Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel
Books, literature, history
Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is like a celebrity blog for old books. That's the author's simile, not mine, and it's absolutely 100% accurate. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, move along.
Still here? Good. This is Christopher de Hamel's attempt to give book lovers the intellectual/sensory/visceral experience of interacting with these beautiful but inaccessible objects. Most of us can't do this. If you go to Dublin, for example, you should definitely take a look at the Book of Kells . . . but your experience will be limited to looking at a few pages, behind glass, in a dimly-lit room, with throngs of other people elbowing you. Christopher de Hamel has access unavailable to us mortals. He gets to actually sit there with the book in front of him.
Lucky bastard.
Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts is both intimate and wide-ranging. Every chapter details one manuscript's history, description, meaning, social context, physical description, location, highlights, and more. Most remarkable, to me, is the fact that in many cases de Hamel plausibly identifies specific individuals--not just patrons, but owners and carriers and artists and scribes--who worked on the volumes. If you don't get a little frisson at thinking about a specific, named person carefully drawing the page you're looking at, sitting there in a dark monastery a thousand years ago . . . I dunno, maybe you should see a shrink or something. These manuscripts are stunningly beautiful, and the book is lavishly illustrated; it's only a shame that it's impossible to reproduce the luster of gold leaf.
The one thing I can imagine some readers finding off-putting is de Hamel's tone. Some might call it witty and wry. Others might find it clubby, insular, and condescending. I didn't object to it, particularly, but then I've been hardened by years of exposure to this sort of thing. Let's just say that Christopher de Hamel is a character in his own book.
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Sunday, December 10, 2017
Book Review: Ripples in Spacetime
Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy
Govert Schilling
Astrophysics
I liked a little over half of this book--the second half. The first half is wasted on me, and probably on most other readers, because it wastes a lot of time explaining basic science. Folks, if you write a book entitled Ripples in Spacetime, you can probably assume that your audience doesn't need a lot of background on what a neutron star is. Furthermore, while plain English and helpful analogies are great, slipping over the line from "colloquial" into "cutesy" is not.
Once we finally get to the actual subject matter of the book, things even out. There's some good info on laser interferometry, a description of the various projects underway, an intelligent discussion of how you detect a tiny gravitational signal, and an argument for why it matters. I don't think the argument entirely makes its case--and I'm a former astronomy student!--but it's still interesting.
So, on balance, okay. Schilling needs to trust his readers more, and have a stronger hold on what it is he's actually trying to express. It's possible that Ripples in Spacetime would work better as a series of articles than as a book. I ended up learning some things, though, and that's the main objective.
Govert Schilling
Astrophysics
I liked a little over half of this book--the second half. The first half is wasted on me, and probably on most other readers, because it wastes a lot of time explaining basic science. Folks, if you write a book entitled Ripples in Spacetime, you can probably assume that your audience doesn't need a lot of background on what a neutron star is. Furthermore, while plain English and helpful analogies are great, slipping over the line from "colloquial" into "cutesy" is not.
Once we finally get to the actual subject matter of the book, things even out. There's some good info on laser interferometry, a description of the various projects underway, an intelligent discussion of how you detect a tiny gravitational signal, and an argument for why it matters. I don't think the argument entirely makes its case--and I'm a former astronomy student!--but it's still interesting.
So, on balance, okay. Schilling needs to trust his readers more, and have a stronger hold on what it is he's actually trying to express. It's possible that Ripples in Spacetime would work better as a series of articles than as a book. I ended up learning some things, though, and that's the main objective.
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Book Review: Huế 1968
Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
Mark Bowden
History
I've been watching Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War, which is excellent, but (necessarily) synoptic. Huế 1968 makes a good companion piece: it's written almost exclusively from a ground-level view. There's virtually nothing about Vietnamese high-level actors, either north or south. American leaders are spotlighted periodically only to emphasize how little they had to do with what was going on.
Which is part of the point.
This is not a book for the squeamish, fans of General William Westmoreland, or anyone who chooses to believe that war is somehow "glorious." It's gut-wrenching. Bowden doesn't flinch from the sheer awfulness of urban warfare. He's not an obtrusive stylist; he uses good, solid, journalistic prose, mostly showing what the men (and a few women) on the ground are seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, and feeling.
It's a visceral combination. Every time Bowden introduced a new character into the narrative, I found myself worrying about what would happen to him; one of Huế 1968's major themes is how random and chaotic death is in war, and how little control the average grunt had. The fighters weren't all alike--Bowden's viewpoint characters have different backgrounds, different characters, different motivations, different views on the war--but they had this in common: they were raw material. Over the course of the book, they're fed into the hopper.Where and how any one of them comes out of the machine is beyond anyone's control.
Bowden empathizes with the Marines. He doesn't venerate them. War turns people ugly, and Vietnam was ugly to begin with. If there are any heroes in Huế 1968, they're the journalists, who risked their lives under horrible conditions to do the best job they could.
Huế 1968 has its limitations. It isn't about arrows on maps; Bowden gives just enough strategic and operational information to follow the overall shape of things. He never strays long or far from the individual view. This eventually starts to get fragmented--there are a very large number of viewpoint characters, and it's sometimes hard to remember who's who. It doesn't help that there are many different units involved, in multiple places, across a period of weeks. I wouldn't have minded reading more of the Vietnamese soldiers' side of things, either, but I suppose that the practicalities of interviewing veterans (not to mention the book's likely readership) tilted things towards the U.S. side.
Nor, to be for, does the book pretend to be particularly objective. Bowden believes (as do I, for what that's worth) that the Vietnam war wasn't winnable--that it was a gargantuan American blunder, conflating Communism with nationalism, that put the Marines in Huế in the first place. If you're among those people whose response is "But from a strictly military point of view it was an American victory!", consider this: the South Vietnamese people, as a generalization, never embraced their government. (Why should they have?) They merely accepted it. It was a fact. Huế and the Tet offensive showed them that it didn't have to be a fact. "Winning" a battle doesn't count for much if there's nobody in particular whom you're winning it for.
Mark Bowden
History
I've been watching Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War, which is excellent, but (necessarily) synoptic. Huế 1968 makes a good companion piece: it's written almost exclusively from a ground-level view. There's virtually nothing about Vietnamese high-level actors, either north or south. American leaders are spotlighted periodically only to emphasize how little they had to do with what was going on.
Which is part of the point.
This is not a book for the squeamish, fans of General William Westmoreland, or anyone who chooses to believe that war is somehow "glorious." It's gut-wrenching. Bowden doesn't flinch from the sheer awfulness of urban warfare. He's not an obtrusive stylist; he uses good, solid, journalistic prose, mostly showing what the men (and a few women) on the ground are seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, and feeling.
It's a visceral combination. Every time Bowden introduced a new character into the narrative, I found myself worrying about what would happen to him; one of Huế 1968's major themes is how random and chaotic death is in war, and how little control the average grunt had. The fighters weren't all alike--Bowden's viewpoint characters have different backgrounds, different characters, different motivations, different views on the war--but they had this in common: they were raw material. Over the course of the book, they're fed into the hopper.Where and how any one of them comes out of the machine is beyond anyone's control.
Bowden empathizes with the Marines. He doesn't venerate them. War turns people ugly, and Vietnam was ugly to begin with. If there are any heroes in Huế 1968, they're the journalists, who risked their lives under horrible conditions to do the best job they could.
Huế 1968 has its limitations. It isn't about arrows on maps; Bowden gives just enough strategic and operational information to follow the overall shape of things. He never strays long or far from the individual view. This eventually starts to get fragmented--there are a very large number of viewpoint characters, and it's sometimes hard to remember who's who. It doesn't help that there are many different units involved, in multiple places, across a period of weeks. I wouldn't have minded reading more of the Vietnamese soldiers' side of things, either, but I suppose that the practicalities of interviewing veterans (not to mention the book's likely readership) tilted things towards the U.S. side.
Nor, to be for, does the book pretend to be particularly objective. Bowden believes (as do I, for what that's worth) that the Vietnam war wasn't winnable--that it was a gargantuan American blunder, conflating Communism with nationalism, that put the Marines in Huế in the first place. If you're among those people whose response is "But from a strictly military point of view it was an American victory!", consider this: the South Vietnamese people, as a generalization, never embraced their government. (Why should they have?) They merely accepted it. It was a fact. Huế and the Tet offensive showed them that it didn't have to be a fact. "Winning" a battle doesn't count for much if there's nobody in particular whom you're winning it for.
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Book Review: Artemis
Artemis
Andy Weir
Science fiction
In the beginning there was Andy Weir's self-published book The Martian. And the self-published book The Martian beget the mega-hit novel The Martian, which begat the Oscar-nominated movie The Martian. And I looked upon these things, and saw that they were good, and also that Andy Weir made a ton of money. Which, to be fair, he richly deserved.
Artemis is Weir's first novel since. (It's not a sequel.) Its plot is quite unlike The Martian's, but the writing is quite similar. It's deployed in service of a caper story rather than a survival story, which makes it a fun, fast read. Weir's humor is still humorous, his science is still scientific, his events are still eventful. It took me a while to warm up to Jazz, our protagonist, but I liked her better as the book went on.
Really, what Artemis is is a Heinlein juvenile, except with an older main character, some off-screen sexual references, and swearing. It reminded me quite a bit (very minor spoiler coming up) of Podkayne of Mars. It's jolly good fun. Go read it.
Andy Weir
Science fiction
In the beginning there was Andy Weir's self-published book The Martian. And the self-published book The Martian beget the mega-hit novel The Martian, which begat the Oscar-nominated movie The Martian. And I looked upon these things, and saw that they were good, and also that Andy Weir made a ton of money. Which, to be fair, he richly deserved.
Artemis is Weir's first novel since. (It's not a sequel.) Its plot is quite unlike The Martian's, but the writing is quite similar. It's deployed in service of a caper story rather than a survival story, which makes it a fun, fast read. Weir's humor is still humorous, his science is still scientific, his events are still eventful. It took me a while to warm up to Jazz, our protagonist, but I liked her better as the book went on.
Really, what Artemis is is a Heinlein juvenile, except with an older main character, some off-screen sexual references, and swearing. It reminded me quite a bit (very minor spoiler coming up) of Podkayne of Mars. It's jolly good fun. Go read it.
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