29: Recollections of Japan, Hendrik Doeff

The memoirs of the chief of Dutch trade in Japan, 1799-1817. A lot of David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" was based on these very memoirs, which is why I picked it up.

This would have been great in Dutch.

It's merely good in English, because, unfortunately, it was translated by Annick M. Doeff, who is...well, hell if I can be bothered to find out exactly. She's married to a descendant of Hendrik Doeff, and does not appear to be a historian.

I can't tell whether the translation is biased, but I certainly can tell the introduction and notes are. I'll paraphrase. "Hendrik Doeff was a great, benevolent, intelligent, diplomatic, centuries-ahead-of-his-time man, the English were all evil, scheming jerks, and the Americans were awesomely fantastic and upright, just as we are today. Also, I won't actually use a capable editor, stick my footnotes in willy-nilly, randomly choose not to translate words that have perfectly good English equivalents, explain words that any person interested in history will know, oh, yes, and do so incorrectly." (No, Annick: the Greeks did not wear togas. They wore tunics. The fucking Romans wore togas. And a "tabard" doesn't need a fucking note explaining it. And it's not a fucking toga, to begin with. Jesus H. Christ in a handbasket.)

't ain't worth the $22 you're charged. Just wait for a Dutch version.

So all that said: the words of Hendrik Doeff himself are excellent (even through this bizarre translation filter). Just ignore the stupid notes.

28: Cornelia Moesbergen (1876-1973), Anthon de Vries

A short monograph my father wrote about his maternal grandmother.

27: By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons, Ralph Caplan

The subtitle whets the appetite, and the book fails to sate it.

There's a load of nonsense about the philosophy of design and how politics is design and design is politics and experience is what designers design and, oh fuck it all. The interesting bits, the Don Norman bits, are spread through this codswallop. I ended up skimming to the good bits.

26: Why Buildings Fall Down, Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori

Hideously annoying: it wants to be a pop-sci book, but it glosses over too much of the sci, yet doesn't explain some concepts enough. On top of that, Salvadori's ego shines through like a thousand suns going nova.

What a bunch of rubbish. With a good editor, this could have been brilliant.

Read the appendices, which are actually good, and skip the rest. Then pick up Gordon's Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, which is a million times better.