A coworker mused aloud just the other day, “Why is it we have bedroom, dining room, living room, bathroom and….. kitchen.”
Why indeed? Of course, we are simplifying things a bit too much, excluding even current room names like basement, foyer, and office, and more archaic room names like boudoir, parlor, and study. But nonetheless, why the preponderance of -rooms and the rather unique “kitchen” in our modern household terminology?
Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel My appetite for biographies is minimal: in general I find focus in single individuals results in a necessarily circumscribed and correspondingly dull book, and therefore avoid them except in certain cases (Christopher Hitchens’ recent memoir, while not strictly a biography, counts among their number). Inestimably more interesting—and invariably more important as well—are general histories, either of periods or concepts.
Occasionally, however, an individual or dynasty serves as a synecdoche for said historical period or concept, and this is the approach that Julia Keller takes toward Richard Jordan Gatling, the 19th-century inventor who lent his name to the famous machine gun. In fact, Keller’s book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, travels along two separate threads; the first is Gatling himself and the era of innovation of which he was emblematic, but the second is the rich irony of Gatling, most proud of his agricultural machinery, becoming famous for instruments of death.
At Home: A Short History of Domestic Life A new book by Bill Bryson is enough to elicit undue excitement from me; said excitement is relative, of course, and so given my…inscrutable…nature, undue excitement looks likes raised eyebrows or perhaps a smile. In any case, I was so overwrought with joy that Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life was coming out, his first real book since A Short History of Nearly Everything. You may imagine my disappointment that the book would not be published stateside until October 5th, and yet came out in late May in England. I cheated; I imported it.
Conrad's Time Machine In the last years of his life, Leo Frankowski’s books had veered from their previous character—a solid bit of science fiction with occasional quirks. Conrad’s Time Machine was, strictly speaking, a sort of prequel to Frankowski’s somewhat famous Adventures of Conrad Stargard; certainly his publishers wanted to stress this fact, even though the book technically had nothing at all to do with (and certainly no mention of) Conrad.
Gore Vidal once famously quipped that “‘Politics’ is made up of two words, ‘poli,’ which is Greek for ‘many,’ and ‘tics,’ which are blood-sucking insects”, and that’s perhaps one of the nicer things said about the practice and its practitioners. It seems as though politics has always been reviled, even back to the earliest statesmen.