Book Review: The World in a Grain

The World in a Grain: The story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
Vince Beiser
Engineering, ecology

Hooray! I thought. Another biography-of-a-substance book! And one that promises to amply fulfill the implied contract of all such books, viz., to take a thing that nobody thinks about and make us think about it.

Chapter 1, the introduction, met all my expectations. Did you know there's a sand mafia--which sounds funny, except that they kill people? That the Arab states import sand, because desert sand isn't suitable for making concrete (it's too rounded)? That China alone used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century? That there's an impending sand shortage?

With all that, I figured chapter 2 would dive into the basic facts. I was hoping to find out something about the geology of sand, the geography of sand, the chemistry of sand, how sand moves, maybe a little history.

These things are not in chapter 2. They're not anywere in the book, except in small incidental doses. That's because The World in a Grain isn't really about sand. It's about advocacy journalism. Vince Beiser is a Prophet rather than a Wizard. He wants to sound the trumpet, rally the troops, sing a few choruses of "We Shall Overcome," and basically change the world. Sand--specifically concrete--is something we're addicted to, he says, and it's bad for us. Repent, ye sinners!

Oh, he does his best to be objective. He interviews people who are in favor of commercial fracking-sand mining as well as those who are opposed. He scrupulously describes positives of things like roads as well as negatives. But his heart clearly isn't in it. A few examples:

• "When pressed, though, [anti-desertification entrepreneur Wang Wenbiao] acknowledges that about half of the company's $6 billion in annual revenues come from "traditional" industries, including chemical production and coal power plants." This dig--I could cite many similar examples--contributes nothing to understanding the topic of the chapter (which is "can China stop deserts by planting trees?"). Its only purpose is to imply, without saying it, that Wang Wenbiao is morally compromised.
• "The bigger question is, can the planet handle the whole way of life that Dubai both represents and embodies--the air-conditioned, car-dependent, energy-dependent, resource-intensive 'good life'?" Gosh, thanks for pointing that out, complete with scare quotes. I would never have thought of it myself.
• "In an ideal world, [fracking-derived oil and gas] could be replaced with solar and wind power." Yes, and in an ideal world magic sparkly pink unicorns would cure cancer and poop ice cream. This is not that world, nor is it likely to become so.
• "At the same time that freeways have brought these benefits, though, they have also hollowed out cities, killed off countless small towns, wreaked environmental havoc, and spawned a car-dependent culture based on sprawling suburbs and soulless shopping malls." Agree a thousand percent. Go write a book about it, Vince--a different book. In this book, passages like this read like mere venting.

This kind of thing is always frustrating. Advocacy journalism is fine in and of itself, but if that's the book you want to write, you should just write it. The World in a Grain veers between empiricism and passion, to the detriment of both. A truly descriptive book on sand would have to, e.g., include at least a few words on the Sahara Desert; Beiser just ignores it. A better advocacy book would use the factual information as a way of drawing the reader to a conclusion, instead of lapsing into oratory in the last third of every chapter. The World in a Grain has a lot of interesting pieces, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Book Review: Graphene

Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World
Les Johnson, Joseph E. Meany
Science, engineering

Graphene is crazy stuff. It's incredibly simple--a repeating plane of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal latice. It's one atom thick. It's phenomenally strong: if plastic cling-wrap were made of graphene, you could support a car on it. It's a near-supercoductor. It's basically weightless. Plus I'm a sucker for the single-word-title biography-of-a-substance book. What could possibly go wrong?

Answer: the writing. Johnson and Meany have good intentions, but their writing skills show more enthusiasm than discipline. Graphene is written in a golly-gee-Mister-Wizard tone that set my teeth on edge from the first chapter. It also contains random anecdotes stuck in unhelpful places, repeated bits, a digressive and disorganized structure, and not nearly enough critical thinking. There's only a limited amount of graphene hagiography that I can stomach before I start feeling contrarian, and Graphene exceeds it early on. The worst part is a section imagining our glowing graphene-enhanced future which reads like somebody watched "Zinc Oxide and You" without realizing that it was funny.

The authors do manage to slip in many fascinating facts. There are also some remarkable graphs showing, for example, the growth in graphene-related patents. None of this, however, adds up to anything more than wishful thinking. Our Friend Graphene is the scientific miracle of the next decade? So is fusion, and it has been for fifty years. So were high-temperature superconductors. So were fuel-cell cars, a bit more than a decade ago. Who knows? Graphene is too long on passion and too short on analysis to let me make any kind of reasoned judgment on its eponymous material. And that's a missed opportunity.

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.

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If you're ever in Cork, Ireland, don't miss the Butter Museum. Really.

Book Review: Rain

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
Cynthia Barnett
Sociology, culture

In the beginning there was Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. And the readers and the reviewers looked upon it and saw that it was good. And in its wake there came a steady tide of books whose titles were single nouns. So Salt begat Coal, and Ice, and The Potato, and Spice, and Banana, and Thames, and Rust, and divers others. I expect that right now someone, somewhere is toiling away at Zinc Oxide: A Global Biography.

And now there's Rain. It's not bad. The actual writing achieves a pleasingly lyrical flow, suitable to its subject. Nonetheless, Rain suffers from a not-uncommon affliction of this genre: a compulsion to flit about from one thing to another, including short squibs on every damn thing the author can somehow relate to to the title.

So Rain goes trippingly from Mars to umbrellas to weather forecasting to rain gods to floods to the shape of raindrops to (of course) global warming to Japanese traditional umbrellas to Indian perfume, seldom bothering to tie any two chapters together. Barnett likes fine-sounding phrases, but she doesn't like to substantiate them. Thus, for example, we are at various times informed that "some scientists predict" X, or "many historians believe" Y, or such-like generalizations. Well, who are these "some scientists"? How many of them are there? Is this a mainstream opinion, a minority opinion, a speculation, or a bunch of flakes?

The pity of it is that there's one section that really does hold together. When Barnett stops globe-trotting and settles down for four chapters in the U.S., she produces a really knockout short narrative of Americans' stormy (har!) relationship with rain. From Thomas Jefferson (who was obsessed with the stuff), through the sodbusters who lived and died by it, and on into the eccentricities of weather control, this is good stuff.

Sadly, it doesn't last. The next section goes off into ... I don't remember where. Some lyrical but ultimately disjointed tangent, I suppose.

Don't get me wrong. I like these books. Why else would I have read so many of them? So I sort of liked Rain. But it could have been better.

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Salt truly is excellent, as is Rust. I also really liked Hannah Holmes's The Secret Life of Dust, even though it has more than one word in the title.

Book Review: Rust

Rust: The Longest War

Jonathan Waldman

Engineering

I write software for a living. But my major headache isn't writing it; it's maintaining it. Software, like any other engineered object, is subject to corrosion.

No, it doesn't literally corrode. It just behaves as though it does. Take a working piece of code. Leave it for six months. Try to run it. You'll almost inevitably find that something has changed. A file isn't where it used to be, or its format has changed, or the database is different, or something that I'm depending on doesn't work the same way, or a calculation has changed, or some assumption is invalid, or ... the list is endless.

The process is sometimes called "bit rot".

So I really liked Rust. Entropy is an absolutely inescapable portion of any engineer's life. It's manifestly stupid not to plan for it--and yet many engineers (or organizations) don't. Rust explains, in gory detail, why they're wrong. Plus I'm a sucker for any kind of book that takes some overlooked aspect of our world and delves into it.

I have a couple of quibbles. The chapters are individual essays--stories of people who are involved with corrosion in some way, including a pipeline engineer and an artist. They don't really link up into an overarching story. I wouldn't have minded more chemistry and physics, either.

Quibbles aside, though, this is a fine read. A couple of other books of the same sort spring to mind:

• Does the subject of the now-ubiquitous shipping container sound boring to you? Then you haven't thought enough about it; read The Box, by Marc Levinson.
• Similarly, does a book about human waste sound like something to make smirking jokes about? After you read The Big Necessity, by Rose George, it won't seem very funny.