Wisdom from the 42nd Page

Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number

On the forty-second page of “Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number” authors Ingmar Lehmann & Alfred S. Posamentier wrote (emphasis added):

were compared for various circular objects. This was likely the beginning of the establishment of comparison between the two measurements that seem related to each other. Was there some sort of common difference or common ratio between their lengths? Each time this comparison showed that the circumference was just a bit more than three times as long as the diameter. The question that perplexed individuals over the millennia was how much more than three times the diameter was the circumference? That would indicate that the relationship was one of a ratio. The history of Π is the quest to find the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.

The Ancient Egyptians

Frequent measurements probably showed that the part exceeding three times the diameter appeared to be about one-ninth of the diameter. We can assume this from the famous Rhind Papyrus, written by Ahmes, an Egyptian scribe, about 1650 BCE.¹ He said that if we construct a square with a side whose length is eight-ninths of the diameter of the circle, then the square's area will be equal to that of the circle. At this point, you can see there was no reason to find the ratio of the circumference to the diameter. Rather, the issue was to construct a square using the classical tools (an unmarked straightedge and a pair of compasses), with the same area as that of a given circle. This became one of the three famous problems of antiquity.² Although we know today

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1. This was a mathematical practical handbook, containing eighty-five problems copied by the scribe Ahmes from previous works. Alexander Henry Rhind, a Scottish Egyptologist, purchased this eighteen-foot-long (one-foot-wide) manuscript in 1858, which is now in the collection of the British Museum. This is one of our primary sources of information about the Egyptian mathematics of the times.
2. The other two famous problems of antiquity are using only an unmarked straightedge and a pair of compasses to construct a cube with twice the volume of a given cube using these same tools to trisect any angle.

More information about “Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Prometheus Books, August 2004. Hardcover, 275 pages. ISBN: 1591022002; EAN: 9781591022008.)

Not Quite What I was Planning

On the forty-second page of “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure” authors Rachel Fershleiser, & Larry Smith, wrote (emphasis added):

Found true love after

nine months.

—Jody Smith

Hillbilly does right

by his teeth.

—Jason Snyder

No words can describe my life.

—John Baldridge

Afraid of everything.

Did it anyway.

—Ayse Erginer

On the playground, alone.

1970, today.

—Charles Warren

More information about “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Harper Perennial, February 2008. Paperback, 225 pages. ISBN: 0061374059; EAN: 9780061374050.)

The River of Doubt

On the forty-second page of “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey” author Candice Millard wrote (emphasis added):

From there is neither East nor West,
Border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Though they come from the ends of the earth.

No longer a boy—he would turn twenty-four in just six days—Kermit was showing every sign of growing into the man that his father had always hoped he would be. He had not only carved out a life for himself under tough circumstances in Brazil, but he was earning his own way and was steadily establishing his independence. Concerned that his son was getting "down to such a very simple diet as a result of having no money at the end of the month," Roosevelt had resolved in April to send him two hundred dollars each quarter. By late July, however, Kermit was proudly tearing up his father's checks. "Unless things go very badly I shan't need money unless I happen to marry. I'm now getting something more than a living wage, and have about three hundred and fifty dollars in the bank," Kermit told his father. "I wrote you that I had torun up the first check and I have now torn up the second."

Although Kermit's pay had improved since he had first arrived in Brazil, the conditions under which he was working had not. Not only did he suffer from recurring bouts of malaria—a disease that he had endured since childhood, having first succumbed to it in Washington, D.C., in the days before the swamps on which the capital was build had been drained—but he worked in remote, sparsely populated locations near Indians who had had little interaction with white men beyond occasional, violent clashes. Kermit took the dangers in stride. In a letter he wrote home the previous fall, while he was working for the Brazil Railway Company, he mentioned offhandedly that they had had three derailments in a single week. "Twice it was a big box car that went off, and once it was the engine," he wrote. "Only one of them amounted to anything, and there we very nearly killed our cook." A few weeks later, he mentioned that he did not think he

More information about “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Doubleday Books, October 2005. Hardcover, 416 pages. ISBN: 0385507968; EAN: 9780385507967.)

The Last Lecture

On the forty-second page of “The Last Lecture” authors Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow, wrote (emphasis & hyperlink added):

I couldn't tell them that I'd been waiting all my life for this call. All I could say was, "Yes, of course!" I wrote the entry. And I included a photo of my student Caitlin Kelleher wearing a virtual reality headset.

No editor ever questioned what I wrote, but I assume that's the World Book way. They pick an expert and trust that the expert won't abuse the privilege.

I have not bought the latest set of World Books. In fact, having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias. But sometimes when I'm in a library with the kids, I still can't resist looking under "V" ("Virtual Reality" by yours truly) and letting them have a look. Their dad made it.

More information about “The Last Lecture” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Hyperion, April 2008. Hardcover, 206 pages. ISBN: 1401323251; EAN: 9781401323257.)

Sarah

This is the book we wanted to feature today:

But... our local library system does not have the book. No bookstore within a 100-mile radius has it in stock. It's even backordered on Amazon.com.

So... we'll have to give you, our loyal readers, a rain check for now.

More information about “Sarah: How a Small Town Mom Turned Alaskas Political Establishment on Its Ear” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Epicenter Press, April 2008. Hardcover, 159 pages. ISBN: 0979047080; EAN: 9780979047084.)

Hopes and Dreams

Tonight being an historic occasion, we think it fitting to turn to the forty-second page of “Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama” where author Steve Dougherty wrote (emphasis added):

the whole class to break up in laughter. Before the day was out, a red-haired girl asked if she could touch his hair, and a boy asked him if his father was a cannibal.

"The novelty of having me in class quickly wore off for the other kids," Obama would later write. His fellow students, mostly the privileged children of well-off families who lived in houses far grander than the two-bedroom apartment Obama shared with his mother's parents, weren't overtly cruel. They didn't beat him up or mock him. They simply lost interest in the black kid who played soccer, badminton, and chess—games he'd learned from his Indonesian stepfather while living in Jakarta with his mother for four years before returning to Hawaii without her—but who couldn't throw a football or ride a skateboard.

As the months passed, he managed to make a few friends and "to toss a wobbly football around," but mostly he withdrew into a routine of going home after school, reading comics, watching TV, and listening to the radio. "I felt safe," he wrote; "it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation."

Obama's mother, Ann Dunham (with his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and half sister Maya Soetoro), insisted that he supplement his schooling by taking U.S. correspondence courses during the four years he lived in Indonesia. Ann woke him at 4:00 a.m. every morning to instruct him for three hours before he left for school and she went to her job at the American embassay. After Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. (right) spent the Christmas holidays with his then 10-year-old son in Hawaii, where Obama was living with his white grandparents, father and son never met again.

He was shocked out of it a few months after school began when his grandparents on his mother's side ("Gramps" and "Toot," short for tutu, the Hawaiian word

More information about “Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, July 2008. Paperback, 160 pages. ISBN: 1579127908; EAN: 9781579127909.)

What a Party!

Since the Democrat National Convention is going on this week in Denver it seems appropriate to look at the forty-second page of “What a Party!: My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals” where former DNC-national party chairman Terry McAuliffe wrote (emphasis added):

Just as Jack had instilled his passion for politics in me, Richard inspired Dorothy. She decided to move to Washington her junior year in the hope of working on the issues she cared so passionately about. Once she transferred to Catholic University in Washington, we started dating, though with my heavy travel schedule it was hard to find time to spend together. One weekend in October 1983 we took a trip to Cape Cod. I had bought a condo in Dennisport, Massachusetts, with my brother Tom, and I wanted to inspect my purchase. No sooner had Dorothy and I arrived than the phone rang. It was Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of the House. Somehow he had gotten wind that I was on the cape.

"Hello, Mr. Speaker!" I said, surprised as can be.

Dorothy shot me a knowing look.

"Terry, why don't you come golfing with me tomorrow?" Tip asked in that great old Boston accent of his.

"Okay, Mr. Speaker," I said. "Terrific.... Dorothy, I've got to go golfing with the Speaker tomorrow," I announced, hanging up the phone.

The next morning I got up early, took the car, and met Tip at Eastward Ho! in Chatham, leaving Dorothy in the condo. She had grown up around politics, and as long as I've known her she has always understood that my work was going to suck up a lot of my time.

Would I go golfing with Tip O'Neill? Of course I would! Tip was not only the biggest figure in the Democratic Party at that time, a legendary force in Congress, he was also a great storyteller and always fun to be around. Plus, he was Irish.

Everything out of Tip's mouth was Irish jokes or Irish stories, and I couldn't have been having any more fun if I'd been sitting in Limerick drinking Guinness with a bar full of leprechauns. Tip told me about the time he put together a good fund-raiser for Jack kennedy and, late in the evening, the two men ducked into the men's room together.

"How did we do?" Kennedy asked him.

"About twenty grand, ten in cash, ten in checks," Tip told him.

"You keep the checks, I'll take the cash," Kennedy said.

That was sure a different era. (Definitely pre-McCain-Feingold!) Even if you had already heard Tip's stories or jokes, it didn't matter—the way he told them, they were still a riot. Tip had that big, white shock of hair and the big, bulbous W. C. Fields nose. He was like a walking caricature lifted straight from a political cartoon, but the thing about him was he never forgot who he was. He hated pretentiousness and taking on airs. He talked to

More information about “What a Party!: My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Thomas Dunne Books, January 2007. Hardcover, 406 pages. ISBN: 0312357877; EAN: 9780312357870.)

All the Way Home

On the forty-second page of “All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House” author David Giffels wrote (emphasis added):

As we stepped back up into the basement's formal hallway, the hardwood floorboards shifted and crunched disconcertingly underfoot. In some places, holes had rotted through. I was worried it would give way, but since we were in the basement, I figured we couldn't fall far. The baseboards there had long hollow gouges and in some stretches had rotted away completely. The stairs were carpeted in a black runner with a baroque floral pattern, lush and gorgeous except that it disintegrated into burlap by the time it reached the bottom.

The end of the basement on the other side of this hallway, opposite the billiards room, was unfinished and looked as if it had been abandoned for a century. The gas burner was an old-time washing machine rested, rusting, on a concrete stanchion. In the adjacent coal room was a huge green coal furnace with an antique label that said Iron Fireman. The current furnace, a boiler, was filthy and disintegrating, dominating the center of the room, one side completely rusted away, with various-size pipes running from it, their junctions corroded, their lengths decorated with bandages of distressed duct tape and tightly knotted rags. There was a black iron contraption in the corner, as fancy as it was substantial. It looked like an ornamental nineteenth-century locomotive cookstove. I asked; the real estate lady said it was the water heater. It hissed.

When we left the billiards room and ascended the formal staircase back to the first floor, a certain reality pushed its way through the sensory overload and solidified, a reality that could best be expressed by the fact that we were leaving the billiards room and ascending the formal staircase back to the first floor.

A billiards room.

At the top of the stairs, we went through a wide door that took us into the kitchen, from the opposite end we had entered before. I paused to get my bearings, but before I had a chance, we went through another door into an arched brick alcove that opened into the outdoors. Our guide said we could go out back and see the reflecting pond. We stepped down into the rear driveway. These stairs, like the front steps, were broken and treacherous. It seemed there was no

More information about “All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(William Morrow, June 2008. Hardcover, 320 pages. ISBN: 0061362867; EAN: 9780061362866.)

Cop in the Hood

On the forty-second page of “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District” author Peter Moskos wrote (emphasis added):

which abounds in the Eastern District. The word "dirty" is used to describe the figurative filth of a drug addit. It is, in the drug-related sense, the opposite of being clean. Addicts also refer to "getting cleaned up," as in "I've been clean for one week." Still, drug users and the police use the idea of dirty in slightly different ways. Addicts consider themselves dirty or clean depending on whether or not they have drugs on them. If stopped by police, addicts hustling to get money for drugs may protest that they are not dirty. Police refer to anybody who is or will be involved with drugs or anything drug-related as dirty.

The damage from hardcore addiction is self-evident, even to an only slightly trained eye. Many addicts ahve blemished and damaged skin, an awkward gait, missing teeth, a thin physique, and, while high on heroin, a gravity-defying ability to lean and sway without falling down. I often visited a local Laundromat owner sho sits behind Plexiglas and, for fear of robery, opened at 7 AM and closed at 2 PM. He described a heroin addict who did small odd jobs for him: "Frank was gone for thirteen months. Locked up. When he came back, things were different but then [simulates repeated injection with his finger into his arm]... He used to do good work. Plumbing, carpentry, electrical. He was making $18 an hour doing, what's it called? With brick. Laying bricks. And now he can't even clean windows." The owner kindly continued to offer Frank odd jobs until the addict burglarized the store for $300 in quarters. In the following days, the bar across the street was inundated with people using change for their liquor purchases.

"How could anyone start taking drugs here?" one police officer wondered. "All you go to do is look around to see

More information about “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Princeton University Press, January 2008. Hardcover, 245 pages. ISBN: 0691140081; EAN: 9780691140087.)

A Pound of Paper

On the forty-second page of “A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict” author John Baxter wrote (some emphasis added):

swim at Manly Beach, near Sydney, we'd pass a red brick building on the ocean front—the Far West Children's Home, set up to give children from the remotest corners of the state their first look at the ocean. I imagined such children—pale, probably, and thin, with Chesty Bond singlets clinging to their bony ribcages and khaki Hard Yakka shorts hooked on angular hips—recoiling in fear from the thud of the surf. And now I was to be part of that deprived pariah group? No Lucifer ever felt a more despairing fall from grace.

The reality was all I'd feared. Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen and Doris Lessing found poetry and drama in the sun-baked grasslands of America and Africa, but Australia would have severely tested their enthusiasm. Considering D. H. Lawrence's description of rural perfection in Women in Love—'uninterrupted grass, and just a rabbit, sitting up'—it's not surprising that he liked it, and spent some time there writing Kangaroo, though prudently beside the ocean, where he could be reminded of the dramatic South Wales coast after which that part of the country was named.

Drama was conspicuously absent from our area. The tallest thing for a hundred kilometres was a grazing merino—as Barry Humphries once said, 'You only had to travel a thousand kilometres in any direction to find something really interesting.'

More information about “A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Thomas Dunne Books, December 2003. Hardcover, 432 pages. ISBN: 0312317255; EAN: 9780312317256.)