referencebooks

Encyclopedia of Water

By David E. Newton

Published by Greenwood, 2003

This is a 7" by 10" hardbound book running to 401 pages including the index, plus a preface, an introduction, and a classified guide to the articles.

See my entry for October 30, 2005, for the same author's Encyclopedia of Air, also published by Greenwood in 2003, along with another one called Encyclopedia of Fire.

Like Encyclopedia of Air, this encyclopedia looks at its subject in a vastly multi-disciplinary way, with articles covering topics in chemistry, biology, meteorology and other earth sciences, literature, mythology and religion, transportation, technology, visual arts, and history, as well as also providing many biographical entries on people whose work related to water and organizations that have to do with water. Here is a list of the first fifteen entries in the "H" sequence, "See Also" references included:

• Haliae See Nymphs
  
• Hard Water
  
• Heavy Water
  
• Holy Water
  
• Holy Waters See Sacred Waters
  
• Hookah
  
• Hovercraft See Boats and Ships
  
• "Hubbly-Bubbly" See Hookah
  
• Human Water Needs See Biological Functions of Water; Desalination
  
• Humidity
  
• Hydrate
  
• Hydraulic Device
  
• Hydraulic Press See Bramah, Joseph
  
• Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, and Hydrodynamics
  
• Hydroelectric Power
  

The entries are written in relatively simple prose given the scientific subject matter of many of them. Since it's such a multi-disciplinary encyclopedia it wouldn't be appropriate to assume too much significant background knowledge, and the author doesn't. However, he doesn't shy away from providing mathematical formulae where relevant. So, there is a fairly decent amount of information included given the breadth of scope.

Reference books like this that take a feature of the world like water and air and look at it from such a wide range of disciplines are interesting, fun, and rather odd from a practical standpoint. Usually when someone is studying something like water it is from the perspective of a particular discipline, and they will find deeper information in a resource that is created specifically for that discipline. This stems from the fact that the work that people do is usually of a certain kind. When I try to think of who would find a book like this most useful, I keep coming back to the notion of a literary writer or a visual or conceptual artist who needs to pull together ideas about water for thematic, exploratory reasons. It is difficult to say who else might find a good use for this book, but you never know. It does have a lot of good information relating to water in it.

The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd Edition

Compiled by Eric S. Raymond

Published by MIT Press, 1996.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback with a very colorful and amateurish-looking cover design for a book from MIT Press. It's 547 pages including the appendices and bibliography, plus a sizeable preferatory section.

The "New" in the title of this book is somewhat misleading. While this edition is indeed much revised from previous editions, the bulk of it is a lexicon of the culture of greybeard hackers rather than the current lingo, and its entries are often markedly nostalgic. This is more of a feature than a bug, as long as you know what to expect.

Here is a list of the first sixteen entries in the "E" sequence, see references not included:

• earthquake
  
• Easter egg
  
• Easter egging
  
• eat flaming death
  
• EBCDIC
  
• punched card
  
• echo
  
• eighty-column mind
  
• El Camino Bignum
  
• elder days
  
• elegant
  
• elephantine
  
• elevator controller
  
• elite
  
• ELIZA effect
  
• elvish
  

There is a lot of colorful material here; the book paints a fascinating picture of a subculture. The entries are written in a way that seems to welcome you to the that geeky male club of staying up all night programming and eating junk food and making nerdy jokes.

Here's one very typical entry, just for fun:

incantation n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned from a wizard. "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be forced into text space."

This is a useful and entertaining reference book.

Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory

Edited by Roberta E. Pearson and Philip Simpson

Published by Routledge, 2001.

This is a 7" by 10" hardcover book running to 498 pages including an index, plus an introduction.

The introduction begins,

The field of film and television studies has emerged from several related disciplines: literary studies, history, sociology and psychoanalysis among others. During the past three decades the field has adapted paradigms borrowed from these disciplines, as well as evolving others of its own, resulting in a complex and sometimes confusing theoretical apparatus for the study of screen media. Such diversity can bewilder and discourage people who are encountering the field for the first time. Students are assumed to have understood difficult and extensive theoretical concepts in order to progress through their courses, and even more experienced scholars are hard-pressed to keep up with the ever growing knowledge necessary to their academic practice. The Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory is intended to meet the needs of both these groups by offering an acessible and authoritative introduction to key concepts in the field.

For a sense of the range of concepts covered, here is a list of the first fifteen items in the "C" sequence:

• cable and satellite
  
• camera style and lens style
  
• camp
  
• canon
  
• carnival
  
• castration
  
• catharsis
  
• censorship
  
• Certeau, Michel de
  
• channel
  
• character
  
• chat/talk show
  
• children and media
  
• cinema of attractions
  
• cinénema vérité
  

The word "theory" in the book's title, as a quick browse of the book shows, refers to the somewhat narrow present-day cultural studies sense of the word, with all of its postmodern and sometimes psychoanalytic implications. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but the potential ways that film and television could be theorized are much, much broader, and are in fact broader than the book represents (for example, there is scant attention to given to marxist concepts of analysis). So an awareness of the book's postmodernist sense of "theory" is important.

Entries, which are signed by the contributors, are often written using some of the vocabulary and sentence construction style of postmodernism, but aren't too off-putting or difficult for a literate person to follow, and are informative and interesting.

This is a fairly handy resource for those getting their feet wet in film and television theory or cultural studies generally.

Encyclopedia of Air

By David E. Newton.

Published by Greenwood Press, 2003.

This is a 7" by 10" hardbound book running to 252 pages including the index, plus a brief introduction and a classified list of entries.

This is an interesting reference book for its mix of scientific and cultural entries on the subject of air. There are entries having to do with chemistry, physics, and meteorology all in the same sequence as the entries having to do with mythology, military topics, government and civic organizations, biography, sports, transportation, law, and other aspects of culture.

The full list of entries from the "B" and "C" sequences is as follows:

• Baghouse
  
• Balloons
  
• Barometer
  
• Barotrauma
  
• Beaufort, Sir Francis
  
• Bernoulli's Principle
  
• Boyle, Robert
  
• Brush, Charles F.
  
• Buoyancy
  
• Carbon Dioxide
  
• Center for Clean Air Policy
  
• Civil Air Patrol
  
• Clean Air Acts
  
• Clean Air Trust
  
• Clean the Air
  
• Cariolis, Gaspard Gustave
  
• Cariolis Effect
  
• Ctesibius (Second Century B.C.)
  
• Cyclones and Anticyclones
  

Entries are very readable and informative, often getting into the history of what's being discussed. The longest entries are just a few pages in length.

It's not a very long book, and the type is on the large side, so there really isn't a whole lot here.

On the whole it is a rather odd book, seemingly a personal project from a guy whose favorite subject is air. It's not easy to see what its main uses would be, other than for associative browsing.