It’s not easy being rich. But despite a family tendency to madness, alcoholism and suicide, Wendy Burden, a fourth generation Vanderbilt, may have grown up to be the funniest memoirist since David Sedaris. “It’s a testament to his libido, if not his character,” she begins Dead End Gene Pool
, “that Cornelius Vanderbilt died of syphilis instead of apoplexy.”
The Vanderbilt fortune came down through her father’s side of the family, the Burden side (yes, “Burden,” really). Wendy was just six when her dad died — suicide, she’d learn later, snooping through boxes. Her mother’s response was to become a swinging sixties hottie, jetting to islands, getting increasingly tan, wearing frosted pink lipstick and occasionally bringing baby alligators home for Burden and her brother.
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If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget
, his first book.
It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?
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Forget hipster idealists, vegans, and off-the-grid hippies: Dolly Freed has another way. Freed — a pseudonym — wrote Possum Living, a manifesto for living cheaply (and, she claims, lazily) in the late 1970s, when she was a feisty 18 year-old. Now reissued by Tin House Books, the volume is a relevant and sassy manual for a non-consumer lifestyle. Dolly’s practical lessons are presented with an irresistible wiseass grin: “We usually leave on the head, tail and fins for the simple reason that the fish looks nicer that way; and it means less work,” she writes. “Also, many fish have considerable amounts of meat in their heads — just like some people.”
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