Duke is a little active fellow and he doesn’t like repetition. I do the same thing twice and he begins to cry. As a first time parent, I was having a hard time coming up with new activities to play with him until my cousin gave me Baby Play for Duke’s full-month celebration.

With 100 easy-to-do techniques, concise explanations and photographic demonstrations, I turn to Baby Play again and again to keep Duke stimulate. He loves cycling when I change him. I could feel the excitement when I give him a little massage after he takes a bath. When he cries, an airplane swinging with jazz would calm him down. He looks so darn cute with his little arms hugging around the roll-up towel on his tummy as I rock him from side to side. He even tries to pull his head up.

Since the book is divided into age range (from zero up to 12 months), I only got through the newborn section. I’ll get there when Duke get there. In addition to the doctor seal of approval, what makes Baby Play worthwhile is that I don’t have to have fancy toys to do these fun activities with Duke.

In his new book, The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music, New York Times’ jazz journalist Ben Ratliff recounts his intimate listening experience with jazz musicians including Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Wanye Shorter and Pat Metheny. By allowing the musicians to pick their own favorites (as long as they were not involved in the making of the music), he gets to see what kind of things they look for and their reactions to a particular piece.

The conversations are fascinating because Ratliff’s questions focus the musicians more on the emotional sense rather than theory. Joshua Redman’s response to Sonny Rollins’s “St. Thomas” is a perfect example. “Listening to an improvisation like this,” Redman referred to Rollins’s solo, “I’m stuck by the mastery and the seriousness of it, as this perfectly constructed, spontaneous narrative. And at the same time, there’s this quality in Sonny: he cautions you against taking anything too serious.”

In the conversation with Dianne Reeves, she made him lunch and explained to him the resemblances of her approach in both cooking and singing: “I work with my ear and try to make it feel right, or I just keep changing it until I like the way it tastes.”

I read The Jazz Ear during my train rides to work and it sure makes my commute much faster and more pleasant. The series is not only informative, but also enjoyable to read. Highly recommended it.

After being humiliated by four local men who assumed that every Viet Kieu’s mission is to steal away their beautiful women, Hung Cam Thai, an assistant professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at Pomona College, conducted his research on international marriage between Vietnamese-American men who live in the States and their wives back home. In his new book, For Better or For Worse, Thai recounts the stories of various transnational couples through his personal interviews with both the brides in Viet Nam and the grooms in America.

The results of his studies, as I predicted, are predictable. Most men who go back to Viet Nam searching for their wife are low-wage workers without a college degree in the States. They feel they don’t get the proper respect from the women who make equal or more money than they do. Some of the men in the book were even proud of the fact that they could just go back to Viet Nam and throw out money to get the respect and attention they desired. One of the men, who makes six to eight dollars an hour, featured in the book would hesitate to buy a bowl of Pho after a long hard day at work, yet doesn’t think twice about buying a bottle of perfume for his wife’s cousin in Viet Nam for fifty dollars.

The irony in these stories is the social status in which Thai points out the differences in the unmarriageable candidate between the two genders. The unmarriageable men in the States are the ones with little education, which makes sense because they feel they aren’t good enough for the educated women in the States. In contrast, the unmarriageable women in Viet Nam are the ones with high education. They feel that local men aren’t good enough for them. What makes the two a good match is that he has money and she has education. I am not sure if these combinations would last. Why would a highly educated woman marry someone less educated than her? What makes the oversea men more marketable than the local men? The answer is simple: the green card.

The book also delves into a highly marriageable couple. He is a software engineer in the States and she is the pretty-but-less-educated girl in a village. What makes him highly marriageable is obvious and what makes her highly marriageable is her typical quality of a Vietnamese woman: listen and respect the elders. This combination might or might not work. It works because the men have no problem marrying down and they can wear the pants. It doesn’t work because they have been raised in two different cultures. They have their ways of thinking and reasoning. He might want her to go to work, but she might prefer to stay home to take care of the kids.

The chapter that seems departed but related is about the matchmaker. In Vietnamese culture, matchmaking is quite popular, and it plays a major role in international marriage. The chapter also touches upon the fascinating emotional debts. Psychological once you owe someone an emotional debt, you could never pay back no matter how much you had given. This is one of the reasons the remittances back to Viet Nam are soaring each year. As the case of the matchmaker, she sends money home every month because she feel that she owes her youngest sister who took her in when she was divorced and had no place to live.

What missing in this book is the marriage between Vietnamese-American women and their husband in Viet Nam. Of course, the women who go back for marriage aren’t as common as the men, but I have known three women who have done that. Two went back to married their boyfriend. One of the two waited ten years later (after she become a U.S citizenship) to go back and married him. Now that is some real love. The third woman went back to arrange a fake marriage for 30 grands, but she ended up married him without the payment. The result is that he beats the shit out of her ten days after he got his green card. Not only that he didn’t have to pay his fee, he also wants half of the house that belongs to her and her father. Some men are gold diggers too.

Matthew Carter’s works could be found in newsstand (Miller News), phonebook (Bell Centennial) and all over the web (Verdana, Georgia). He bridged the gap between traditional and digital typography. As Johanna Drucker pointed out in an essay from Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter: “Take Carter’s letters out of our universe of words and that world would appear as gap-toothed as a field of corn in the aftermath of the eager attention of a flock of crows.” Carter’s types have been widely used for their functional, economical beauty. Typographically Speaking, which is published in conjunction with an exhibition with the same title, featured essays including Carter’s reinterpretation of the classic types and how he had integrated type with technologies. The book, which also showcases compelling graphic design pieces using Carter’s typefaces, is a wonderful gem for designers.

While browsing through the limited selection of graphic design books in Gelman Library at George Washington University, I came across Carl Dair’s Design with Type. Flipping through it, I was impressed by the exemplary typographic illustrations. I checked it out and couldn’t resist. In fact, I just finished reading it and already want to reread it to soak everything in. Dair nails down typography like a musician breaks down his chords. He knows how to explain type so readers understand and he does so with clear, simple and tasteful approach. This book is without a doubt a classic.

If a book on design motivates you to design, then the book has done its job. While reading Yolanda Zappaterra’s Art Direction + Editorial Design, I keep wanting to apply the concepts presented in text to either my work or personal projects. With inspiring case studies, profiling of major publications and interviewing with influential designers, Art Direction + Editorial Design is an inspirational source for designers. Even if you get design block, flipping through this book will help open up your creativity.

In Miles, Ornette, Cecil, jazz journalist Howard Mandel pulled together the three avant-gardists whose music advanced beyond jazz. Miles took on fusion; Ornette built on harmolodic; Cecil went way out and wild. Drawing from his personal experience as well as his professional expertise, Mandel examines the art of improvisation and the musical direction Miles, Ornette and Cecil had embarked. What makes this book a fantastic read is hearing these masters, particularly Ornette, talking about their work, creative thinking and innovative approach in the interviews Mandel had conducted.

Ben Ratliff, jazz critic of the New York Times, obviously spent a lot of time listening to jazz in order for him to pick out 100 Most Important Recordings. Let it be known that these selected albums are based only Ratliff’s taste and he does have quite a range: from the well-known figures (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong) to lesser-know cats that I haven’t heard of. What makes the book worth-reading is Ratliff’s clear, approachable, and astute criticism. Here is a beautiful except on John Coltrane:

His playing is intense, lusty, and sometimes smeared with harsh, abrasive noise, but it is not scattershot. He finds areas of exploration and methodically roots around them. Four minutes into “Venus,” he finds a pivot point in the middle register, oscillating back and forth from it toward dark low notes that work their way up the horn. Two minutes and twelve seconds into “Jupiter,” Coltrane starts gushing descending scales, almost making them sound as if they’re overlapping; he starts altering these with shrieks a minute later. Then around the five-minute mark he finally returns to the three-not theme, repeated and bounced around between octaves; when he’s finished, as always, he shakes the bells again—as much a signal to Ali that he’s finished as to the listener.

This is a pleasurable read for both novices and aficionados.

A spare yet intriguing collection of typographic puns like “sexxx,” “incomplet” and “!xclamation.”

Jeff Fisher’s Identity Crisis! presents the old and new logo side by side to show how each brand had been redesigned. With 50 case studies, concise explanations and hundreds of visual illustrations (including websites, stationary packages and collateral pieces), the book is a useful resource for graphic designers.