Unknown Quantity

Author: John Derbyshire
Year: 2006
Genre: Science history

I like math. I was a math minor in college, and would have double-majored if I could have taken math classes on my junior year abroad. In high school I was really good at math, but when I took honors math classes in college I was just good enough to hang on for the ride. I realized that, as much as I enjoyed learning about group theory, complex analysis, and the search for really big prime numbers, I wasn't good enough to do it professionally. Sadly, if you don't live in that world full-time, it's astonishingly difficult to keep up with it at all, and so I let my math lapse after graduation.

Unknown Quantity is a rare exception: a book about math and math history made accessible to the interested layperson. And Derbyshire doesn't just write about math; he writes about algebra, possibly the most abstract and conceptually challenging branch of theoretical mathematics. By covering the history of algebra over the last 6000 years or so, the book follows how emerging awareness of numbers in ancient Babylonia led to the Greeks, the Renaissance, and the algebra that most people remember (or don't) from high school. Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries, algebra took a sharp turn to the abstract, but Derbyshire makes clear connections to show how it evolved from more representational problems. He challenged me, but he never lost me entirely.

Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series

Author: Eliot Asinof
Year: 1963
Genre: History

An interesting history of the 1919 Black Sox scandal from a journalistic perspective. It's the book that John Sayles's movie was based on.

I picked up this book (for $1!) because of my casual interest in baseball history, but baseball isn't really the point of the story at all. Instead, it's a sad reminder of the way that power protects the powerful, whatever side of the law they might be on, while pawns and servants (innocent or not) are left to take the fall. It seems clear that all of the eight banned players were present during discussions about throwing the World Series, and that at least some of them actually cheated during the games. It's also clear, though, that the gamblers who really benefited from the fix got away clean while cheating the players out of most of their payoff. In the end, there was a sort of unspoken agreement among the more powerful gamblers, lawyers, and baseball team owners that the easiest face-saving decision would be to treat the eight suspected players as harshly as possible — and then to do nothing else. It's even more tragic because baseball is all that guys like Shoeless Joe Jackson knew how to do.

I wonder how much has changed since 1919. Of course, with baseball players now regularly paid in the millions, they have little reason to throw games for money. They're much more powerful than they were. I believe, though, that there still exists a sort of collusion among teams, players, and the media to perpetuate a wholesome, nostalgic view of baseball. (How often did "kids" and the "national pastime" come up in contemporary discussion of the 1919 World Series? How much are they mentioned in connection with Barry Bonds?) Talking about baseball as a cultural institution is good for business, after all, and talking about it as a business, well, isn't.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Author: Orhan Pamuk
Year: 2004
Genre: Memoir

Orhan Pamuk is a lifelong resident of Istanbul, and in this book he tells both the city's history and his own. It's a terribly difficult book for me to write about because there's a lot going on: he doesn't just write a history of Istanbul, but also a history of Istanbul writers and painters (both Turkish and Western), of himself as an Istanbullu, of himself as an Istanbul writer and painter, of certain buildings or classes of building or times of day that he finds evocative, of the different moods that these buildings and times of day evoke. There's a lengthy discussion of hüzün, which is a peculiar sort of Turkish melancholy that the residents of a city can feel collectively because of the knowledge that they have been the capital of three empires but are now marginalized and impoverished.

And, there are the times when Pamuk addresses himself directly to the audience and hints at his deeper purpose in telling the story. That purpose, as I understood it, is to describe the artistic lives of Orhan Pamuk and of Istanbul, but through tangential stories that show their richness as well as their deep interconnections.

Reading this book is like listening to the ramblings of your favorite uncle, if your favorite uncle were Turkish, and a Nobel-winning novelist.

Quicksilver

Author: Neal Stephenson
Year: 2004
Genre: Historical fiction

Stephenson claims to be a science fiction writer, but I have to disagree. Like Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver is not science fiction so much as historical fiction about scientists. Maybe he calls it science fiction because his audience is the same; SF or no, Quicksilver can unquestionably be shelved under "zany fun for geeks."

What a tangle of subplots: there's the Puritan in Restoration England, the early history of the Royal Society, 17th-century financial intrigue a la A Conspiracy of Paper, Louis XIV court intrigue that's not too far removed from Mel Brooks, and two pirate stories. Half the fun is keeping all that in your head.

I'll see if I can still remember it when I get around to reading Book Two.

The Linguistics Wars

Author: Randy Allen Harris
Year: 1993
Genre: Linguistics

I came to this book hoping that Harris would be the Stephen Jay Gould of linguistics: someone who understands the field well, and can explain major ideas in their historical context. Upon reading, though, The Linguistics Wars strikes me more as an academic Homicide: an intimate portrait showing that science is a dirty business done by real, flawed human beings.

Our story begins with Noam Chomsky as a rising star of linguistics and philosophy in the 1950s, and then focuses primarily on the well-established Chomsky c. 1970 and his conflict with a group of former students who broke off to follow a research program called "generative semantics." While the substance of generative semantics and its differences from Chomsky's "interpretive semantics" program do receive some attention, Harris spends far more time on the personal antipathy between Chomsky and the generative semanticists, most notably George Lakoff. I was left with an impression that, whatever the respective merits of the generative and interpretive theories may have been, the actual unfolding of the debate had more to do with personality than with science.

Not that there's anything wrong with that -- necessarily. An early stage of the debate, it seems, was scientifically productive. The dislike that grew between the two camps did inspire its share of nasty ad hominem and polemic, but also caught linguists by their competitive instinct, resulting in some of the field's most original and influential research. With time, though, scientific debate gave way to personal sniping, and eventually, the generative program fizzled and the "wars" faded away.

The moral of the story is that scientific "progress" is largely a product of the culture that the scientists inhabit. (Maybe the comparison of Harris to Gould is not so far wrong, then; see my review of The Mismeasure of Man.) In the case of Chomsky et al. vs. Lakoff et al., that means the culture of research in modern theoretical syntax; and as Harris points out, it's not inaccurate to say that Chomsky, the ultimate victor in the Linguistics Wars, had founded that culture. In a larger sense, though, it also means the culture of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. While Chomsky was (and remains) an outspoken political ultra-liberal, Chomsky-the-academic is deadly serious and strictly authoritarian. (Perhaps he inspired the discussion in Lakoff's Moral Politics of people who are both politically progressive and academically conservative.) Harris contrasts this with a picture of the generative semanticists as academic hippies, bringing the "sex-drugs-rock & roll" counterculture and its collectivist ethos to their way of doing linguistics. Their hypotheses were grand and their failures public; they promised a map of the human mind that, in the end, they could not deliver.

Salt: A World History

Author: Mark Kurlansky
Year: 2002
Genre: History

I'm not sure what to say about this book. Does salt, as a basic need of human societies past the hunter-gatherer stage, open the door to a uniquely global world history? Kurlansky does connect it to historical figures from Marco Polo to Humphry Davy to Gandhi. Also, as salt is so intimately connected to the home life of ordinary people, there are recipes and other social-historical morsels that provide a sense of common humanity across times and places; after all, how different can "they" be from "us" if everyone makes pickles?

On the other hand, the book as a whole seems somewhat trivial and forgettable. Kurlansky suffers from the same popular-history syndrome as some of the other history books I've reviewed here: it reads like a list of random facts without much narrative force or broader significance. "Salt" is too small a topic, and "world history" too large, for the book to make much of a statement about anything.

Assassination Vacation

Author: Sarah Vowell
Year: 2005
Genre: History

This was a quick, entertaining read about presidential assassinations. I haven't had this much fun since I saw Assassins (and I've had the soundtrack stuck in my head the whole time I've been reading this book). There are a lot of interesting historical details about Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, but mostly it's the story of the author's compulsion to visit morbid presidential history sites while forcing her friends to tag along.

Since it's a book full of trivia about one woman's obsession with historical minutiae, Vowell's attempt to conclude the book with a hint of grander significance (weird coincidences in history give us a sense that life might not be random and meaningless) falls flat. It doesn't matter, though - that's not the point of the book. Vowell is more like the high school history teacher who can make you like her class, even if you don't like history, because she evidently loves it so much. Since the McKinley chapter, I've been feeling strange urges to check out the new biography of T.R., and if I do, it's to her credit.

The Golden Ratio

Author: Mario Livio
Year: 2002
Genre: Science / Math

Before I read this book, I'd heard about a lot of the astonishing mathematical properties of Φ, as well as the Golden Ratio's aesthetic appeal. What struck me reading Livio's book is not the math itself (as interesting as that was; I haven't studied math seriously in many years). No, what really caught my attention was the number of times that Φ has been cited as the basis for great works of art, that turned out to be pure B.S. Consider the following:

• Φ is not the ratio of the height of the Parthenon to its width.
• Φ has no role in the design of the Pyramids.
• While Da Vinci did illustrate a mathematical book on Φ (The Divine Proportion by Luca Pacioli), he did not use it as a guide to composing the Mona Lisa or anything else.
• Mozart and Mondrian didn't use it, either.

So, The Golden Ratio succeeds as a debunker's compendium. Livio makes the history of Golden Ratio fanaticism seem like so much Da Vinci Code-style overblown hokum. (All the more ironic that Dan Brown's praise for The Golden Ratio is given pride of place on the front cover.)

After that, the best part of the book for me was the end, where Livio digresses into fractal geometry and the enduring philosophical conundrum of why mathematics (a purely abstract human invention) mirrors the physical universe so precisely. These fundamental questions are more interesting to me than any laundry list of Φ trivia.

Hello to All That: A memoir of war, Zoloft, and peace

Author: John Falk
Year: 2005
Genre: memoir

This book alternates between Falk's own experience with chronic depression and the struggles of ordinary Sarajevans he witnessed as a freelance journalist during the 1992-1994 seige. The parallels between the two settings keep leading you back to the same messages: in life, bad things happen to people; the important thing is how you deal with them; and regardless of whether you are fighting Chetnik snipers or your own brain chemistry, the love of your family can make all the difference.

Falk goes a long way to make these relatively obvious points, but the real significance of the story is that he himself had to travel to the depths of depression and war, and come out the other side again, before he really learned them.

One detail that I noticed and appreciated is that Falk subtly acknowledges his own poor understanding of the conflict. Even with his graduate degree in foreign affairs and his coursework in the political differences between rural and urban Serbia, he arrives in Sarajevo knowing more or less the BBC-CNN version of the war: Serbs=aggressors, Bosnians=victims. He gains a greater appreciation of its complexities from, of all people, a Bosnian Catholic sniper, who teaches him about the happier days of former Yugoslavia, which most Serbs, like most Bosnians, had preferred to the war and brutality of the 1990s; and about the deep ethnic divides that went unacknowledged for so many years, but eventually led to the war in which the sniper himself had to assassinate his former best friend.