delicious

The post’s title sounding like a bad Eric Roberts pseudo-action flick aside this week’s jaunt to the library turned up a few more nuggets of joy keeping with the same destruction and mayhem theme that started the whole experiment. The more I look for books of “questionable” topics the more I’m suprised by the seemingly dwindling number of titles in these areas. While there’s no shortage of the latest Harry Potter or Dean Koontz snooze-fests topics like anarchism, socialism, anti-capitalism (and to a lesser extent destruction and explosives) turn up fewer and fewer hits as the weeks go by. If only the library system weren’t so helplessly dependant on the regime o’ the day for funding maybe they’d be more inclined to keep a more well-rounded selection and dabble in more subversive topics.

I realized after I dropped my books off in the return slot that I hadn’t written down the titles., but this week I walked out with the following:

• The Chemistry of Powder And Explosives by Tenney L. Davis, Ph.D. © 1943: 1943?!? Holy way-the-hell-out-of-date-books Batman! This book is supposed to teach me about powder and solid explosives and it pre-dates napalm, plastic explosives and “the bomb”? Ok. The fact that this book was published when my grandfather was being drafted for WW2 to kick some Nazis in the eier didn’t prevent it from laying down the basics. A decent amount of pictures and aparatus designs to impart the reader with a working knowledge of things. Mr. Davis offers nothing in the way of manufacturing, well, perhaps if you have a degree in or serious understanding of chemistry it does. All in all a pretty decent read, but a bit tame for my purposes.
• Crisis Response - Inside Stories on Managing Image Under Siege by Jack A. Gottschalk © 1993: This was a total waste of time. I figured I’d get a book to see how corporations deal with serious crisis i.e. terrorism, natural disasters, civil unrest, armed revolution, etc. Turns out it’s just a public relations handbook on how to rape the environment and steal millions from unsuspecting investors while putting on a happy face to tell people everything’s A-OK! One especially nauseating section is on the Valdez oil spill and how Exxon could have done a much better job protecting thier corporate image. Fuck their corporate image you ass hat. A drunk fuck ran a god damn oil tanker aground and spilled 240,000 barrels of oil that saturates Price William Sound to this very day and this book wants to critique their corporate image. I recommend this one if you’ve accidentally injested drano, it’s sure to induce vomiting.
• World Trade Center Building Performance Study FEMA © 2002: I picked this one up just for the title. Ought to be a good addition to any would-be terroists reading list. Has lots of bright colors and pretty pictures, but doesn’t get anywhere close to some real questions like “how do not one, but two, 80+ story buildings structurally fail and come down in a nice tidy pile no larger than the space of the city block they rested on?”. To me there are a hell of a lot more holes in the story that this book tries to put a Mr. Wizard spin on.

Not a bad take this time and there’s some decent reading in there even if it did come from a 60+ year old book. If you want some more sane and thought-provoking material pertaining to 9/11 I highly recommend checking out In Plane Site by Dave vonKleist and William Lewis.