A slum is characterized by poverty, informal housing, and lack of public utilities. Which means you’re hungry and sick, and you walk around in shit. You get a slum when hundreds of thousands or millions of poor people want to live in a city that has no room for them. Cities can only grow so fast. When they grow faster, you get slums.

Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums is a bird’s-eye view of the slum problem, full of facts and numbers. There are no individuals here, no sentimental stories. There are only masses of people, breaking like waves on the urban shore.

But it’s not a dry account. Planet of Slums is an angry book. Davis’s anger is a cold anger, aimed at everyone. He is angry with the colonial powers for leaving a mess, with Third World elites for making it worse, with the World Bank and the IMF for forcing ivory tower doctrines upon their debtors, and with global NGO’s for bulldozing local initiative.

It’s an interesting approach to popular sociology: Academic in content, moralistic in tone. One reviewer thinks Davis is too bleak, leaving no room for hope, and maybe he is. For my own part, I notice ignorance about the liberal policies he attacks. They may not have worked, but Davis finds even their purpose incomprehensible. He seems to think that market pricing, for instance, is a conspiracy to squeeze the poor.

But that doesn’t matter. This is an important book, and leftist outrage is more appropriate here than rightist pollyannaism.

In the urban Third World, poor people dread high-profile international events – conferences, dignitary visits, sporting events, beauty contests, and international festivals – that prompt authorities to launch crusades to clean up the city: slum-dwellers know that they are the “dirt” or “blight” that their governments prefer the world not to see. During the Nigerian Independence celebration in 1960, for example, one of the first acts of the new government was to fence the route from the airport so that Queen Elizabeth’s representative, Princess Alexandria, would not see Lagos’s slums. These days governments are more likely to improve the view by razing the slums and driving the residents out of the city.

Manilenos have a particular horror of such “beautification campaigns”. During Imelda Marcos’s domination of city government, shanty-dwellers were successively cleared from the parade routes of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant, the visit of President Gerald Ford in 1975, and the IMF-World Bank meeting in 1976. Alltogether 160 000 squatters were moved out of the media’s field of vision, many of them dumped on Manila’s outskirts, 30 kilometers or more from their former homes.

- Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

Gladwell is fond of quirky factors. The unexpectedness of his explanations often disguises their banality or their error. In his new book, he is particularly interested in examining the amount of time that must be spent honing a skill or a craft, although his larger point is that society frequently plays a role in providing people with the opportunity to do so. “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise,” Gladwell reports. (I hope those studies did not cost too much.)

[..]

Gladwell’s overarching thesis in Outliers is so obviously correct that it hardly merits discussion. “The people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” Also, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of your life. Gladwell writes as if he is the only person in the world in possession of this platitudinous wisdom. The central irony of Outliers is that, Gladwell’s discomfort with the self-help genre notwithstanding, he has written a book that conforms to it perfectly. This is a motivational manual. It is larded with inspirational stories, and with interactive games to capture the reader’s attention–with handy charts and portentous graphs.

- Isaac Chotiner, reviewing Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

In Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, everyone is made pretty at age 16. Not just beautiful, but far beyond, to the point implied by our evolutionary origins. A point where you look both vulnerable, healthy, wise and attractive. Pretty to a degree not possible by random mutation.

As a minor side effect, the operation turns you into a happy, empty-headed party animal – unless your job requires otherwise. Somebody has to make all the toys work.

Yes, we’re in a dissonant utopia here. Everything is perfect, except it isn’t. There is no overt oppression in this world of happy, shiny people. You rarely see the Secret Police. But when you do, you obey instinctively, because they have had plastic surgery too, and their beauty is a cruel beauty, the kind that inspires awe and fear.

The story is about Tally, a young “ugly” (ie. pre-operation) girl, who gets involved with freethinkers who want to live normally, like in the old days. It’s similar to Tripods and Fahrenheit 451, and the result is very enjoyable.

The Uglies novels are written for the young adult market, which means they are short and easy to read. Isn’t it funny how often good writing overlaps with enjoyable writing? You can’t be self-indulgent when you’re writing for teenagers. Actually, Westerfeld’s adult Succession novels were succinct too. The main difference is that Uglies doesn’t feel as crammed full of ideas as Succession did, and it is better for it.

David Denby aims too carelessly in Snark, his attack on the cheap sarcasm he believes dominates our media culture. Snark is an empty, angry attempt at wit, told in the knowing voice of us vs them. It’s so easy that everybody can do it, and everybody does. You don’t need to know anything, or have any ideas, or stand for anything – in fact it is better if you don’t. All you need is a target and the ability to sneer.

Snark, Denby argues, enforces mediocricity, becoming a philistine outlet for resentment against anyone who dares to achieve or believe in anything. Snark embraces the reader. “You and me, we know everything. Everybody else sucks.” No wonder it’s popular.

Unfortunately, Denby’s choice of examples is an EPIC FAIL!! (Uhm, sorry.) He selects Wonkette for particular scorn, but gets all the facts wrong. Besides, I rather like Wonkette’s “proudly idiotic” style. If this is snark, I’m not entirely against it.

Tom Wolfe is an even more baffling example. Why him? Even if one could detect snark in his writings, he is not a good representative of the style. Denby seems anxious to select examples many people know about, thus missing the point. The best examples of ugly snark are all to be found below the top tier of writers. The essence of snark is how easy it is to write.

That said, I believe Denby’s analysis is correct and valuable. Also, he deserves sympathy for volunteering as the perfect snark bait.