Tag Archives: Book reviews

Book Review: Turn and Jump

February 4, 2011 8:27 am

Howard Mansfield. Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart. Rockport, Maine: Down East Books, 2010. 195 pages.

Today we take for granted that time is rigidly (and sometimes mercilessly) segmented. But the way people think about time has changed dramatically over the last two hundred years, with local and natural time, based on sunrise, sunset, and the seasons, giving way to universal, artificial time, marked off by clocks and timetables. In TURN AND JUMP, Howard Mansfield shares a few stories that provide glimpses into times passed–and time’s past.

Its a very local history, strongly rooted in the source material. This has benefits and drawbacks for the reader. On the plus side, the reader is fully immersed in the details of what Mansfield’s describing–he faithfully relates every detail he can find. His chapter based primarily on records that document a century of Derby’s, a department store in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It’s infinitely more interested than I’ve made it sound, and it’s a piece of writing that any historian can envy and any archivist can fall in love with: Mansfield shows that, with the right documents, it’s possible to bring the past to life. The downside to this close use of source documents is that the reader is at the mercy of the author: she may not find the little details so artfully shared as interesting as the author did. It can be hard to convey with ink and paper the thrill of traveling back in time by handling primary source documents, seeing the past through its own eyes.

As fits a book about the struggles between local and national time, TURN AND JUMP alternates between “big” national history, like the railroads’ creation of time zones and B. F. Keith’s innovation of continuous vaudeville, and the minutely local history of Mansfield’s New England. It’s a good mix.

As writing, there’s little to fault with TURN and JUMP. Much of the time it’s a truly enveloping read in the way that the best narrative non-fiction should be: Mansfield shares not just a story, but a point of view. The downside that I found was his tendency to romanticize the past. It’s strongly implied that, since standard time was an invention of the railroads, and the railroads were businesses run for profit, there’s something unseemly about it. In fact, standard time is a real boon to both communication and commerce, and probably a historical inevitability: it’s an undoubtedly good thing that the 3:35 from Dubuque and the 4:15 from Platteville aren’t trying to occupy the same piece of track at the same time. Similarly, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that a route which once took cattle drovers three days to traverse on foot can now be driven in an hour–certainly good news if you’re the one who would otherwise have to slug through the mud for three days.

TURN AND JUMP is definitely a worthwhile read, with some fascinating historical elements, like the chapter on the one-time blockbuster play The Old Homestead. But don’t be surprised if the author doesn’t convince you that life was intrinsically better when it was lit by tallow and whale oil rather than fluorescent and LED.

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Book Review: The Clockwork Universe

January 30, 2011 7:44 am

Edward Dolnick. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. 400 pages.

In THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE, Edward Dolnick gives the reader a sense of the world that the scientific greats of the early modern period inhabited, and lets us see that there was more than dry formulae to their lives. Some of the giants Dolnick examines are household names–Galileo, Kepler, Newton. Others, like Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, are not, so even those who have a decent understanding of where modern science came from (i.e., remember a bit from college) will learn something. Most, but not all, of those Dolnick discusses were members of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Sciences, a body that mixed sometimes-idle curiosity about the way the world worked with true scientific genius. At times almost liked an academic department, at times merely a forum for interested gentlemen to indulge in show-and-tell, the patchwork nature of the group exemplifies the dawning discipline of science.

The book alternates between describing the mental world of the “band of geniuses” who redefined reality and the physical one, which was far grimier than we can to remember. Though they pointed the way to modernity, they really inhabited a world built primarily on superstition and supposition, not all of it entirely logical. Combined with detailed but accessible to the layman descriptions of the experiments and logical constructions that helped Newton and the others unlock the mysteries of motion and gravity.

Divided into short chapters, THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE is a surprisingly nimble read, considering the weighty (pun intended) subjects it covers. It’s not exactly breezy–no work describing the birth of calculus could be–but it zips along pretty well. Dolnick is able to make problems that bedeviled philosophers for centuries, like Zeno’s paradox, comprehensible to the modern reader. Sprinkled with a liberal helping of detail about the everyday London of the day, it’s a great introduction-or re-introduction–to reading about scientific thought.

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Book Review: Spousonomics

January 21, 2011 4:25 pm

Paula Szyuchman and Jenny Anderson. Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes. New York: Random House, 2011. 352 pages.

Spousonomics is another addition to the growing popular economics literature that makes concepts like division of labor, comparative advantage, and information asymmetry digestible for a lay audience. As such, its publication is a good thing: after all, the more people know about how societies handle scarcity, the better. This book’s hook is that it attempts to apply economic theory to marital relations…and, as the authors repeatedly point out, that means ALL marital relations.

With ten chapters, each focused around a single idea from economics (to the three listed above, add also loss aversion, moral hazard, and several others), the authors show the reader how, by applying lessons learned from economists, they can have a better marriage–and, as they point out more than once, more sex. Each chapter has a similar format: the authors explain the concept using both textbook phraseology (although there’s blessedly little of that) and examples from real life, then present several “case studies” that show how different couples actually confront the issue the chapter illuminates.

As an introduction to economic ideas it’s not bad, and it might get you thinking about how you make decisions and relate to your spouse and children in a different way. Many of the couples profiled, however, were not easy to empathize with, to put it politely; some seemed downright annoying. Also, a lot of the spouses seemed…stereotypical, with the hubby obsessed by “the game” and loafing around, and the wife doing all the housework, or with one a workaholic and the other a free spirit. In the course of researching the book, the authors talked to more than two thousand people, so this might just be what they found. Maybe most people (or most people in their sample) really are that predictable.

But the general concepts the authors highlight are all valid, and it wouldn’t hurt to give their approach a try. Like all advice books, though, this one has its limits. It’s easy to tell people to be dispassionate when assessing their relationships; probably a lot harder to have that Vulcan reserve when you’ve just been vomited on, have heard nothing but crying for two hours, and your spouse is out doing pilates/pickup basketball/reviewing books/whatever.

Overall it’s an interesting book that has several great concepts; whether its a truly useful one is likely up to the reader….and his/her spouse.

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Book Review: Vietnamerica

December 31, 2010 10:29 am

GB Tran. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. New York: Villard, 2011. 192 pages.

Graphic novels can be an extremely effective medium for memoir–Art Speigelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’ Persepolis have proven. GB Tran’s Vietnamerica is very much in the mold of these two classics, and it tells a story that similarly mingles memoir with history.

Tran’s family fled Vietnam with the fall of Saigon, and his parents–particularly his father–didn’t tell their son much about their homeland. Vietnamerica is the story of Tran’s return to Vietnam with his parents for the funeral of his maternal grandmother Thi Mot. The trip triggers his exploration into the history of his family, which parallels the past three generations of Vietnamese history.

It’s a vividly-detailed look at the family that doesn’t sugar-coat unpleasant aspects (of which there are a few) or simplify for the purpose of telling a more cohesive story. Tran is a courageous writer who takes some real risks here, and they pay off. It’s probably a cliche to say that Tran puts a human face on history with this graphic novel, but it’s absolutely true.

There are many powerful characters in the book; the one who dominates much of the story is Tran’s father, but both sets of grandparents have their moments, as does is mother. All in all, it’s an unflinching look at a difficult period in his family’s life, and one that sheds some light on the biographical repercussions of historical events.

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Book review: Mr. Toppit

December 17, 2010 9:39 am

Charles Elton. Mr Toppit. New York: Other Books, 2010. 400 pages.

With MR TOPPIT, Charles Elton gives the reader a look into the life, not of an author, but of his family. The Hayseed Chronicles are a mashup of A.A. Milne’s Pooh books and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with Luke Hayward, the book’s chief protagonist, filling the role of Christopher Robin/Harry Potter. Through a series of events, the character based on his childhood becomes the hero of a beloved series of books. MR TOPPIT follows him as he copes with unwelcome fame.

There are a few other interesting characters: Martha, his eccentric mother; Lila, the ever-devoted illustrator who’s been snubbed by the current American publishers, and Lauri, a put-upon radio host whose chance encounter with author Arthur Hayman ultimately transformers her into an Oprah-like media powerhouse.

It’s a bit of an uneven book–it has a great premise, and some really clever twists. But a few of the character revelations–particularly one about a character’s father that comes late in the book–feel too cliche. Overall, though, it’s a good read that may get you thinking about the families behind the authors who create books that others find so captivating.

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Book Review: The Sherlockian

December 10, 2010 9:29 am

Graham Moore. The Sherlockian. New York: TWELVE, 2010. 350 pages.

Book Review Friday is back with a bang. After a little bit of a layoff, I’ve recharged myself with some excellent fiction. I really, really liked this book.

There’s only so many places a mystery can go. Someone has to get murdered, and someone has to solve the crime. The answer can’t be too obvious, or it wouldn’t be worth writing about, and it can’t be too outrageously obscure. You change the setting, or change the time period, to get a mystery set anywhere and anywhen from Republican Rome to the 24th century Delta quadrant, but it’s pretty much variations on a theme.

With THE SHERLOCKIAN, Graham Moore’s delivered a clever twist on the genre. His inspiration is the 2004 death of Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green. David Grann produced an excellent non-fiction treatment of the mystery surrounding the case in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, and it’s fascinating to see how Moore’s story developed from the kernel of this true event. In Moore’s tale, Alex Cale, an eminent Sherlockian, is found dead in a hotel room; budding young Sherlockian Harold White, with a mysterious female Watson, sets out to solve the crime and discover the whereabouts of a legendary lost Arthur Conan Doyle journal, which Cale claimed to have found.

At the same time, back in 1900, Doyle and his friend Bram Stoker find themselves on the trail of their own mystery. It’s a wonderful portrayal of Doyle: having killed off his fictional detective in 1893, he’s still dogged by Holmes’ hold on the popular imagination. He’d like nothing more than the public to forget about the detective and start to appreciate his writing about the Boer War, but as the reader knows, that’s not in the cards. He’s drawn into a murder mystery that draws him to the underside of late Victorian London, and shows off Moore’s good eye for period detail.

There’s much to commend both stories in the SHERLOCKIAN. Moore is not overly-referential to the Sherlockians, but he doesn’t mock them. He walks a fine line, which is no mean feat, since dedicated Sherlock Holmes fans made Trekkies look well-adjusted; at one point, he mentions the rift between the Sherlockians, who “believe” that Holmes and his adventures were real and that Doyle was only Watson’s literary agent, and the Doyleans, who acknowledge Sir Arthur as the author. Harold, the protagonist, isn’t a brilliant, dashing adventurer, but he’s not a total schmuck, either. Again, it’s a balance that Moore strikes just right. Teaming up Doyle and Stoker might have been literary fan wank in the hands of a less-apt writer, but Moore was able to create in the two authors real characters whose depth goes beyond their writing. Drawing known historical figures into the novel was ambitious, but Moore really delivered.

When all is said and done, THE SHERLOCKIAN is a wonderful novel. While the contemporary story tracks as commentary on the enduring power of literary obsessions, the historical tale gives the reader a sense of the world that Doyle lived in, and in which Holmes solved his mysteries. The result is a phenomenally readable book about writing, reading, and living in the shadow of obsession–one’s own, and those of others. I’m looking forward to reading more from Graham Moore.

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Book Review: The Wave

November 5, 2010 8:30 am

Susan Casey. The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. New York: Doubleday, 2010. 336 pages.

In THE WAVE, Susan Casey looks at the science behind giant waves (towering over 100 ft), which were once thought impossible. Turns out, they’re crashing around the middle of the ocean all the time. Casey talks to scientists who studies the waves, but the bulk of the story is taken up by tow surfers—surfers who use jet skis to get into position to ride mammoth waves. As she tells it, these are heroic heroes, dashing off to exotic locales to face death and brave danger.

The thing is, just because these guys do risky stuff, doesn’t make them interesting. And they really don’t come across as that interesting, if you’re not into surfing and you don’t idolize bronzed, risk-taking men with good teeth. In fact, when you consider the risks that these guys take just “for the rush,” they seem pretty self-centered. I can’t understand how someone with kids would be willing to risk their life over something as inconsequential as tow-surfing, just to say that they rode a huge wave. This makes the narrative a difficult one to follow. Even if these guys risk their lives, they have only themselves to blame for it. It’s like reading about a competitive eater waiting for the results of his cholesterol screen–sure, we’ll feel bad if he’s unhealthy, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for him.

The two most appealing characters in the book were the fishing boat captain who turned his boat around and refused to be all radical and ferry the daredevils out on a day when three people (including a surfer) were killed by giant waves because he wouldn’t “risk his livelihood” over it. Smart guy, with some perspective. Then there was a guy who genuinely took risks, but for an actual reason: marine salvage captain Nicholas Sloane, who faces the same adverse conditions as the tow surfers, but for good reasons–to salvage at-risk ships, saving lives and often preventing toxic cargo from being spilled into the ocean.

In the end, it’s a decently-written book, with some nice detail, but it falls flat because it’s just impossible to really identify with any of the major characters. That, and an underlying scientific paradox: though there isn’t enough data to prove conclusively that giant waves have gotten larger recently, several scientists in the book claim that they are, and man-made climate change is the culprit. One scientist, Peter Janssen, admitted that there was no longitudinal data to even prove that waves are getting larger, much less that human activity has anything to do about it. In the next breath, though, he assures us that he “is quite sure it is happening.”

Sloane and his crew would have made for a much more compelling read. At least I would have cared about them.

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Book Review: Hi-De-Ho

October 29, 2010 8:07 am

Alyn Shipton. Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 283 pages.

Cab Calloway was an important figure in American popular music history: over his career, which spanned decades, he sold millions of records and blurred several musical genres. His big band was one of the crucibles of bop. In this studiously detailed biography, Shipton recreates both Calloway’s life and the world that he lived in.

Shipton traces Cab’s recording and performing career using solid archival sources and interviews with those who worked with him, but he does much more. He also considers Calloway’s music and image in its broader social context, intersecting with both race and American culture. Even if you’re not familiar with his music, this should be a good read, since Shipton is able to recreate Calloway’s life vividly, thanks to his good sense for detail.

Most of the focus is on elements of Calloway’s life that are easiest to divine from archival sources, such as touring schedules and recording dates, as well as critical analyses of his recorded music and live performances. In addition, thanks in part to interviews with surviving family members, Shipton reconstructs a great deal of Calloway’s childhood and early life. Frequently, he is able to add another dimension to Calloway’s own descriptions of his life and experiences, which adds an interesting perspective.

Much of Calloway’s later life, when he was not recording prolifically, is brushed over quickly, but it is clear that Shipton has devoted a great deal of effort to recreating and discussing the periods of Calloway’s life that are likely most significant. HI-DE-Ho is a masterpiece of well-researched historical biography, and a fascinating read about a talented performer.

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Book Review: The Mental Floss History of the United States

October 22, 2010 8:04 am

Erik Sass, with Will Pearson and Mandesh Hattikudur. The Mental Floss History of the United States. New York: Harper, 2010. 448 pages.

Book review Friday is back! Again!

There are plenty of statistics out there that demonstrate just how little most Americans know about their history. This is doubtless a bad thing, and not just for frustrated history teachers: knowing more about the nation’s history should make citizens better judges of its current social, political, and economic state. The folks at magazine/website mental_floss have done their bit for the national discourse by producing a quick single-volume history of the United States.

One of the sections of the mental_floss website offers “cocktail party cheat sheets” and this history is very much in that vein: entertaining, with all of the pertinent information provided in bite-sized pieces. Written in an off-beat style, it’s definitely not boring. Obviously, this isn’t a comprehensive treatment of American history, but it’s a good introduction, or reminder of what you’ve probably forgotten since school.

That said, it’s a pretty fun romp through American history. Maybe at time a bit too fun–the constant snarkiness can get a bit grating, particularly when dealing with complex and tragic events in American life.

The tendency for over-glibness aside, this is a pretty good single-volume history of the United States. It will definitely help you brush up on the major trends, or talk your way through a cocktail party. But if it sparks any curiosity in you about the events it describes, you’re going to need to follow up with something more substantial. If you don’t have a US history text on your shelf, you could do a lot worse than this one.

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Book Review: Where Did Noah Park the Ark?

October 15, 2010 6:13 am

Eran Katz. Where Did Noah Park the Ark? Ancient Memory Techniques for Remembering Practically Anything. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010. 237 pages.

Book Review Friday is back! With a vengeance! And since I’ve read this book, and I can’t cite forgetfulness as an excuse for not posting book reviews here each Friday.

Everyone would like a better memory, right? In WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK? memory expert Eran Katz promises to give you just that. He shares several techniques for memorizing lists of things, techniques that no doubt serve him in good stead in his career as a memory entertainer, and that may help you as well.

I’m not going to list all of the techniques, but mostly they involve creating associations between what you’re trying to remember and images. Some of them I’ve seen before, some not, and I can see how they’d all be useful.

But ultimately, is memorizing lists of things really going to help you? For some things, like shopping lists and remembering names at a party/meeting, I think these techniques are definitely useful. But do they give you a better understanding of what you’re remembering? I’m not sure they do.

For example, Katz talks about Cicero a great deal, in particular his De Oratore. Makes him seem pretty well-read. But then he lets something slip that suggests he really doesn’t know all that much about Cicero. Talking about the great orator giving a speech about maintaining horses, he says, “Certainly the masses of horses with colds and runny noses would be a disgrace to the Roman emperor.”

It’s the usual kind of “rimshot” punchline Katz uses, but think about what he just said: Cicero worried about what the “Roman emperor” would think. Wrong on two counts. First, Cicero was an advocate of republican government who strongly opposed the dictatorial tendencies of Julius Caesar, let alone an actual emperor. Second, Cicero was murdered by the Second Triumvirate before Octavian become emperor.

This seems like a minor point, and I don’t bring it up to quibble. But it shows the flaw in using memory shortcuts–you store, but don’t comprehend, the facts you’re memorizing. Katz talks about history classes requiring the memorization of “dusty dates.” I’ve never been in, or taught, a class like that. Studying history’s more about cause and effect, and understanding how things change over time. It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember the exact date that Cicero wrote De Oratore or how many pages it has; it matters than you remember that Cicero was a republican champion who lived in the last days of the republic.

So many of the “studying” techniques, IMHO, won’t work well for many disciplines. You need to understand who all the parts fit together, not just remember what they’re called.

In general, the book was entertaining, with heavy doses of humor throughout. There seems to be a lot of padding–it takes at least 30 pages to get beyond the author just telling you how nice it would be to have a good memory, and there way too many motivational passages larded throughout the work. And the author’s tone can be a bit…overbearing at times, particularly when he tells the reader we’ve all heard phrases likes ad hoc and modus vivendi, but never took the time to look up their meanings. Actually, I know what both those phrases mean, so he’s wrong. He follows this with more padding–”humorous mistakes” that kids have made on tests (which seem to be pinched from a 1931 Dr. Seuss book, no less).

So while I found the techniques to be interesting, and appreciate that having a better memory would be a good thing, there are quite a few elements that take away from WHERE DID NOAH PARK THE ARK?

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