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.
Friday, September 14, 2018
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.
Monday, August 20, 2018
Book Review: A Long Time Coming
A Long Time Coming
Aaron Elkins
Mystery
Ahh, the classic looted-Nazi-art suspense tale. Aaron Elkins has done this sort of thing before, in the Chris Norgren novels and the standalone thrillers Loot and Turncoat. And you know what? Like the art itself, it never gets old.
A Long Time Coming picks up speed gradually; it's about the middle of the book before the violence begins. I didn't mind. The setup is interesting in its own right, and the story of Solomon Bezzecca--the victim of the looting--is quite powerful. Once the scene shifts to Milan (yes, it's another one of those books that makes you want to travel someplace and eat things) the plot thickens nicely, with several layers of murkily-agenda'd characters to choose among. There's some good art history and some good art technical details and a nice cryptic development or two for the protagonist to puzzle over.
It's not groundbreaking. It's not going to be picked up for a big-budget Hollywood thriller starring Tom Cruise. It is, however, great fun. I'm not generally prone to car metaphors--I'm a train nut--but I can't help thinking of A Long Time Coming as the literary equivalent of a ride in a sports car with a good driver. The gear changes come smoothly, you get just the right amount of excitement, the car handles superbly, and when you get to the end you'd be happy to do it again.
Or, to put it another way: not once did I think "Oh, come on, I could do better than that." If you think that's a low bar, you didn't read this, this, this, this, this, or this. Among others.
Aaron Elkins
Mystery
Ahh, the classic looted-Nazi-art suspense tale. Aaron Elkins has done this sort of thing before, in the Chris Norgren novels and the standalone thrillers Loot and Turncoat. And you know what? Like the art itself, it never gets old.
A Long Time Coming picks up speed gradually; it's about the middle of the book before the violence begins. I didn't mind. The setup is interesting in its own right, and the story of Solomon Bezzecca--the victim of the looting--is quite powerful. Once the scene shifts to Milan (yes, it's another one of those books that makes you want to travel someplace and eat things) the plot thickens nicely, with several layers of murkily-agenda'd characters to choose among. There's some good art history and some good art technical details and a nice cryptic development or two for the protagonist to puzzle over.
It's not groundbreaking. It's not going to be picked up for a big-budget Hollywood thriller starring Tom Cruise. It is, however, great fun. I'm not generally prone to car metaphors--I'm a train nut--but I can't help thinking of A Long Time Coming as the literary equivalent of a ride in a sports car with a good driver. The gear changes come smoothly, you get just the right amount of excitement, the car handles superbly, and when you get to the end you'd be happy to do it again.
Or, to put it another way: not once did I think "Oh, come on, I could do better than that." If you think that's a low bar, you didn't read this, this, this, this, this, or this. Among others.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Book Review: Conan Doyle for the Defense
Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer
Margalit Fox
True crime
This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think.
Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.
To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:
Margalit Fox
True crime
This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think.
Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.
To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:
- The murder in question was a sensation at the time and a major event in the evolution of he justice system. (Exaggerated)
- The choice of Oscar Slater as culprit had more to do with contemporary social attitudes, particularly anxiety towards aliens, than anything else. (True)
- The police investigation was a travesty. (True in spades)
- Slater's guilt was not discovered but constructed. (True)
- Conan Doyle was a genuinely admirable person, and exemplifies the virtues of his time as much as the bogus investigation and trial exemplified its vices. (Largely true, but incomplete)
- Without Doyle, Slater would never have been released. (Exaggerated)
The truth is that many, many people other than Doyle knew that the verdict was a gross miscarriage of justice. Doyle's major contributions were to write an outstanding and devastating summation and analysis of the case, which nonetheless didn't get Slater released, and to lend his enormous prestige and his connections to the cause.
Look: I liked the book. It has great pacing, a generally sound thesis, some magnificent character portraits, pathos, and a fine sense of time and place. Whether it would be a better book if it were more restrained and less carefully topiaried into shape is an unanswerable question.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Book Review: Bryant and May: Wild Chamber
Bryant and May: Wild Chamber: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
Christopher Fowler
Mystery
I've never been able to make up my mind about how I feel about this series. Maybe that's because Christopher Fowler doesn't seem to have made up his mind, either.
Wild Chamber is pretty typical, really. There are elements of black comedy in it, but it's not really a comedy. There are elements of satire in it, but it's not really satire. There are chunks of urban grit, but it's not a hardboiled novel. There are realistic parts, written about natural-seeming characters in believable settings, and then there are parts that seem to have wandered over from Douglas Adams and set up shop. It's sort of a whodunit, although the ending is as much "whuh?" as "ah-hah!" (To be fair, I've read much worse.)
Half the time it seems as though Fowler doesn't like most of his characters, which is a downer. And in every book of the series there's a B plot in which Peculiar Crimes Unit is on the verge of being shut down by the Powers That Be, which frankly gets pretty repetitive.
What's good about it, you ask? (You do. Trust me.) Well, I adore the amiably melancholy off-kilter lead character, Arthur Bryant; he's like Lieutenant Columbo as written by P. G. Wodehouse. There are some excellent deductive bits along the way: "I knew how he got into the garden as soon as I found out that Mrs. Soandso kept a budgerigar". There are plot twists. There are suspects who are actually suspicious. It's wildly creative and full of useless facts. I like the setting. Some of the funny bits are, in fact, quite funny. I didn't spot the culprit until near the end, either.
A mixed bag, in other words--a collection disparate parts, not exactly fitting together, yet it all more or less works out. (That describes the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself, incidentally, as well as the books that feature it.) Christopher Fowler's own website describes the lead characters as "Golden Age Detectives in a modern world", which actually puts it rather neatly. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you like, it probably isn't. Otherwise . . . well, I'm not going to be buying the books in hardcover, but I'll pick up the next one if it strikes my fancy.
Christopher Fowler
Mystery
I've never been able to make up my mind about how I feel about this series. Maybe that's because Christopher Fowler doesn't seem to have made up his mind, either.
Wild Chamber is pretty typical, really. There are elements of black comedy in it, but it's not really a comedy. There are elements of satire in it, but it's not really satire. There are chunks of urban grit, but it's not a hardboiled novel. There are realistic parts, written about natural-seeming characters in believable settings, and then there are parts that seem to have wandered over from Douglas Adams and set up shop. It's sort of a whodunit, although the ending is as much "whuh?" as "ah-hah!" (To be fair, I've read much worse.)
Half the time it seems as though Fowler doesn't like most of his characters, which is a downer. And in every book of the series there's a B plot in which Peculiar Crimes Unit is on the verge of being shut down by the Powers That Be, which frankly gets pretty repetitive.
What's good about it, you ask? (You do. Trust me.) Well, I adore the amiably melancholy off-kilter lead character, Arthur Bryant; he's like Lieutenant Columbo as written by P. G. Wodehouse. There are some excellent deductive bits along the way: "I knew how he got into the garden as soon as I found out that Mrs. Soandso kept a budgerigar". There are plot twists. There are suspects who are actually suspicious. It's wildly creative and full of useless facts. I like the setting. Some of the funny bits are, in fact, quite funny. I didn't spot the culprit until near the end, either.
A mixed bag, in other words--a collection disparate parts, not exactly fitting together, yet it all more or less works out. (That describes the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself, incidentally, as well as the books that feature it.) Christopher Fowler's own website describes the lead characters as "Golden Age Detectives in a modern world", which actually puts it rather neatly. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you like, it probably isn't. Otherwise . . . well, I'm not going to be buying the books in hardcover, but I'll pick up the next one if it strikes my fancy.
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