Book review: One Hot Summer

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858
Rosemary Ashton
History

Interesting topic, thorough research, lackluster writing. The connections among the characters are intriguing. "What do Disraeli and Brunel have in common? Or Disraeli and Karl Marx . . . ? Frith's [painting] Derby Day and Brunel's [ship] Great Eastern? . . . " asks Ashton, in a very promising start. The answer, too often, turns out to be "not much, except that they were all contemporaries." Ashton focuses relentlessly on the micro scale, so the thematic spine of the book is weak. It will undoubtedly be very interesting to intense students of the period, but not so for general readers, nor even general history readers.

Not a beach book, in spite of the title. Did you wonder for a moment about the precipitous decline in my reading standards?