Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World
Thomas F. Madden
History
The place that's now Istanbul has been a city, continuously, since 667 BC. That's a lot to fit into one 300-page book. Thomas Madden approaches the problem by paring down his focus. Istanbul is almost entirely about a few topics: politics, in the form of influential individuals rather than movements; building(s); and violence.
Authorial focus is good, except where it isn't. Istanbul is curiously blinkered. The Byzantine-Bulgarian wars, for example, lasted for over half a millennium, by most accountings, and were hugely consequential. Their page count in Istanbul: zero, because they didn't much impact the city of Constantinople in these very specific ways. There's an extremely good, extremely revealing account of how the Fourth Crusade ended up conquering the city--an event that, out of context, seems inexplicable--but to give it, Madden has to use up something like 10% of the book. Any larger sense of social evolution is only brought in where it involves a change of dynasty, an edifice, or a riot.
Also, there are some things that are just plain irritating. Over and over and over, Madden explains that ancient thing X still stands in Y Street, or was where the Z Building is now. This would be useful to a person intimately familiar with the city (as Madden is). It might be useful if there were, say, more than three small maps. Lacking either case, it's merely vexing. Madden also has an annoying habit of repeating the exact same fact twice, thrice, or more. These aren't just reminders; Madden obviously forgets, or doesn't care, that he's already said these things.
Within its limitations, Istanbul is useful enough. Those limitations, however, are pretty severe.
Justinian's Flea is outstanding, though it only deals with a short time period. For a longer view, Lost to the West, by Lars Brownworth, is a good synopsis of Constantinople's role in the transition from Roman antiquity to and through the Middle Ages.
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Friday, April 28, 2017
Book Review: Butter
Butter: A Rich History
Elaine Khosrova
Food, science, history
Ah, the now-classic single-noun-titled biography of a substance. We already own Salt and The Potato. Getting this one felt kind of inevitable.
Butter's not bad. It's somewhat scattershot in its approach, touching on its subtopics--buttermaking, history, nutrition, and so forth--in no very particular order. I think Khosrova would have been wiser to have started with, at minimum, a definition of terms. No doubt in her foodie bubble everyone is born knowing the exact distinctions among butter, butterfat, milk solids, cream, whey, and so forth, but I wasn't. On the other hand, the vigorous defense of butter's healthiness was (if nothing else) heartening.
If you're ever in Cork, Ireland, don't miss the Butter Museum. Really.
Elaine Khosrova
Food, science, history
Ah, the now-classic single-noun-titled biography of a substance. We already own Salt and The Potato. Getting this one felt kind of inevitable.
Butter's not bad. It's somewhat scattershot in its approach, touching on its subtopics--buttermaking, history, nutrition, and so forth--in no very particular order. I think Khosrova would have been wiser to have started with, at minimum, a definition of terms. No doubt in her foodie bubble everyone is born knowing the exact distinctions among butter, butterfat, milk solids, cream, whey, and so forth, but I wasn't. On the other hand, the vigorous defense of butter's healthiness was (if nothing else) heartening.
If you're ever in Cork, Ireland, don't miss the Butter Museum. Really.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Book Review: Letters to a Young Scientist
Letters to a Young Scientist
Edward O. Wilson
Science, biography, essays
A love letter to science, framed as epistles to an imaginary recipient. Letters to a Young Scientists is beautifully if simply written and often quite touching. It really gives a wonderful feel for how much Wilson adores science--indeed, for the love that any good scientist feels--as well as giving some of Wilson's own biography. (Incidentally, there are also many fascinating facts about ants.)
If you're a scientist, or if you're interested in how scientists feel about what they do, this is the book for you. If you're not interested, you should maybe read it anyway; you may well be fascinated before you finish.
Edward O. Wilson
Science, biography, essays
A love letter to science, framed as epistles to an imaginary recipient. Letters to a Young Scientists is beautifully if simply written and often quite touching. It really gives a wonderful feel for how much Wilson adores science--indeed, for the love that any good scientist feels--as well as giving some of Wilson's own biography. (Incidentally, there are also many fascinating facts about ants.)
If you're a scientist, or if you're interested in how scientists feel about what they do, this is the book for you. If you're not interested, you should maybe read it anyway; you may well be fascinated before you finish.
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Book Review: A is for Arsenic
A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie
Katherine Harkup
Medicine, literature
This book is aimed squarely at a particular demographic: fans of Agatha Christie who are also interested in forensics. Given that Christie has sold somewhere north of two billion books, that's not as narrow a target as you might think. Needless to say, I'm in it.
A is for Arsenic is more about the science than about the literary criticism. Every chapter picks a separate poison and discusses its chemical properties, how it works, its symptoms, antidotes (if any), how to detect it, real-life cases, and (finally) how Christie used it in fiction. It's an extraordinarily informative book--good enough for aspiring mystery authors to use as a reference. The tone might have benefited by being more sprightly and less stately; Harkup periodically reveals a sharp sardonic wit. The writing is very clear, though, and should be accessible even to non-scientists. A non-mystery-loving reader won't find much in A is for Arsenic, but for the right-thinking remainder of us it's a lot of fun.
WARNING: Katherine Harkup does her best to avoid spoiling the books, but it's an impossible task. In some cases, just knowing that book X features poison Y--or any poison--is a spoiler. Read the books first. If you've already read them, read them again.
An excellent companion book is Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook.
Agatha Christie published something like eighty books over a 50-plus-year writing career. Naturally, not all of the books are of equal quality. My semi-subjective list of the absolute best would include (in no particular order):
Katherine Harkup
Medicine, literature
This book is aimed squarely at a particular demographic: fans of Agatha Christie who are also interested in forensics. Given that Christie has sold somewhere north of two billion books, that's not as narrow a target as you might think. Needless to say, I'm in it.
A is for Arsenic is more about the science than about the literary criticism. Every chapter picks a separate poison and discusses its chemical properties, how it works, its symptoms, antidotes (if any), how to detect it, real-life cases, and (finally) how Christie used it in fiction. It's an extraordinarily informative book--good enough for aspiring mystery authors to use as a reference. The tone might have benefited by being more sprightly and less stately; Harkup periodically reveals a sharp sardonic wit. The writing is very clear, though, and should be accessible even to non-scientists. A non-mystery-loving reader won't find much in A is for Arsenic, but for the right-thinking remainder of us it's a lot of fun.
WARNING: Katherine Harkup does her best to avoid spoiling the books, but it's an impossible task. In some cases, just knowing that book X features poison Y--or any poison--is a spoiler. Read the books first. If you've already read them, read them again.
An excellent companion book is Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook.
Agatha Christie published something like eighty books over a 50-plus-year writing career. Naturally, not all of the books are of equal quality. My semi-subjective list of the absolute best would include (in no particular order):
- And Then There Were None
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- The ABC Murders
- Murder on the Orient Express
- Death on the Nile
- Cards on the Table (warning: contains a spoiler for Murder on the Orient Express)
- Evil Under the Sun
- Sleeping Murder
- A Murder is Announced
- Thirteen at Dinner
- Curtain
- Five Little Pigs
- The Patriotic Murders
- The Moving Finger
If she'd written any one of these, it would certainly have been considered a classic, one of the absolute best books of the puzzle-mystery genre. To have written all of them, plus twenty or thirty others that are almost as good . . . well, it's just plain unfair.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Book Review: Compass
Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation
Alan Gurney
Science, history, nautical
If you think the subject matter sounds interesting . . .
Actually, Compass is a bit better than the label would indicate. It's comprehensive, it's informative, it's detailed, and it's colloquially written. It might not appeal to readers with a low tolerance for minutiae, and it lapses once or twice into Nauticalese ("Lady Nelson . . . had lost dagger boards"). That aside, it's an agreeable read into an important and oft-overlooked piece of technology.
Alan Gurney
Science, history, nautical
If you think the subject matter sounds interesting . . .
Actually, Compass is a bit better than the label would indicate. It's comprehensive, it's informative, it's detailed, and it's colloquially written. It might not appeal to readers with a low tolerance for minutiae, and it lapses once or twice into Nauticalese ("Lady Nelson . . . had lost dagger boards"). That aside, it's an agreeable read into an important and oft-overlooked piece of technology.
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Book Review: Colonel Roosevelt
Colonel Roosevelt
Edmund Morris
Biography
Like Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt is too large and varied a figure to be easily encompassed. This is the man who, while campaigning for President against his own chosen successor, was shot in the chest and then proceeded to give his scheduled speech anyway, with the bullet still in him. This is also the man whose collected published writings ran to twenty-four volumes; who explored an uncharted river through the Amazon rain forest; who won the Nobel Peace Prize; who made American conservationism a reality . . .
It's not surprising, then, that TR couldn't be captured in a single book. Colonel Roosevelt is the third and final volume of Edmund Morris's epic biography (the first two are The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex.) The adjectives it demands run towards "magisterial," "monumental," and "definitive." It's also vivid, multifaceted, and elegantly written in a sinuously literary register.
It's not an overblown newspaper report. Morris's aim is to be judicious, rather than impartial. As a writer with some evident pride in his own authorial chops, Morris feels free to critique Roosevelt's written output. Here a speech shows "Roosevelt's contempt for legalistic justice"; there another speech has "few passages of eloquence"; the book America and the World War has "some passages of real power," but "browsers glancing through its table of contents felt that they . . . would gain little by reading further." Outside of the literary, Morris's editorial specialty is the well-honed word or phrase, as when Woodrow Wilson "flee"s the White House, or is "professedly" bedridden.
It bears emphasizing that this linguistic scalpel is deployed carefully, and is not confined either to praising or to damning TR. The opinions of Roosevelt's foes, as well as his admirers, are given thoughtful weight, and in all cases the basis for their judgment is manifest. Thus, the naturalist John Burroughs can say
Ken Burns's recent documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History is a superb introduction to Rooseveltology, though of course it's much less detailed than Morris's three-volume, 2000+-page biography. For Roosevelt's adventures in South America, don't miss Candace Millard's The River of Doubt.
Edmund Morris
Biography
Like Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt is too large and varied a figure to be easily encompassed. This is the man who, while campaigning for President against his own chosen successor, was shot in the chest and then proceeded to give his scheduled speech anyway, with the bullet still in him. This is also the man whose collected published writings ran to twenty-four volumes; who explored an uncharted river through the Amazon rain forest; who won the Nobel Peace Prize; who made American conservationism a reality . . .
It's not surprising, then, that TR couldn't be captured in a single book. Colonel Roosevelt is the third and final volume of Edmund Morris's epic biography (the first two are The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex.) The adjectives it demands run towards "magisterial," "monumental," and "definitive." It's also vivid, multifaceted, and elegantly written in a sinuously literary register.
It's not an overblown newspaper report. Morris's aim is to be judicious, rather than impartial. As a writer with some evident pride in his own authorial chops, Morris feels free to critique Roosevelt's written output. Here a speech shows "Roosevelt's contempt for legalistic justice"; there another speech has "few passages of eloquence"; the book America and the World War has "some passages of real power," but "browsers glancing through its table of contents felt that they . . . would gain little by reading further." Outside of the literary, Morris's editorial specialty is the well-honed word or phrase, as when Woodrow Wilson "flee"s the White House, or is "professedly" bedridden.
It bears emphasizing that this linguistic scalpel is deployed carefully, and is not confined either to praising or to damning TR. The opinions of Roosevelt's foes, as well as his admirers, are given thoughtful weight, and in all cases the basis for their judgment is manifest. Thus, the naturalist John Burroughs can say
Roosevelt would be a really great man if he could be shorn of that lock of his hair in which that strong dash of the bully resides.and we know exactly what he means, just as we can simultaneously appreciate the tributes of Teddy's unabashed partisans. All in all there's no reason to doubt a contemporary journalist: Roosevelt was "the most interesting American."
Ken Burns's recent documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History is a superb introduction to Rooseveltology, though of course it's much less detailed than Morris's three-volume, 2000+-page biography. For Roosevelt's adventures in South America, don't miss Candace Millard's The River of Doubt.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Book Review: I Contain Multitudes
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Ed Yong
Biology
Sometimes you get a book that demands adjectives. I'm talking "mind-blowing," "wondrous," "astounding" . . . you know, the usual tepid endorsements you've come to expect from this blog.
Part of the wondrousness of I Contain Multitude is simply a matter of content. For anyone with even a passing interest in biology, it would be hard to write a dull book given Yong's factual starting points. Did you know that . . .
Life, in other words, is gloriously amazingly complicated. We humans tend to view it simplistically: it's a pyramid, we're at the top, and microbes are enemies to be eliminated. I Contain Multitudes effectively and enthusiastically demolishes that view. Along the way it treats the reader to an unending cornucopia of wonders, even as Ed Yong conscientiously documents the ways in which science is ever-changing and tentative and unsettled (especially in new fields such as this). Yong's writing is chatty, often sly, always clear, sometimes surprisingly eloquent. He has no choice, given the scope of his subject matter, to jump around somewhat--from researcher to researcher, from problem to problem, from organism to organism--but he's usually pretty good about reminding us where he's coming from.
I find it hard to imagine any reader who wouldn't enjoy this book, except possibly for the pathologically science-phobic. How much you take away from it, in terms of facts, is a separate question; there's just too much information for anyone to remember it all. Trust me: you won't care.
Though wildly different in tone and structure, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is similar in that it's a great read full of can't-miss content.
An interview with the author is here.
Ed Yong
Biology
Sometimes you get a book that demands adjectives. I'm talking "mind-blowing," "wondrous," "astounding" . . . you know, the usual tepid endorsements you've come to expect from this blog.
Part of the wondrousness of I Contain Multitude is simply a matter of content. For anyone with even a passing interest in biology, it would be hard to write a dull book given Yong's factual starting points. Did you know that . . .
- There's a species of mite that contains no less than five bacterial symbionts, none of which can survive without the others (or the mite itself)?
- Your personal biome influences how attractive you are to insects?
- The desert woodrat can digest the toxic leaves of the creosote bush because of its gut microbes?
- The microfauna on your left hand are probably quite unlike what's on your right hand?
- It may be possible to prevent the spread of viruses using mosquitos' own bacteria?
Life, in other words, is gloriously amazingly complicated. We humans tend to view it simplistically: it's a pyramid, we're at the top, and microbes are enemies to be eliminated. I Contain Multitudes effectively and enthusiastically demolishes that view. Along the way it treats the reader to an unending cornucopia of wonders, even as Ed Yong conscientiously documents the ways in which science is ever-changing and tentative and unsettled (especially in new fields such as this). Yong's writing is chatty, often sly, always clear, sometimes surprisingly eloquent. He has no choice, given the scope of his subject matter, to jump around somewhat--from researcher to researcher, from problem to problem, from organism to organism--but he's usually pretty good about reminding us where he's coming from.
I find it hard to imagine any reader who wouldn't enjoy this book, except possibly for the pathologically science-phobic. How much you take away from it, in terms of facts, is a separate question; there's just too much information for anyone to remember it all. Trust me: you won't care.
Though wildly different in tone and structure, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is similar in that it's a great read full of can't-miss content.
An interview with the author is here.
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