When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
Jim Holt
Science, mathematics, philosophy
I really like Jim Holt's 2012 book Why Does the World Exist? It's both a meaty intellectual challenge and a playful, engaging read. When Einstein Walked With Gödel is equally engaging, but less meaty. The difference is simply that Why Does the World Exist is a focused collection that deeply explores a single topic, while When Einstein Walked With Gödel is a diffuse collection that shallowly explores many topics.
This isn't a diss. Jim Holt is a very good writer, and his essays are not unreminiscent of Carl Sagan in both their discursiveness and their humanity. He's especially good at weaving together biography and abstract ideas. These collected essays cover twenty years of writing, though; inevitably there is some overlap. The individual pieces are excellent, but too short to give more than an overview of their subjects. The thing as a whole is brilliant, but fragmented--kaleidoscopic isn't too strong a term.
And it's nobody's fault but my own that my brain insists on setting the book's title to the tune of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
Steve Brusatte
Natural history, paleontology
As a wee shaver, one of my oft-reread books was All About Dinosaurs, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a character--he may have been one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones--and his books are a mixture of derring-do, science, and personal history. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is as close as I've ever come to an adult equivalent. Like Andrews, Steve Brusatte is obviously having an enormous amount of fun.
The book is at once a good overall introduction to the natural history of dinosaurs, a charming and discursive autobiography, and an up-to-date survey of modern scientific thinking. Brusatte knows a lot of colorful characters (and he seems to like them all, which is nice). If they never quite get rescued from starvation by the last-minute arrival of their camel caravan in the Gobi Desert, there are still a lot of exotic locales and bone-finding adventures. Oh, and the information itself is really interesting.
The writing is good, too. Brusatte uses a conversational, intimate tone, reminiscent of Ed Yong (that's a good thing). He doesn't dumb anything down, but he does make everything perfectly accessible. For instance, I was particularly and professionally interested in the ways that computers, statistics, and basic machine-learning techniques, are being used now in paleontology; in this, as in general, Brusatte strikes a good balance between too much and not enough information for the general reader.
I wouldn't have minded if The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs had been 50% longer, but that's hardly a complaint. Hopefully there will be a sequel.
For a biography of Andrews, see Dragon Hunter by Charles Gellenkamp. Though not exclusively dinosaur-related, Douglas Preston's Dinosaurs in the Attic tells the story of the American Museum of Natural History and provides a good recounting of the Bone Wars.
Steve Brusatte
Natural history, paleontology
As a wee shaver, one of my oft-reread books was All About Dinosaurs, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a character--he may have been one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones--and his books are a mixture of derring-do, science, and personal history. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is as close as I've ever come to an adult equivalent. Like Andrews, Steve Brusatte is obviously having an enormous amount of fun.
The book is at once a good overall introduction to the natural history of dinosaurs, a charming and discursive autobiography, and an up-to-date survey of modern scientific thinking. Brusatte knows a lot of colorful characters (and he seems to like them all, which is nice). If they never quite get rescued from starvation by the last-minute arrival of their camel caravan in the Gobi Desert, there are still a lot of exotic locales and bone-finding adventures. Oh, and the information itself is really interesting.
The writing is good, too. Brusatte uses a conversational, intimate tone, reminiscent of Ed Yong (that's a good thing). He doesn't dumb anything down, but he does make everything perfectly accessible. For instance, I was particularly and professionally interested in the ways that computers, statistics, and basic machine-learning techniques, are being used now in paleontology; in this, as in general, Brusatte strikes a good balance between too much and not enough information for the general reader.
I wouldn't have minded if The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs had been 50% longer, but that's hardly a complaint. Hopefully there will be a sequel.
For a biography of Andrews, see Dragon Hunter by Charles Gellenkamp. Though not exclusively dinosaur-related, Douglas Preston's Dinosaurs in the Attic tells the story of the American Museum of Natural History and provides a good recounting of the Bone Wars.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Book Review: How Do We Look
How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilisation
Mary Beard
Art, psychology
I very much liked Beard's SPQR, with the caveat that she sometimes descended into a kind of erudite waffling--it might have been this way, but on the other hand we should be skeptical, but on the other hand Plutarch says such-and-such, but nonetheless on the other hand . . . How Do We Look contains some germs of an interesting idea, but the caveat has grown to consume the book.
It's not much of a book, to be honest. It's short. Almost half of it consists of (gorgeous) illustrations. Even within its text, it's divided into two largely disjointed sections: one where Beard considers portraiture (especially sculpture), and another where she considers religious art. The tenuous thread that unites the halves is . . . Um. Well. That's the problem, really. I'm not sure there's a thread even within the sections, much less between them.
I mean, there's something. Beard is trying to write a thought-provoking book about how we, the viewers, respond to art--how our expectations shape our experience of the piece, how the piece communicates to us across time and culture, how the concerns of the artist are or aren't relevant to us. It's got interesting bits: Christians are commanded not to worship graven idols, for example, yet they dress up the Crying Madonna of Macarena like a Barbie doll and parade it through the streets. That says something interesting about the way people project their desires onto an artwork. I'm just not sure what, and Beard doesn't really want to tell me.
The caveat to my caveat is that How Do We Look isn't really a stand-alone work. It's a companion piece to a new BBC TV series, a response to Kenneth Clarke's deservedly famous and influential Civilisation. What works poorly on the page would, I imagine, work better on screen. I don't often recommend viewing over reading, but How Do We Look is an exception.
Mary Beard
Art, psychology
I very much liked Beard's SPQR, with the caveat that she sometimes descended into a kind of erudite waffling--it might have been this way, but on the other hand we should be skeptical, but on the other hand Plutarch says such-and-such, but nonetheless on the other hand . . . How Do We Look contains some germs of an interesting idea, but the caveat has grown to consume the book.
It's not much of a book, to be honest. It's short. Almost half of it consists of (gorgeous) illustrations. Even within its text, it's divided into two largely disjointed sections: one where Beard considers portraiture (especially sculpture), and another where she considers religious art. The tenuous thread that unites the halves is . . . Um. Well. That's the problem, really. I'm not sure there's a thread even within the sections, much less between them.
I mean, there's something. Beard is trying to write a thought-provoking book about how we, the viewers, respond to art--how our expectations shape our experience of the piece, how the piece communicates to us across time and culture, how the concerns of the artist are or aren't relevant to us. It's got interesting bits: Christians are commanded not to worship graven idols, for example, yet they dress up the Crying Madonna of Macarena like a Barbie doll and parade it through the streets. That says something interesting about the way people project their desires onto an artwork. I'm just not sure what, and Beard doesn't really want to tell me.
The caveat to my caveat is that How Do We Look isn't really a stand-alone work. It's a companion piece to a new BBC TV series, a response to Kenneth Clarke's deservedly famous and influential Civilisation. What works poorly on the page would, I imagine, work better on screen. I don't often recommend viewing over reading, but How Do We Look is an exception.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Book Review: Germany
Germany: Memories of a Nation
Neil MacGregor
History, sociology
This book works better than it has any right to. MacGregor's thesis is that it's impossible to write the history of Germany, because for most of history there hasn't been a single "Germany". The Holy Roman Empire overlapped with "Germany", but it wasn't the same, and the empire itself was a jigsaw puzzle of little Mini-Germanies. (As late as the 18th century, most of them had their own currencies.) Various historically-German-speaking regions and cities are now parts of other countries. The German Empire only lasted from 1871 to 1918, and the middle of its three emperors only reigned for 90 days. There were two actual Germanies from 1945 to 1990. And these are just the political fragmentations!
So MacGregor wrote a book about how various things, places, people, and ideas have been used to construct an idea--the titular "memories"--of Germany. Often the same subjects are used in multiple ways: the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider got stamps from both East and West Germany, for example, with quite different messaging. It would be frightfully easy to turn this material into a mess. How can you write one book that encompasses the Iron Cross, the VW Beetle, Charlemagne's crown, the gates at Buchenwald, porcelain, the psychology of the forest, and the defeat of the Roman Legions in AD 9?
Somehow it all works. It doesn't hurt that the individual chapters are excellent little mini-essays in the mold of James Burke's Connections, or that the theme--the manufacture and use of "memories"--is consistently sustained. It's a remarkable stained-glass-window, adding up to more than the sum of its excellent parts. If it never does resolve the twists and contradictions of this thing called "Germany" . . . .well, that's sort of the point.
Neil MacGregor
History, sociology
This book works better than it has any right to. MacGregor's thesis is that it's impossible to write the history of Germany, because for most of history there hasn't been a single "Germany". The Holy Roman Empire overlapped with "Germany", but it wasn't the same, and the empire itself was a jigsaw puzzle of little Mini-Germanies. (As late as the 18th century, most of them had their own currencies.) Various historically-German-speaking regions and cities are now parts of other countries. The German Empire only lasted from 1871 to 1918, and the middle of its three emperors only reigned for 90 days. There were two actual Germanies from 1945 to 1990. And these are just the political fragmentations!
So MacGregor wrote a book about how various things, places, people, and ideas have been used to construct an idea--the titular "memories"--of Germany. Often the same subjects are used in multiple ways: the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider got stamps from both East and West Germany, for example, with quite different messaging. It would be frightfully easy to turn this material into a mess. How can you write one book that encompasses the Iron Cross, the VW Beetle, Charlemagne's crown, the gates at Buchenwald, porcelain, the psychology of the forest, and the defeat of the Roman Legions in AD 9?
Somehow it all works. It doesn't hurt that the individual chapters are excellent little mini-essays in the mold of James Burke's Connections, or that the theme--the manufacture and use of "memories"--is consistently sustained. It's a remarkable stained-glass-window, adding up to more than the sum of its excellent parts. If it never does resolve the twists and contradictions of this thing called "Germany" . . . .well, that's sort of the point.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Book Review: The Age of Genius
The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
A. C. Grayling
History, philosophy, science
The first hint that The Age of Genius might have problems comes on page xiv, in the Author's Note.
Needless to say, I skipped nothing. I can't say that I'm much the wiser thereby, though. Military history is a demanding discipline, and A. C. Grayling doesn't show much mastery of it. He has moments of clarity, but overall he never makes sense of the Thirty Years War (which would be hard to do for anyone).
Nor, more critically, does he really tie it into the rest of the book. His warning is all too true: the first 100 pages of The Age of Genius are not only disjoint in themselves, but they fail to tie into the argument of the book. That argument--that the 17th century represents a watershed moment in human intellectual history--is a defensible one; but Grayling doesn't really make it. Too much of the book consists of a series of examples, like the "Before" and "After" shots in a magazine ad, where what's needed is some illustration of how Before became After.
Furthermore, the examples themselves are sometimes dubious. For example:
Actually, to call it a thesis is to give too much credit. The book is full of inconsequential side quests. What does it matter whether Descartes was a Rosicrucian or a Jesuit spying on the Rosicrucians? Why spend so much ink contrasting Hobbes and Locke when both of them clearly belong on the "modern" side of the philosophical divide? Grayling proposes at one point to set up a contrast between the world-view of an educated man in 1600 and one in 1700, and then fails to do so (or, if he does it, it's awfully well-hidden). In any case, the fact that a change occurred is hardly in doubt; the attempt to box it into one arbitrary calendrical period doesn't seem to add much value.
The book ends well. The last chapter is a robust defense of reason, the Enlightenment, liberal thought, and education. It's a pity that the rest of The Age of Genius doesn't really lead there.
A. C. Grayling
History, philosophy, science
The first hint that The Age of Genius might have problems comes on page xiv, in the Author's Note.
The section on the Thirty Years' War might be of less interest to some readers than the rest of the book . . . [they] may skim that section and pass on to the rest. It might be enough for them to have the bare report as here given . . .It is never a good sign when, before your book even starts, you have to tell your readers that they can skip over the first third of it.
Needless to say, I skipped nothing. I can't say that I'm much the wiser thereby, though. Military history is a demanding discipline, and A. C. Grayling doesn't show much mastery of it. He has moments of clarity, but overall he never makes sense of the Thirty Years War (which would be hard to do for anyone).
Nor, more critically, does he really tie it into the rest of the book. His warning is all too true: the first 100 pages of The Age of Genius are not only disjoint in themselves, but they fail to tie into the argument of the book. That argument--that the 17th century represents a watershed moment in human intellectual history--is a defensible one; but Grayling doesn't really make it. Too much of the book consists of a series of examples, like the "Before" and "After" shots in a magazine ad, where what's needed is some illustration of how Before became After.
Furthermore, the examples themselves are sometimes dubious. For example:
In 1606 Macbeth was stages for the first time. Shakespeare was able to rely on the beliefs of his audience . . . to portray the killing of a king as subversive of nature's order, to the extent that horses ate each other and owls fell upon falcons in mid-air and killed them. In 1649, a single generation later, a king was publicly killed, executed in Whitehall in London before a great crowd . . . The idea of the sacred nature of kingship as premised in Macbeth had been rejected . . .Leaving aside the fact that killing off the occasional king was hardly uncommon in previous centuries, Shakespeare's audience was not stupid. We can accept for the sake of entertainment the proposition that vampires walk among us, or that the Nazis won World War II. I have no doubt that seventeenth-century people were just as capable of accepting certain things in fiction, as fiction. By Grayling's logic, Goethe's Faust--written in the heart of the Enlightenment--shows that 19th-century Europeans generally believed in the literal truth of the deal-with-the-devil narrative, which (if it were true) would falsify The Age of Genius's main thesis.
Actually, to call it a thesis is to give too much credit. The book is full of inconsequential side quests. What does it matter whether Descartes was a Rosicrucian or a Jesuit spying on the Rosicrucians? Why spend so much ink contrasting Hobbes and Locke when both of them clearly belong on the "modern" side of the philosophical divide? Grayling proposes at one point to set up a contrast between the world-view of an educated man in 1600 and one in 1700, and then fails to do so (or, if he does it, it's awfully well-hidden). In any case, the fact that a change occurred is hardly in doubt; the attempt to box it into one arbitrary calendrical period doesn't seem to add much value.
The book ends well. The last chapter is a robust defense of reason, the Enlightenment, liberal thought, and education. It's a pity that the rest of The Age of Genius doesn't really lead there.
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Book Review: Energy
Energy: A Human History
Richard Rhodes
Science, engineering, history
Maybe I'm just the wrong reader; I know a lot of this story already. Or maybe my expectations were too high, based on Rhodes's prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. For whatever reason, Energy was a bit of a let-down.
I can't really point to anything wrong with it. It's more that, for most of its length, it doesn't do anything unusually right. Rhodes treats a series of energy sources (steam, petrochemicals, nuclear, etc.) in a lucid pop-sci fashion, giving a capsule history of the development of each. It's fine. It's just not very innovative.
The book only really gets interesting, in fact, when Rhodes gets around to nuclear power. This is where he stops reporting and starts analyzing. He's decidedly a Wizard, not a Prophet. He pays little or no attention to arguments that humanity needs to reduce its energy footprint--indeed, he takes it for granted that no such thing will occur. (I think he's probably right.) Without being polemical or myopic about it, Rhodes is pretty clearly on the side of more nuclear power. He makes a strong case, too. Coal kills a lot of people.
If you're looking for a good topic overview with no need for a technical background, Energy is for you. If you're looking for thoughtful argument, the last third of Energy is arguably for you. If you're looking for something groundbreaking, you might have to look elsewhere.
The Grid only partially overlaps Energy, but it's a very intriguing book. Coal, by Barbara Freese (and also subtitled "A Human History"), is a decent biography-of-a-substance book that covers related territory. For the emergence of steam as the first non-muscle-based power source, I liked Christopher McGowan's The Rainhill Trials (among others).
Richard Rhodes
Science, engineering, history
Maybe I'm just the wrong reader; I know a lot of this story already. Or maybe my expectations were too high, based on Rhodes's prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. For whatever reason, Energy was a bit of a let-down.
I can't really point to anything wrong with it. It's more that, for most of its length, it doesn't do anything unusually right. Rhodes treats a series of energy sources (steam, petrochemicals, nuclear, etc.) in a lucid pop-sci fashion, giving a capsule history of the development of each. It's fine. It's just not very innovative.
The book only really gets interesting, in fact, when Rhodes gets around to nuclear power. This is where he stops reporting and starts analyzing. He's decidedly a Wizard, not a Prophet. He pays little or no attention to arguments that humanity needs to reduce its energy footprint--indeed, he takes it for granted that no such thing will occur. (I think he's probably right.) Without being polemical or myopic about it, Rhodes is pretty clearly on the side of more nuclear power. He makes a strong case, too. Coal kills a lot of people.
If you're looking for a good topic overview with no need for a technical background, Energy is for you. If you're looking for thoughtful argument, the last third of Energy is arguably for you. If you're looking for something groundbreaking, you might have to look elsewhere.
The Grid only partially overlaps Energy, but it's a very intriguing book. Coal, by Barbara Freese (and also subtitled "A Human History"), is a decent biography-of-a-substance book that covers related territory. For the emergence of steam as the first non-muscle-based power source, I liked Christopher McGowan's The Rainhill Trials (among others).
Friday, September 7, 2018
Book Review: Ticker
Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart
Mimi Swartz
Biography, engineering
Having read a book on heart surgery recently, and another on heart symbolism, it seemed only natural to continue with heart engineering.
The subtitle is a bit of bait-and-switch. Ticker doesn't recount "the" quest to create an artificial heart. It recounts "a" quest, specifically the quest of one Dr. Oscar “Bud” Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute. Everyone else who's worked on artificial hearts is involved only in so far as they intersect Frazier's orbit.
The technique is reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, as exemplified in his classic The Soul of a New Machine. Mimi Swartz is no Tracy Kidder. To be fair, most people aren't. Swartz is a pretty good journalist and she writes pretty good "New Journalism" style prose. Ticker reads like a long article in one of the better class of magazines--Atlantic or New Yorker, perhaps--that's overflowed its banks. It suffers from a bad case of hagriography. It benefits from a narrow focus. It's strong in character portraits, particularly in a devastatingly acerbic view of pioneering heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. It's weak in technology.
Most unsatisfying, however, is that Ticker lacks an ending. I understand that Swartz wanted to get the book out, but the story she tells is an unfinished one. Reality is not neat. Great authors find a way to write as if it were; competent authors merely reflect the fact. Ticker is competent.
Mimi Swartz
Biography, engineering
Having read a book on heart surgery recently, and another on heart symbolism, it seemed only natural to continue with heart engineering.
The subtitle is a bit of bait-and-switch. Ticker doesn't recount "the" quest to create an artificial heart. It recounts "a" quest, specifically the quest of one Dr. Oscar “Bud” Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute. Everyone else who's worked on artificial hearts is involved only in so far as they intersect Frazier's orbit.
The technique is reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, as exemplified in his classic The Soul of a New Machine. Mimi Swartz is no Tracy Kidder. To be fair, most people aren't. Swartz is a pretty good journalist and she writes pretty good "New Journalism" style prose. Ticker reads like a long article in one of the better class of magazines--Atlantic or New Yorker, perhaps--that's overflowed its banks. It suffers from a bad case of hagriography. It benefits from a narrow focus. It's strong in character portraits, particularly in a devastatingly acerbic view of pioneering heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. It's weak in technology.
Most unsatisfying, however, is that Ticker lacks an ending. I understand that Swartz wanted to get the book out, but the story she tells is an unfinished one. Reality is not neat. Great authors find a way to write as if it were; competent authors merely reflect the fact. Ticker is competent.
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