Category: dewey decimal project
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Dewey Decimal Project: 720.483 MAR Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision
Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City has always been a fixture of my perception of downtown Chicago. As a child I attended a broadcast of the local children’s television program, BJ and Dirty Dragon from the Marina City TV studios (now the House of Blues), saw Steve McQueen chase the bad guys through the parking garage until they crashed…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 711.4 SMI The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City
Had I gone to public school in the city of Chicago instead of just outside it, a mandated part of my education would have been learning about Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. Since that’s a counterfactual, I only learned about the plan in dribs and drabs, a lot of retailed by my father and…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 700.19 LAI The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
And now I enter the 700s: Arts & recreation. In the generic category of “Arts” I decided to got with The Lonely City Olivia Laing’s book which is a mix of memoir and examination of the works of artists who treated on the topic of solitude. The mixture of genres within this book worked extraordinarily well and…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 690.837 ADL Outwitting Contractors: The Complete Guide to Surviving Your Home or Apartment Renovation
We close out the 600s—Technology—with “construction of buildings.” Since we were planning on doing some renovations, I thought it might be helpful to read a book like Outwitting Contractors. The book itself is padded with a number of anecdotes which made me think that Adler was perhaps at one point a journalist, although there is no…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 681.145 SWA The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage And The Quest To Build The First Computer
We move from “manufacturing” to “manufacture for specific uses” which doesn’t sound too promising, but I managed to find this book about Babbage’s difference engine among the books in this decade and decided it looked like it might be interesting. Babbage’s difference engine is probably the most influential machine that was not finished. It inspired a…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 676.09 KUR Paper: Paging through History
The 670s are “Manufacturing” and while I was initially nervous about what would be available at my local public library on the topic, I spotted this book about the history of paper and decided that this would be the book for me to read. From my life in typography, I’m reasonably conversant with the history of…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 664 LYN Seeds of science : How we got it so wrong on GMOs
I continue working through the “Technology” class of the Dewey Decimal System, with 660–669.9 being “Chemical Engineering.” It’s easy to forget this while I’m browsing the stacks and I wouldn’t have guessed that’s where I was when I saw this book about GMOs. There are a handful of areas where my liberalism becomes a bit…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 650.11 DAV Two awesome hours : science-based strategies to harness your best time and get your most important work done
Who wouldn’t want to make more effective use of their time? I sure would. So when I faced the bleak wasteland of 650–659.999, Management and Public Relations, I decided that one of the time management books would be the most appealing option. Davis’s approach is to focus on decision points and making the point of making…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 640 BOW The useful book : 201 life skills they used to teach in home ec and shop
I think that the best option for writing about this book is to provide a copy of the letter that I wrote to accompany the copy that I gifted to my nephew after I read it (roughly a year ago, in pre-Covid times when he had just started his freshman year of college. Dear T—,I hope…