect more than a few women of today would find Mysie and Marta (of Never Ask the End) remarkably contemporary in their situation and views. And if this short excerpt from her New York Herald Tribune Weekly Books Review column, “Turns with a Bookworm” is representative, a collection of her newspaper pieces would make a terrific read.

Find Out More

Locate a Copy

The Golden Vanity, by Isabel Paterson
New York: William Morrow & Co., 1934

The Peabody Sisters of Salem, by Louise Hall Tharp

The stories of Elizabeth Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne — the Peabody Sisters of Boston — whose lives interwined with most of the great names of 19th century American literature and culture, have retold in such recent books as Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury, and the essay collection Reinventing the Peabody Sisters. As a subject, the sisters seem too good to pass up: Elizabeth’s 13 West Street bookshop in Boston was, if you will, the Shakespeare and Co. of the Transcendentalists; Mary was married to the pioneering educator Horace Mann, after whom one in six middle schools in the U.S. is named; and Sophia to the great novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Peabody Sisters of Salem'Louise Tharp Hall first celebrated the remarkable sisters in her 1950 collective biography, The Peabody Sisters of Salem, now out of print, which at the time was received with great acclaim. Here is a small sample of its many enthusiastic reviews:

• Jane Volles, San Francisco Chronicle

Generously Mrs. Tharp has filled in the background of that golden age in which the sisters lived. At one time or another, you meet all of the ‘Olympians’. She gives an interesting treatment to the young crowd of Transcendentalists parading the Boston streets in smocks and tasseled caps…. Mrs. Tharp evokes rather than probes in her presentation of the Peabodys. Her portraits have that quality we call inspired which defies the wreckage of time and catches certain aspects that remain in the mind of the reader: Elizabeth at her happiest when she was giving more than she could afford; Mary, always stimulating to the mind; Sophia, filled with irrepressible buoyancy. Mrs. Tharp’s manner of presentation is summed up perfectly in certain words of Mary Peabody’s: “It is not enough to cultivate the memory or even to enlighten the understanding. Out of the heart are the issues of life.”

• Henry Steele Commager, New York Herald Tribune, 8 January 1950

Mrs. Tharp has re-created the Peabody girls and the circle in which they moved with consumate skill. It would be easy to make the Peabodys objects of fun, but Mrs. Tharp writes of them with sympathy and affection and understanding…. [The criticisms of the book] are minor matters. What is important is that one of the exciting families of our middle period should be rescued from oblivion and made to live again.

• Clorinda Clarke, Catholic World, March 1950

Wit and pathos, respect and scholarship are the ingredients of this book. In it we meet afresh, Alcott and Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Mrs. Browning. It achieves that blend of history and humanity that makes a first-rate biography.

• Edward Weeks, The Atlantic, February 1950

In style and technique the book is a blend, and a very good one, or letters and diaries and Mrs. Tharp’s reanimation of the past. In its scenes, in its conversation, in its detailed knowledge of the background, it is an invigorating, honestly recaptured chronicle. These people mattered largely in their day, and we enjoy that day and feel their vitality in this leisurely and attractive book.

• Cleveland Amory, New York Times, 8 January 1950

Mrs. Tharp has a narrative ability and an affection for her subject which is contagious. Her scholarship is extensive and, while one wishes she had included a list of her sources as well as a complete list of the writings of the Peabodys themselves, it is convincing.

• Edward Wagenknecht, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 8 January 1950

Judged by any standard you like, this is absorbing biography. The year 1950 is not likely to offer any more exciting reading experience.

Copies of The Peabody Sisters of Salem can be picked up on Amazon for as little as 15 cents. A bargain like that is hard to pass up.

Most of Tharp’s other books were biographies written for young readers, but her 1965 biography of the Boston heiress and art patron, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose museum is one of the finest art collections from the “Robber Baron” era, Mrs. Jack was a best-seller and received reviews equal to that of The Peabody Sisters of Salem. It was reissued in 2003 by the museum.

Which forgotten novel do you love?, from the Guardian Unlimited

Source: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/09/plucked_from_obscurity.html, Guardian Unlimited Books Blog, 2 September 2007

Following up on The Observer’s feature, “How did we miss this?”, in which 50 contemporary novelists were asked to name the books they considered most “shamefully undervalued,” its literary editor, Robert McCrum, took to his blog to invite readers to recommend their favorite “obscure, half-forgotten, probably out-of-print titles.”

As in The Observer feature, the recommendations include a fair number of in-print, critically recognized, and well-established books neglected only in the assessment of those who proposed them: The Bell Jar? In the Heart of the Country? Le Grand Meaulnes? They may not be Moby Dick, but they’re certainly not “obscure, half-forgotten,” or out-of-print.

But it’s worth a look for the genuinely obscure works that pop up in and amongst these:

• Bernard Gilbert’s “Old England” series

Gilbert “envisaged a sequence of 12 books each in a different form : poetry, drama as well as prose” depicting aspects of “Old England.” In a 2006 post in the Codisdead, writer and artist Herbert Read’s review of one of these books, Old England: A God’s-Eye View of a Village, is quoted in which Read wrote,

His book is so completely planned and neatly executed that it comes into the category of those works of science that in conception give evidence of a poetic mind…. In our own time it will stand as a diagnosis of the diseased heart of the country. In another age it will mean as much as, and even more than, Piers Plowman means to us.

• Thinks I to Myself, by Edward Nares

First published as “Says I, Says I” by “Thinks-I-to-Myself Who”, this “Serio-Ludicro-Tragico-Comico Tale”, popular in the early 1800s, is a tongue-in-cheek “autobiography” penned by an English clergyman. The narrator fills his story with all sorts of asides and commentaries, such as this lament upon the decline in the servitude of servants:

It used formerly to be a matter of convenience for any master or mistress to communicate an order or direction through a third person: to tell the butler, for instance, to tell the coachman to wait at the table, or the footman to ask the groom to carry a letter to the post; but this round-about mode of communication is now properly put end to; Mr. Butler no longer dare presume to tell Mr. Coachman to wait at table, nor Mr. Charles the footman Mr. Bob the groom to carry a letter to the post; Mrs. Housekeeper to tell Miss House-maid to help her prepare the sweetmeats; nor the nurse to ask the laundry-maid to bring up little Miss’s dinner.

The full book can be read online or downloaded from Google Books.

• Katharine Topkins’ All the Tea in China

Poster christopherhawtree writes of this 1960s novel,

Nothing like it. Seething, erotic, with an extraordinary meditation upon a woman’s view of depressing a car’s throttle pedal, something I have never seen mentioned anywhere else (it’s hardly a subject one can broach in polite company). Topkins wrote “Kotch”, filmed with Jack Lemmon, and later wrote novels with her husband. I lent my copy to somebody at Virago – it screams out to be a Modern Classic, but I never got it back… It’s not quite Lolita but getting that way. A wonderful novel.

“How did we miss these?”, from the Observer

Source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,2160644,00.html, The Observer, 2 September 2007

“[B]ooks that seem to speak only to you are, in some ways, the most treasured,” writes Robert McCrum, The Observer’s literary editor, in his introduction to a recent cover feature. The magazine’s editor asked 50 contemporary novelists to name “the novelist or poet whose work they believe to be shamefully undervalued.”

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'The Balloonist'Their responses show that undervalue, like value, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Given the wealth of academic attention paid to Flannery O’Connor’s work and the fact that A Good Man Is Hard to Find, it’s hard for me to agree with M. J. Hyland’s nomination of the book. For several other writers, it’s the work, not the author, that’s undervalued: Thackeray, Samuel Johnson, and Edith Wharton are secure in their respective spots in the literary canon, but Pendennis, Rasselas, and The Reef are hardly the titles most likely to be associated with them.

Only few genuinely neglected titles pop up on this list. Philip Pullman proposes The Balloonist, one of the many out-of-print wonders by the late MacDonald Harris, of whom he writes, “Actually, it’s almost impossible to read any of Harris’s first pages without helplessly turning to the next, and the next.” Although Julien Green’s Midnight (recommended by John Mortimer), Hans Fallada’s The Drinker (Beryl Bainbridge), and Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s Viking saga, The Long Ships (Michael Chabon) are all now out of print, each has had one or more reissues within the last decade or so.

The most significant aspect of the feature is its demonstration of the resurrection of works of the English novelist and short-story writer, Elizabeth Taylor, “the author of some of the finest and subtlest English novels of her time,” in McCrum’s assessment. Three novelists nominate her works, which can now enjoy a revival on the order of Barbara Pym’s in the early 1980s, thanks to new editions of such works as Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Angel, At Mrs Lippincote’s, and In a Summer Season from Virago Modern Classics and a 2005 film of “Mrs. Palfrey.”

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Gerald Weinberg

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


Cover of first U.S. edition of 'An Introduction to General Systems Thinking'The complete substitution of theory for observation is, of course, not scientific. Even worse is going through the motions of observing, but discarding as ‘spurious’ every observation that does not fit theory — like the Viennese ladies who weigh themselves before entering Demel’s Tea Room. If they’re down a kilo, they have an extra mochatorte, and if they’re up a kilo they pronounce the scale ‘in error’ and have an extra mochatorte anyway.

This, then, is the problem. Raw, detailed observation of the world is just too rich a diet for science. No two situations are exactly alike unless we make them so. Every license plate we see is a miracle. Every human being born is a much greater miracle, being a genetic combination which has less than 1 chance in 10100 of existing among all possible genetic combinations. Yet the same is true for any particular state — in the superobserver sense — of any complex system.

‘A state is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again.’ But no state will ever occur again if we don’t lump many states into one ‘state.’ Thus, in order to learn at all, we must forego some potential discrimination of states, some possibility of learning everything. Or, codified as The Lump Law:

If we want to learn anything, we musn’t try to learn everything.

Examples? Wherever we turn they are at hand. We have a category of things called ‘books’ and another called ‘stepladders.’ If we could not tell one from the other, we would waste a lot of time in libraries. But suppose we want a book off the top shelf and no stepladder is at hand. If we can relax our lumping a bit, we may think to stack up some books and stand on them. When psychologists try this problem on people, some take hours to figure out how to get the book, and some never do.

It’s the same in any field of study. If psychologists saw every white rat as a miracle, there would be no psychology. If historians saw every war as a miracle, there would be no history. And if theologians saw every miracle as a miracle, there would be no religion, because every miracle belongs to the set of all miracles, and thus is not entirely unique.

Science does not, and cannot, deal with miracles. Science deals only with repetitive events. Each science has to have characteristic ways of lumping the states of the systems it observes, in order to generate repetition. How does it lump? Not in arbitrary ways, but in ways determined by its past experience — ways that ‘work’ for that science. Gradually, as the science matures, the ‘brain’ is traded for the ‘eye,’ until it becomes almost impossible to break a scientific paradigm (a traditional way of lumping) with mere empirical observations.

Editor’s Comments


This is the most mind-opening book I have never read. Never read, that is, from beginning to end, as I have every other book I’ve featured so far.

I first came across this book while browsing through the stacks of the engineering library at my graduate school. Even though An Introduction to General Systems Thinking has plenty of equations, graphs, and diagrams, it stood in dramatic contrast to all the other volumes, wholly and humorlessly technical in content. In just the first few moments of thumbing through its pages, I could see that this was an attempt to step away from the entire range of scientific and technological endeavors and ask, “What’s going on here?” As most of my waking hours at the time were devoted to such endeavors — physics, orbital mechanics, statistics, and linear programming — the book had the effect of someone opening up the window in an grim, airless cell. I couldn’t escape the need to stick with the curriculum, but at least, with Weinberg’s help, I could put it all in some kind of perspective.

When one gets deep into a particular scientific or engineering subject, the depth and breadth of details, theories, and methods can easily come to fill one’s whole field of vision. The discipline becomes the way we approach a great range of problems. However, we also quickly learn to define away any of the problems that fall outside the means of the discipline to solve. “But what,” ask Weinberg, “of the problems that refuse to be avoided? What of the depletion of our natural resources by an ever-increasing population in an ever-more-wasteful economy? … What of grisly wars and impoverished peace? What of death, and what of me, dying?”

“Such problems,” he continues, “fall outside any discipline.” An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, is, fundamentally, an attempt “to teach an approach to thinking when the labels are missing, or misleading.” Weinberg takes the basic principles of General SystemsTheory, as introduced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1930s and then developed by Kenneth Boulding and others, and shows how they can be applied, in various ways, … well, not exactly to solve such problems, but at least to recognize and understand them. He doesn’t presume to have all the answers: “…[D]o not take this book too seriously,” Weinberg warns his readers. “It is not a bible, nor a proof, nor even a cohesive argument. It is, indeed, my first few thoughts, a collection of hints, nudges, pushes, and sometimes shoves, which aim to assist your first few thoughts on any ‘systems’ problem.”

In mapping out his territory, Weinberg early on divides (and, as he notes repeatedly in the book, any act of dividing things up has inherent dangers) the space of problems into three regions:

  • “Organized simplicity” — the region of mechanical laws
  • “Unorganized complexity” — the region of sufficient diversity or randomness for statistics to be reliable
  • “Organized complexity” — the region “too compex for analysis and too organized for statistics”

For problems that fall into this last space, he argues, “there is an essential failure of the two classical methods.” Weinberg is not opposed to the use of scientific methods. “Science, too, is a most useful tool — probably the most useful tool that man has ever discovered,” he writes. But we are continually stymied in our attempts to tackle problems where the simplifying tools of mechanics or statistics don’t seem to work. And, unfortunately, we have a tendency to persist in hammering away at the coalface with these tools even when they don’t work.

Weinberg compares the situation to the story of the boy who said, “Today, we learned how to spell ‘banana,’ but we didn’t know when to stop.” Or, as he elevates the idea into the Banana Principle,

Heuristic devices don’t tell you when to stop.

Take, as Weinberg does, the example of the two classic approaches to understanding a system: the black box and the white box. On the one hand, in the black box approach, we run the risk of not understanding the limitations of our tools for observing (e.g., the uncertainty principle in quantum physics) or of the act of observing on the black box (e.g., the Hawthorne effect in social sciences). On the other, with the white box approach, he writes, “because of our own limitations, no box is ever entirely revealed to us, even if we construct it ourselves.”

Understanding the limitations of our tools is a recurring theme in An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. As in the excerpt above, Weinberg stresses that any scientific tool must have a simplifying effect to have any value. Awareness of a tool’s limitations does not undermine its value, however — or, as he proposes in the Count-to-Three Principle,

If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it.

Weinberg compares scientific methods to a handyman’s box of tools. It’s been highly effective at solving many problems in the first two regions. What lies in the third region might be “situations in which present scientific methods could work, but have not, either because they have never been tried or because they have been tried without proper imagination and understanding.” But it’s also possible that there are situations where we’re unlikely to stumble across the breakthrough that pulls the problem into a space where our tools can solve them completely or effectively, at least anytime soon.

One of Weinberg’s strongest messages in the book is the importance of recognizing when problems don’t respond to known methods and approaches. Or, as he puts it, “[A]fter we have been fishing in a small pond for a while, most of the easy fish will have been caught — and it may be time to change bait.” Because we are human, we resist change. We stick with what’s worked in the past even when it doesn’t seem to be working. Only extreme frustration, disaster, or some other crisis, forces us to step back and rethink what we’re doing. Weinberg calls this the Used Car Law:

  1. A way of looking at the world that is not putting excessive stress on an observer need not be changed.
  2. A way of looking at the world may be changed to reduce the stress on an observer.


“In other words,” he writes, “why do we continue pumping gas into certain antique ways of looking at the world, why do we sometimes expend mammoth efforts to repair them, and why do we sometimes trade them in?”

Such questions are one of the great delights of An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. At the end of each chapter, Weinberg offers a set of “Questions for Further Research.” Questions such as:

  • Tagore said, “By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower.” Many poets are similarly renowned for their celebration of wholeness and complexity. Choose a particular poet and several representative works to discuss in light of the Law of Medium Numbers [“For medium number systems {i.e., those that fall in the third region–Ed.}, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly.”].
  • The French Academy is reputed to have debated for 40 years over whether it was “le voiture” or “la voiture. How does an English speaker learn the sex of a feather? How does a French child learn the same thing? How does the French Academy know the sex of automobiles?

  • Go out into a large open field — if you can still find one — lie on your back, and gaze up at the clouds for an hour or so. Make notes of the figures you see there, and later analyze those notes to see if you can detect the influences that have shaped your vision.

Like most of the questions in the book, these are open-ended. An Introduction to General Systems Thinking is that rare book where the questions outnumber the answers. Go to just about any page, and you will find some question that can lead you to hours or days of thinking. Which is one of the reasons I’ve never succeeded in reading it from start to finish. For me at least, doing that would require me to set aside some great eye-opening question in favor to pressing relentlessly on, which seems contrary to Weinberg’s whole point. “All general systems thinking,” he writes, starts with one of three questions:

  1. Why do I see what I see?
  2. Why do things stay the same?
  3. Why do things change?

Of our grappling with these questions, Weinberg says,

…[W]e can never hope to find the end; we do not intend to try. Our goal is to improve our thinking, not to solve the riddle of the Sphynx.

Which is also why I’ve found myself returning to An Introduction to General Systems Thinking again and again in the twenty-plus years since I first stumbled across it. I know no better spark to revive a mind that’s stuck in dead-end thinking than to open this book, dive into one of Gerald Weinberg’s wonderful open-ended questions, and rediscover how one looks at the world.

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking was out of print for years after its first publication by John Wiley & Sons in 1975, but in 2001, Dorset House reissued the book in a silver anniversary edition, with a new preface by Weinberg.

Other Comments

· John Richards, CSQE Body of Knowledge areas: General, Knowledge, Conduct, and Ethics (on the silver anniversary edition)

As one can tell from the title, this is not a new book – it is a classic. The author worked on the original from 1961 to 1975. He begins the preface to this silver anniversary edition with a quote from Albert Einstein: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

This book is about thinking. It is about how humans organize, synthesize, and put order to their universe….

It is difficult to summarize the book’s broad chapters in a few sentences and even more difficult to give this book the credit it deserves in such a limited review. Suffice it to say this is one of the classics of systems or science of computing. I recommend it to all; it will cause both scientists and nonscientists to examine their world and their thinking. This book will appear on my reading table at regular intervals, and one day I hope to update to the golden anniversary edition.

· Charles Ashbacher, posted on Amazon.com

. . . it is truly an extraordinary piece of work. . . . It is not about computing per se, but about how humans think about things and how ‘facts’ are relative to time, our personal experience and environmental context. . . .

….This is a book that is a true classic, not in computing but in the broad area of scholarship. It is partly about the philosophy and mechanisms of science; partly about designing things so they work but mostly it is about how humans view the world and create things that match that view. This book will still be worth reading for a long time to come and it is on my list of top ten computing books of the year.

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Locate a Copy

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Gerald M. Weinberg
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975
New York: Dorset House Publishing, 2001