INFORMATION ANXIETY by Richard Saul Wurman...

INFORMATION ANXIETY by Richard Saul Wurman (Doubleday: $19.95)

While an average edition of a newspaper the size of The Times already contains more information about the world than a person in the 17th Century was likely to come across in a lifetime, most communications planners remain intent on opening the floodgates of information even wider--creating new computer networks and specialty journals, for example. And so one takes no small comfort in finding a planner such as Richard Saul Wurman, who is more interested in channeling that deluge of data into meaningful knowledge.

Wurman offers his advice, based on the strategies he developed while creating the “Smart” Yellow Pages and his “Access” guides to cities and subjects, both to information providers and information consumers. Information providers should eliminate unnecessary detail, he suggests, and structure data according to the intuitive logic likely to be used by their audience; his “Access” books guide people through cities not by exhaustively listing streets, for instance, but by relating locations to major landmarks. Information consumers, in turn, should consider data discriminately, relating it to familiar mental landmarks.

Wurman’s redesigns of old guides have been more common-sensical than revolutionary, of course, but they have yet to catch on across America: Bank loan forms still use terms such as “proceeds to borrower” instead of “amount of the loan,” people still define terms such as “an acre” abstractly (“43,560 square feet”) rather than helpfully (“about the size of a football field without the end zones”), news articles still fail to answer basic questions that come to most readers’ minds.

And yet while Wurman’s ideas about presenting information are no doubt sensible, his notions about how we can best receive information are far less thoughtful and even dangerous in their implications. Writing in short, loosely connected information blurbs reminiscent of TV news and speckling his margins with interesting, though unpondered quotes, Wurman doesn’t consider the many dangers in his recommendation that readers “get comfortable with (their) ignorance . . . reducing the world to manageable proportions” by strengthening their point of view. Wurman’s theories ultimately encourage narrow-minded and self-righteous thinking, a weakness that Wurman sometimes displays in these pages. Envisioning his own specialty as the definitive way of comprehending all knowledge, he suggests that students study “only one course,” “Learning about Learning,” up to 6th grade. Worse, assuming that we all share his world outlook, he proposes that all news be divided into three categories: “hope, absurdity and catastrophe.”

EDVARD MUNCH by Louise Lippincott (Getty Museum Studies on Art, P.O. Box 2112, Santa Monica,CA 90406: $14.95)

The work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch conveys a dramatically wide range of human emotion, from the warmly enveloping, brightly colorful “Flowering Meadow in Veierland” to the anguish of “The Scream,” where a lonely figure emerges from swirling currents of air not unlike those in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” opening his or her mouth in an eerie Expressionist cry that concentrates the painting’s neurotic tension. It is generally assumed that Munch’s outlook changed most markedly after his nervous breakdown in 1908, when he stopped depicting individuals victimized by nature’s malevolence and by their own passions and began evoking the joy of life, the abundance of nature and man’s affinity to it.

In this able overview of Munch and Scandinavian art, however, we see that Munch’s hope and despair always co-existed. Only a year before his ebullient “Veierland” painting, for instance, Munch produced “The Sick Child,” one of his most somber works. Effectively blending technical art criticism with subjective interpretation and cultural history, Louise Lippincott, a curator at the Getty Museum, captures the balances in Munch’s art (his depiction of darkness is at once mysterious, sensual and foreboding) and in his life: his Bohemian idealism about reforming his homeland existed only in tension with his Expressionist alienation, a spirit that was to produce such writers as Franz Kafka.

NEW WORLD, NEW MIND

Moving Toward Conscious Evolution by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich (Doubleday: $18.95) “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,” Albert Einstein warned Franklin Roosevelt in an oft-quoted 1946 telegram, “and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” The authors wrote this book because they share Einstein’s concern that old ways of thinking are inadequate to govern a post-nuclear world, but in these pages they try to downplay his pessimism by pointing out that we can take conscious control of our own evolution and develop a “new mind,” one capable of perceiving the obscure dangers characteristic of our era, from abstract trends to ubiquitous technologies.

The “old mind” we have employed until now tends to focus on dramatic change, on the immediate and the personal, the authors write. It is a focus that served man well when the principal dangers were the sudden crack of a branch as it was about to give way, the roar of a flash flood racing down a narrow valley or the rustling of a predator in the underbrush. But now that our greatest threats are visible only to the intellect, the authors persuasively argue, our senses mislead us: Angelenos worry about smog as the sky turns brown when invisible, odorless carbon dioxide is more dangerous; Americans fear traveling abroad after a well-publicized terrorist murder when handguns kill more Americans each day than decades of terrorist attacks; TV viewers worry about a little girl trapped in a well when fundamental social and economic problems go unaddressed. We are, the authors analogize without apology, like frogs, who only can detect their favorite cuisine--the fly--when it is in motion; a frog surrounded by dozens of delectable, dead flies would starve to death.

Many “old minds,” unfortunately, are going to dismiss this book for its repetitiousness (phrases such as “we have developed little capacity to understand the new world we have built” frequently recur, diminishing the sense of narrative progression) and for its 1960s-style idealism: “Why has humanity not redirected its efforts,” the authors ask, “into seeking ways for people to live together without conflict and to limiting the size of its population so that every one can lead a meaningful life?” Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, Stanford biologists who also are accomplished authors, should have defended their idealism by countering the inevitable objections, from the cynical (conflict is inevitable) to the pragmatic (too much sacrifice of short-term profits also sacrifices long-term solutions).

Most problematic, though, is the fact that the authors’ vision of a “new mind”--a consciousness neither grounded in a particular culture nor swayed by “gut feelings”--neglects timeless human needs. The authors don’t seem to realize, for instance, that we focus on the little girl caught in the well not because we have lost our sense of what is important, but because we want to affirm that as a nation we care for our citizens. Similarly, they present our reaction to the Challenger disaster as an example of how dramatic accidents eclipse abstract dangers. Mourning the astronauts, however, also was a way of collectively recognizing our aspirations and acknowledging our limitations.

TOO COOL TO GET MARRIED And Other True Stories by David Seeley (Harper & Row: $15.95) Many young adults now writing for urban magazines and city weeklies have ventured one step beyond the subjectivity of New Journalism, adopting a “true confessional” style in which they reveal everything from childhood fears to sexual frustrations. The style seems to offer a vicarious form of social intercourse for a generation that is necessarily preoccupied with work and reflects a continuing shift in interest from the political to the personal among those in their 20s and 30s. David Seeley, a journalist self-described here as “a nice little North Dallas WASP boy,” is one of this generation’s most prolific writers, unafraid of confessing or of walking up to a couple dancing at a Los Angeles or New York nightclub and extracting their confessions.

Seeley travels some trampled terrain on his city beat, offering, for instance, the familiar assortment of weird-people-I’ve-dated stories: One woman, a ballet instructor, would take off her clothes and meditate by candlelight for an hour and a half every night; “her refrigerator,” Seeley laments, “never had anything in it but yogurt and boiled chicken.” Some of these pieces, however, are more than mere diversions. In the moving title story, Seeley recalls how his girlfriend, after too many nights drinking and dancing with him until 4, decided to adopt her generation’s pragmatic bent, marrying an older man in more of a useful partnership than a spiritual union.

Seeley’s pieces also reveal his generation’s identity crisis. “Many of us (who graduated from high school in the mid-1970s) feel cheated for having missed the Sixties,” he writes, “when things were jumping, alive.” Only two paragraphs later, however, he describes his college days as quite 1960s-spirited, as “loose, free, thrilling times.” Writing in generalities (“America seemed like a simpler place” in the early 1960s), Seeley never masters the difficult task of describing why so many of his friends wished they had been born in an earlier era.