amen corner

I'm reading an excellent book that everyone and anyone involved in human factors, software development, project management, technical writing or systems design should read: The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper (ISBN 0-672-31649-8) In fact, I can hardly wait for the paperback version so I can scribble in the margins and paint it with a yellow highlighter!

Alan Cooper is the first person that I know of to explain that the "digital divide" is more about stupid, "counter-intuitive", hard-to-use technology than it is about personality or cultural "defects" that the so-called information "have-nots" presumably have. He calls it "software apartheid"! He makes the point that if software/firmware is so malleable and modifiable why is it still difficult for many people to figure out how to program a VCR, or to set the microwave to work predictably.

And he explains why (hold on to your hats) engineers should not be placed in charge of the development process. (Doh!) And why design teams should include "fuzzy" professionals like technical writers and designers.

Buy it! (Best Book Buys) Because the job you save may be your own!

To ears polarised by the too often vitriolic dialog about Black male/female relationships, the title of Naomi Long Madgett's Adam of Ifé: Black Women in Praise of Black Men might sound like a oxymoron. (In fact I remember doing a double take in the bookstore myself.) But once you part the covers of this masterpiece you will quickly find the truth too often obscured by the media inflamed rhetoric: we love each other madly--not inspite of who we are--but because of who we are.   There are poems in this book for weddings, funerals, and intimate moments. There are poems in this great anthology you can use to shield your sons when you send them out into this vicious world. Buy this book and look beyond the hype.

By the way, the publisher Lotus Press (lead by Ms. Madgett) has an excellent catalog. Check it out:

Lotus Press
PO Box 21607
Detroit, MI 48221

Toi Derrocotte's collection of essays and journal entries, The Black Notebooks: an Interior Journey (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997, ISBN: 0-393-04544-7) is a must read, because of the disturbing questions about color and racial identity it leaves unanswered.  To a dialog about race that all too often degenerates into disjointed and meaningless "factoids", name-calling, and sloganerring, the painful and intelligent vision found in The Black Notebooks arrives like a breath of fresh air.  Ms. Derricotte turns over rocks of race and gender, and carefully examines the tiny and often disgusting things that scurry for cover --from a unique perspective--through lens of her life.  She describes while others are content to prescribe about difficult issues. As a lightskined Blackwoman who is often mistaken for being white she does not run from questions as expansive as those about Black identity and authenticity, or as intimate as those about her own existence.  Read The Black Notebooks and enjoy the nightmares.

Return to the top