Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

Book Description

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes.

This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.

The book includes:

Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan, shows how deep insight into a language and a problem can lead to a concise and elegant solution.

Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel, starts with a well-chosen abstraction and demonstrates its unifying effects on the system's further development.

Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley, suggests how to measure a procedure without actually executing it.

Chapter 4, Finding Things, by Tim Bray, draws together many strands in Computer Science in an exploration of a problem that is fundamental to many computing tasks.

Chapter 5, Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Verifiers, by Elliotte Rusty Harold, reconciles the often conflicting goals of thoroughness and good performance.

Chapter 6, Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility, by Michael Feathers, presents an example that breaks the rules and achieves its own elegant solution.

Chapter 7, Beautiful Tests, by Alberto Savoia, shows how a broad, creative approach to testing can not only eliminate bugs but turn you into a better programmer.

Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold, drops down a level to improve performance while maintaining portability.

Chapter 9, Top-Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford, revives an almost forgotten parsing technique and shows its new relevance to the popular JavaScript language.

Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr., reveals the impact that some clever algorithms can have on even a seemingly simple problem.

Chapter 11, Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom, by Ashish Gulhati, discusses the directed evolution of a secure messaging application that was designed to make sophisticated but often confusing cryptographic technology intuitively accessible to users.

Chapter 12, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl, by Lincoln Stein, shows how the combination of a flexible language and a custom-designed module can make it easy for people with modest programming skills to create powerful visualizations for their data.

Chapter 13, The Design of the Gene Sorter, by Jim Kent, combines simple building blocks to produce a robust and valuable tool for gene researchers.

Chapter 14, How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination, by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, surveys the history of LINPACK and related major software packages, to show how assumptions must constantly be re-evaluated in the face of new computing architectures.

Chapter 15, The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design, by Adam Kolawa, explains how attention to good design principles many decades ago helped CERN's widely used mathematical library (the predecessor of LINPACK) stand the test of time.

Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman, explains how many efforts by different collaborators to solve different problems led to the successful evolution of a complex, multithreaded system.

Chapter 17, Another Level of Indirection, by Diomidis Spinellis, shows how the flexibility and maintainability of the FreeBSD kernel is promoted by abstracting operations done in common by many drivers and filesystem modules.

Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling, explains how a careful design combined with accommodations for a few special cases allows a language feature to support many different uses.

Chapter 19, Multi-Dimensional Iterators in NumPy, by Travis E. Oliphant, takes you through the design steps that succeed in hiding complexity under a simple interface.

Chapter 20, A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission, by Ronald Mak, uses industry standards, best practices, and Java technologies to meet the requirements of a NASA expedition where reliability cannot be in doubt.

Chapter 21, ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability, by Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, shows how a powerful ERP system can be developed with free software tools and a flexible architecture.

Chapter 22, A Spoonful of Sewage, by Bryan Cantrill, lets the reader accompany the author through a hair-raising bug scare and a clever solution that violated expectations.

Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, describes a system that provides an easy-to-use programming abstraction for large-scale distributed data processing at Google that automatically handles many difficult aspects of distributed computation, including automatic parallelization, load balancing, and failure handling.

Chapter 24, Beautiful Concurrency, by Simon Peyton Jones, removes much of the difficulty of parallel program through Software Transactional Memory, demonstrated here using Haskell.

Chapter 25, Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander, by Kent Dybvig, shows how macros-a key feature of many languages and systems-can be protected in Scheme from producing erroneous output.

Chapter 26, Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software, by William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, applies a range of standard object-oriented design techniques, such as patterns and frameworks, to distributed logging to keep the system flexible and modular.

Chapter 27, Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way, by Andrew Patzer, demonstrates a designer's respect for his programmers by matching the design of a B2B web service to its requirements.

Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller, shows how a disciplined approach to validating code can reduce the time it takes to track down errors.

Chapter 29, Treating Code as an Essay, by Yukihiro Matsumoto, lays out some challenging principles that drove his design of the Ruby programming language, and that, by extension, will help produce better software in general.

Chapter 30, When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World, by Arun Mehta, takes you on a tour through the astounding interface design choices involved in a text editing system that allow people with severe motor disabilities, like Professor Stephen Hawking, to communicate via a computer.

Chapter 31, Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop, by TV Raman, shows how Lisp's advice facility can be used with Emacs to address a general need-generating rich spoken output-that cuts across all aspects of the Emacs environment, without modifying the underlying source code of a large software system.

Chapter 32, Code in Motion, by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, lists some simple rules that have unexpectedly strong impacts on programming accuracy.

Chapter 33, Writing Programs for "The Book," by Brian Hayes, explores the frustrations of solving a seemingly simple problem in computational geometry, and its surprising resolution.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent lessons in several topics. A great value........2007-10-03

This book is a great compilation of software design problems and solutions. Each chapter is an essay from one author which covers a particular problem in computer science and/or software engineering.

The chapters are complete discussions within themselves and they offer different insights into how to solve problems. The solutions are geared to issues found in both the natural world and the business world.

Of particular interest (for me) were the chapters on seraching and debugging.

One aspect of the book that will be either a plus or a minus depending on the reader is that because each chapter is by a different author, there are many distinct writting styles used. Since I was looking towards the book to gain insight into how others solve these problems, I found this useful. Since some of the context of the thought process came through in the writting, it was more like talking to the authors rather than just reading a textbook.

The chapter vary considerably in both topic and the thought process that went into the solution so inevitably there will be chapters that interest any programmer.

The books chapters can be read in any order and the editor indexes the chapters well. Information is easy to find.

Programming Pearls is of similar composition but with shorter chapters and explanations. This book goes a step further in both scope and length of explanation.

great idea, mediocre execution.......2007-09-28

This book came to being from a very good idea. The editors decided to go around and ask renown programmers and designers about snippets of code, software architecture, design or anything related they found beautiful and see as an example of good design.

Indeed, the idea is terrific. After all, besides books describing specific technologies we read on a per-need basis, what books do programmers have to read for inspiration ? Consider artists and architects, for example. They have peer art and work to study and be inspired by. Sure, code reading is highly recommended, but wouldn't it be great if someone had already collected all the good bits ? Wouldn't it be sweet for Brian Kernighan and Yuhikiro Matsumoto to tell you what they've found beautiful ?

Unfortunately, this books doesn't fulfill the high expectations I had from it. It's not bad, no, but it isn't as good as I hoped it to be. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Many of the authors forgot that they're writing for a paper book, and not an online article / blog entry. When reading a paper book, you can't just click on links to find out more information. Therefore, I'd expect many chapters to be more complete. The authors could have spent a few extra lines to explain a concept instead of referencing it to some online resource or (worse) a paid-subscription-access paper at ACM. This is a paper book - I want to read it on the bus to work. Had I wanted to read an online article jumping around links, I would just do that.
2. A few of the chapters in the book are just way too specific. How many people would understand a chapter about LINPAK - a Fortran library for linear algebra manipulation, especially when the author is very parsimonious in explaining the concepts and sends you to linear algebra tomes instead (see complaint #1).

In general, I think that to better execute the idea of such a book, a panel of experts has to be assembled and scrutinize each and every article. I would be much happier to read a book of 10 great articles than a book of 33, of which 10 are great. Who said that each and every programming book should be more than 600 pages long ?

However, I want to finish on a positive note, since as I stated in the beginning, the book is not bad. Here's a list of articles I found really good and interesting. I guess that just for them it was worth to read:

1. Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan
2. Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel
3. Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley
4. Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold
5. Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr.
6. Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman
7. Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling
8. Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat
9. Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller
10. Chapter 33, Writing Programs for "The Book," by Brian Hayes

want my copy?.......2007-09-18

I bought this book because it was mentioned in a Google Tech Talk about a beautiful Quicksort algorithm.

I was just looking for an interesting book that I could skim through and see some really neat, SHORT examples... but a lot of it requires that you read an entire chapter before you can understand the two pages of C that implements some part of a driver. It personally wasn't what I was looking for.

So it sits on my shelf, barely read and in near mint condition if anyone wants to take it off my hands. It is probably a better book than I think, but I don't really have the time or interest to study other people's supposedly good code.

Learn How to Think.......2007-09-18

A frequent topic of discussion among those in any technical field is for a short list of essential books that anyone worth their salt has read. With regards to software engineering, two classics quickly come to mind: Code Complete, and Design Patterns, as well as a recent publication joining the ranks of these epics, Beautiful Code by O'Reilly Media.

What makes Beautiful Code stand apart from the rest, is that it's format is so unconventional when compared to most other programming texts. The book is comprised of 33 Chapters, each written by a different author about a particular bit of code they had written and thought to be particularly eloquent. The best way to explain why this book is so wonderful is to make an analogy about the differences between learning something via a lecture as opposed to a private lesson. Most instructional books will take the lecture approach, where the author shows you one correct way to solve a problem, or complete a certain task and the reader must then digest that as best as possible. Beautiful Code is more like a private lesson in which the author of each chapter is giving the reader personalized attention by explaining their thought processes, how they arrived at each step, and occasionally showing some dead ends that didn't work out. Now consider that these private lessons are being given by such legendary names as Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold, and Yukihiro Matsumoto - and it becomes obvious why this is a must-have addition to any serious software engineer's bookshelf. Some particularly memorable sections include Karl Fogel's discussion on the origins and implementation of the Subversion Delta Editor and the look inside Google's MapReduce technology by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

As stated earlier, one of the best strengths of this book is that it is language neutral. In each chapter, as the author is speaking from experience on a particular project, rather than writing a chapter for a hypothetical "Better Programming in Language XYZ", you will see code snippets in C#, MSIL, Python, Ruby, and several other languages (There's even one chapter with Emacs Lisp!). This is important because the insight gained from this book will not be diluted from one language falling out of favor or into obsolescence, and allows for the possibility of this title being just as valuable ten years from now.

Many books will teach you how to solve a problem, but rare are those to teach you how to think. Beautiful Code is one of those select few, and will keep you coming back from project to project to consult its veteran sages of computer science. A worthy edition to any serious programmer's library, and hopefully a second volume is not far off.

Fascinating collection of case studies.......2007-09-15

I found this to be a fun, thought provoking book. It is a large collection of essays by various leading software developers each providing examples of their ideas of what makes code beautiful. Examples cover a wide variety of languages from c to ruby, and a variety of perspectives on what makes code 'beautiful.' The essays cover a good mix of old and new, ranging from regular expression matchers to the FIT testing framework. With such a wide variety of perspectives I doubt anyone can say they agree with everything in this book, but each author's view is worthy of thought and consideration.

The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of the South

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Surveys the towns of the South which are most colorful
A Good Way To Learn About the South

The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of the South
Bonnie Ramsey , and Lisa Newsom
Manufacturer: Thames & Hudson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0500019991

Book Description

A region of widely divergent landscapes and peoples, the American South is bound by a tradition and style that make it quite unlike any other part of America. Nowhere is the quintessence of Southern life so intensely expressed as in the villages and towns photographed and described in this book. Marked sometimes by the violent events of history--first settlement, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War--and the explosive growth of the cotton economy, these towns and villages appear in the book as they developed across the South. The region divides naturally into four geographic areas, each one a stage along the path of settlement. The miles of shoreline on the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided natural harbors for the first arrivals. Piedmont, at the foot of the mountains stretching from Virginia to Georgia, possessed the rich soil that made it the center of Southern agriculture. The profusion of rivers and the rich land along their banks attracted settlers from the Carolinas and Georgia, while the final push was to the deep interior and the mountains, the upcountry from the Blue Ridge chain in Virginia to the Texas hill country. The villages of these regions are varied, but those included in this book all have their individual beauty, whether expressed in white clapboard or Victorian brick. Their historical variety, too, is expressed in their names, demonstrating the diversity of their origins. The name of Wascahachie, Texas, is derived from the Native American word for "buffalo creek." Waterford, Virginia, is unmistakably Irish, while Camden and York in South Carolina have a distinctly English ring. Whatever their origins, the villages and towns included in this book have one thing in common: their beauty. And this exquisite picture of the South is completed by special illustrated features on its horse culture, its churches and cemeteries, and its fabulous gardens. A Traveler's Guide to sites, local festivals, hotels, and guest-houses provides essential information for the visitor. Produced in association with Veranda magazine. 250 color photographs.

Customer Reviews:

Surveys the towns of the South which are most colorful.......2001-02-16

This lavish, oversized presentation with photos by Dennis O'Kain surveys the towns of the South which are most colorful in aspect, from those with notable architecture and beautiful gardens to sites sporting local festivals and color. This beautiful coffee table edition will offer many possibilities for both armchair travel and planning a destination in the South, and is packed with stunning photos.

A Good Way To Learn About the South.......2000-10-12

This book explores the many varied regions of the Southeast, and does a great job of showing the beauty and culture that is associated with these different regions. The towns in the book are typical small towns that many people have never heard of, even if they live in the South. Bonnie Ramsey does a great job of finding many distinct and interesting facts about these towns and their culture, while Dennis O'Kain does a fine job of portraying some of the prettiest houses in the South in his photos. This book is for anyone who enjoys the beauty and culture that is associated with the South, even if you think you are competent in Southern culture and towns. This book will surely be a welcome addition to anyone's library. This book is the most recent addition to the Thames & Hudson line of The Most Beautiful Villages of. . ., and it continues in the fine tradition that this line of books has already established.

The Beautiful Queen (My Little Camera Book - True Stories That Teach)

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The Beautiful Queen (My Little Camera Book - True Stories That Teach)
Linda Finley-Day
Manufacturer: Holman Bible Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0805418113

Creative Stitching on Paper: 40 Beautiful Projects, from Scrapbook Pages to Chinese Lanterns

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Creative Stitching on Paper: 40 Beautiful Projects, from Scrapbook Pages to Chinese Lanterns
Joanne O'Sullivan
Manufacturer: Lark Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1579906990

Book Description

Paper crafters will warmly welcome this first-of-its kind volume, which presents the richness and variety of a newly popular technique. Whether it’s used in scrapbooks or on handmade cards, for decorative effects or functional bindings, stitched paper is found everywhere these days. The spectacular results are unique and impossible to achieve with just glue or folding. Explore a cornucopia of different papers and threads. Follow the clever tips for preventing delicate papers from tearing and for machine-stitching around curves. Best of all, you can create a beautiful baby mobile; a “family tree” to frame; and a "slipcover” for a bud vase.

A Selection of the Crafters Choice Book Club.

Excursion to Enchantment: A Journey to the World's Most Beautiful Places

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Excursion to Enchantment: A Journey to the World's Most Beautiful Places

Manufacturer: National Geographic Society
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Binding: Hardcover

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The Jewish home beautiful,: Written by Betty D. Greenberg and Althea O. Silverman

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The Jewish home beautiful,: Written by Betty D. Greenberg and Althea O. Silverman
Betty Davis Greenberg
Manufacturer: The Women's League of the United Synagogue of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0007E2XL8

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Beautiful Wineries Of The Wine Country
Jennifer Barry , Charles O'Rear , and Thom Elkjer
Manufacturer: Ten Speed Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1580086403

Book Description

The wineries of Northern California are as varied as the wines that emanate from the region's bountiful soil. In BEAUTIFUL WINERIES OF THE WINE COUNTRY, author Jennifer Barry and acclaimed photographer Charles O'Rear present a magnificent visual tour of more than 50 distinctive wineries in Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties. Featuring a variety of building styles—Victorian and historic farm, European influenced, and California contemporary—this small-scale, full-color coffee-table book is a thoughtful gift for architecture enthusiasts and the perfect keepsake for wine lovers and visitors. From sweeping landscapes to the tiniest architectural details, BEAUTIFUL WINERIES OF THE WINE COUNTRY captures the beauty and spirit of this multicultural locale.

Tecnology (The Fun They Had/ It's Such a Beautiful Day/There will come soft Rains/ If I Forget Thee, O Earth)

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Tecnology (The Fun They Had/ It's Such a Beautiful Day/There will come soft Rains/ If I Forget Thee, O Earth)

Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Literature
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000BNMLCG

Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry

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With Friends Like These . . .

Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry
Andrew Epstein
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Binding: Hardcover

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Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Contemp North American Poetry)

ASIN: 019518100X

Book Description

Although it has long been commonplace to imagine the archetypal American poet singing a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. In this lucid and absorbing study, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with both the pleasures and problems of friendship erupts in the "New American Poetry" that emerges after the Second World War. By focusing on some of the most significant postmodernist American poets--the "New York School" poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka--Beautiful Enemies reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of postwar American poetry and culture: the avant-garde's commitment to individualism and nonconformity runs directly counter to its own valorization of community and collaboration. In fact, Epstein demonstrates that the clash between friendship and nonconformity complicates the legendary alliances forged by postwar poets, becomes a predominant theme in the poetry they created, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Rather than simply celebrating friendship and poetic community as nurturing and inspiring, these poets represent friendship as a kind of exhilarating, maddening contradiction, a site of attraction and repulsion, affinity and rivalry. Challenging both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion, this book provides a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. By situating his extensive and revealing readings of these highly influential poets against the backdrop of Cold War cultural politics and within the context of American pragmatist thought, Epstein uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of postwar American poetry.

Customer Reviews:

With Friends Like These . . ........2007-02-17

I've got so many opinions about BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES that I will be misquoting its author for years, arguing about its contentions, red-faced, drunken, at parties and conferences, watching with immense satisfaction as its truths eventually percolate through the strong soil of O'Hara criticism. Andrew Epstein, himself an accomplished poet, wades into deep waters with his study of the friendships between O'Hara and Ashbery and between Baraka and O'Hara. I was enthralled throughout the entire book and think you might be too. Even the notes are beautifully written, compact, thorough, yet with Epsteinian touches of wit and esprit.

A contrarian, even controversialist bent animates Epstein here, and if you come away from BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES feeling your head is about to explode, don't say I didn't warn you. Seems that everything (well, all the obvious things) that we had ever been taught about the three poets were wrong, even the most basic of our assumptions. You thought Frank O'Hara the apostle of friendship and community? Wrong. Through a clever and conscientious use of letters, diaries, contemporary news items, interview material, and most of all through recourse to the poems themselves (including some "new" material that, for the most part, is wholly surprising and convincing), Epstein is able to shove O'Hara more towards the Jack Spicer school of contentious grump whose ideas of friendship included competition, division, testing, and a free floating anxiety that manifests itself in unusual verbal tactics. "I hope," he writes, "to provide a corrective here to the usual sense that Frank O'Hara is a poet of `sociability' whose work simply `celebrates' his friends and his coterie.' It's not just rhetoric, there's a genuinely original vision of O'Hara here that complicates the work immeasurably and makes him not so annoying--not that I ever really found him annoying, but thinking about the old, "received" version of O'Hara, the sunny Tom Hanks of poetry who's everybody's favorite pet, just makes my blood run cold. I like the new guy, and he's sexier to boot!

If you thought Ashbery cold or silent about the human condition, a la Mark Halliday, surprise, for Epstein reads Ashbery (particularly in THE DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING, the book he wrote after O'Hara's death) as a poet very much concerned with personal relationships, particularly friendship and its ups and downs. The material here is thinner on the ground, but I suppose it's possible, and Epstein has won so much goodwill from his previous reading I could forgive him nearly anything. Plus he has unearthed a beautiful, witty, tender, collaborative poem written in alternate couplets by FO'H and JA that illustrates perfectly--as though fabricated for the occasion--how friendship is always a bag mixed to brimming with competition, adoration, a Wayne Koestenbaum sort of erotics, and a perfect period panache. (Maybe this balances out another undocumented poem by O'Hara that Epstein found in Kenneth Koch's papers, "Finding Leroi a Lawyer," which some may champion but others will find the singlemost dumbest poem O'Hara ever put to paper.)

If you thought, following all previous Baraka scholars, that Baraka's "Beat" period was but a inconsequential and negligible phase of what Epstein calls a "conversion narrative," then you are missing out on some intensely great work; Epstein reverses conventional thinking here, or comes close to it, by plumping for the early work (written before Malcolm's assassination in February 1965) as far superior to the later Black Arts poetry and, perhaps, as politically committed. In each case, Epstein just patiently plays his cards until what seemed shocking or just startling for its own sake, when one began reading the chapter, seems by the end of it a perfectly reasoned, exquisitely marshaled argument. Were O'Hara and Baraka romantically involved, perhaps sexually involved? Here Epstein wades right in where angels fear to tread, following the leads provided in Brad Gooch's criminally underrated biography of O'Hara, CITY POET. It does seem as though the older, white, homosexual man, sometimes generous, sometimes threatening, always alluring, who pops up through much of Baraka's early prose, poetry and drama must have worn O'Hara's face at least occasionally. Baraka's supposed to appear at City Lights on Monday, I'll have to go and ask him what he thinks of BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES and his new avatar as sort of the Billy Strayhorn of the New American Poetry.

All in all, a groundbreaking and even better, a gorgeously written and thought out book. Hooray for Andrew Epstein! Some caveats, I don't 100% buy this new John Ashbery, our greatest poet of love and friendship. No way. Well, maybe a little way. And also I OD'd a bit on how without Emersonian pragmatism nothing important would ever have been thought, written or said. And I grimace when I see Epstein replaying Michael Davidson's effective, yet rhetorical vision of the Spicer circle as a hellish hotbed of gay homophobia and "exclusion," in order for him, Epstein, to say, "but our fellows didn't go that far." So there was no exclusion in the New York circles of O'Hara and Ashbery? Uh-hunh, and I'm Tallulah Bankhead.

Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements)

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Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements)

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Aesthetics | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0521785111

Book Description

This book considers the role of values in truth seeking, in morality, in aesthetics and also in the spiritual life. We have got beyond the simplistic view that values are simply expressions of feeling, but their precise ontological and epistemological status remains controversial. The essays in this book indicate in an accessible way the state of the discussion as it is at the end of the second millennium.

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