At Home: A Short History of Domestic Life by Bill Bryson

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 You may imagine my disappointment that the book would not be published stateside until October 5th, and yet came out in late May in England.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.

Paradoxically, I typically find myself unable to say very much about Bryson’s books when I review them, perhaps because it’s easier to criticize than laud. Then, too, the very nature of Bryson’s writing and personality is understated and warmly avuncular; it is not life-changing, nor will it make you weep (though The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid did make me giggle uncontrollably for about ten minutes). However, Bryson has an indomitable way of making the most mundane things seem powerfully interesting.

Though he’s written a couple of smaller books in the interim, Bryon’s last major undertaking was A Short History of Nearly Everything, a massive undertaking which attempted to summarize the entire history of scientific achievement in the last five hundred years. In fairness to science, its history is quite interesting, most especially when one considers just how much early scientists tended to be crazy and/or prima donnas. By contrast, Bryson’s new book is about something both overlooked and admittedly mundane: the house, and all the stuff that’s in it, turning Bryson into something of a literal armchair historian.

My home is about 5 years old, made with aluminum siding; Bryson’s, by contract, has been around for several centuries, having been owned and rather well-documented by a Victorian parson. Most of the book deals with the Victorian era and after (as is Bryson’s apparent forte after his adventures in Science™), but he dutifully begins at the beginning with the unearthing of some of the earliest dwelling structures known to exist. There must have been a point at which humans crossed from makeshift dwellings into some sort of semi-permanent structures; these would have fulfilled the barest necessities of protection from the elements, and it would be a great many years before Man would come to think of his dwelling as anything more than a utility.

And yet, by the time we reach the dowdy days of Victorian England, people—rich people, anyway—have gotten very good at expending startling amounts of time and energy on their homes, remodeling them, decorating them, expanding them, and writing books about them. All of this excess energy, coming during an age of extraordinary discovery, invention, and mobility, creates a perfect auger for the sort of oddity and novelty upon which Bryson (and his readers) feeds. And so comes discoveries about paint (Victorian paint, since it was expensive, tended toward the embarrassingly gaudy), insane architects, bathrooms, couches and chairs, eating habits and diet, copulation, and everything which occurs between four sets of walls (and a little bit outside of it).

What is ultimately so fascinating about At Home, even compared to the masterpiece that is A Short History of Nearly Everything, is that while the latter covers scientific topics that were heretofore (and likely still remain) somewhat far-flung and abstract to us laymen, the former gives context and story to the things we use every day and which histories we take for granted. Take bras (short for the French brassieres), for instance, which were prototyped as early as 1863, as “breast puffs”, but which suddenly saw a surge of patented innovation in the century which followed. Has any modern reader ever wondered at what point it was that women began wearing these strange but apparently comfortable contraptions? I certainly haven’t, but that’s precisely the sort of useless-but-fascinating knowledge that Bryson will impart to you. And you may very well share his disappointment that bras were not, as is sometimes thought, the invention of an Otto Titzling; a similar disappointment follows the attribution of the toilet to Thomas Crapper (the name is a coincidence).

Bryson has what Leo Frankowski might call a “garbage pit mind”; it should therefore come as no surprise that while homes and rooms form a sort of frame narrative or motif, the stories eventually told within this context span decades and burst outside their frames and bounce around from topic to tangent like a frenetic photon. I won’t bother to list them; the joy in the book is reading them for yourself. I also take joy in Bryson’s own apparently genuine joy at all this knowledge; this vicarious pleasure must be akin to watching one’s child excitedly open a Christmas present, as the author’s fascination permeates his writing, and I think it is this very character which sets Bryson’s writing—including At Home—far and away above other books of this sort.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

There is a peculiarity to Englishness which is historical, polite, and understated. After all, consider that England was, at one time, one of the most powerful nations on the planet and remained so for many years, despite the size of its landmass being vanishingly small and its natural resources slight. At the same time it was flashing its Germanic roots by turning the rest of the world into its empire, it was also cementing its reputation for stodginess and quaintness. Bill Bryson, though a native of Iowa and everything that entails, lived in the U.K. for most of his adult life, before moving back to the US in 1995 (and eventually winding up back across the Atlantic in 2003).

To be sure, this isn’t an extended discussion of Anglo-American relations in the way that Hitchens’ Blood, Class and Empire. though of course Bryson’s dual nature as a corn-fed son of the Midwest and warm-lager-drinking adopted son of Britain is a subtle but persistent undercurrent throughout the book. Written as a sort of plaintive paean to his adopted country before leaving it to move to Vermont for a little under ten year, Notes from a Small Island documents Bryson’s travels across the UK, reliving some of his first experiences in-country in the 1970s as well as seeing some of the touristy and/or far-flung portions he’d never gotten around to seeing as a workaday journalist or writer.

His very first night in England, in fact, was spent on a bench in the cold; this being the era when British hostelry consisted mostly (as Bryson would characterized it) of rooms rented out by bitter old women, and only before sundown. Having little money, no contacts, and otherwise no recourse, a night spent in the out-of-doors was the only alternative. And what a testament to the staying power of England that the arrival of morning was enough to keep him there for another twenty years (though admittedly none of them spent sleeping on benches).

If you’re familiar with Bryson peripatetic works, such Neither Here Nor There or The Lost Continent, the style of Notes from a Small Island should come as no surprise. In that affably old-fashioned way of his, Bryson hikes, rides, and occasionally tumbles his way across Great Britain, wrinkling his nose at overly-touristy big cities, falling in love with the odd and lovely small hamlets, and drinking too much at a series of bars pubs that range from swank to positively squalid.

When I read the book last time, I recall feeling a bit left out in the cold, as though I had missed so many of the references that a native Briton would take for granted. Would an American know, for instance, that Marks & Spencer is the quintessential British department store? Regardless, I found this time around that I felt no such alienation; perhaps I’ve simply absorbed a little more about English culture since then, or more likely I’ve simply become a better reader since five years ago, and picked up on the subtle ways in which Bryson allows non-English readers to appreciate England without having been there. The droll way he references Marks & Spencer, for instance, makes it understood that it’s more or less a British Wal-Mart, ubiquitous and obnoxious and in a way comforting to the weary traveler.

Though Bryson is by nature self-deprecating, and uses his dry sense of humor to turn less-than-exemplary experiences for him into laugh-out-loud experiences for the reader, he is at his best when his travels take him to some undiscovered country, either some fascinating historical site unknown even to most Britons, or some far-flung coastal resort which instills in him the same sense of homey English comfort that pulled him in twenty years prior. Bryson is naturally curious and not a little nostalgic (bordering on wistful), but he doesn’t turn his last hurrah on Angleterre into a maudlin affair. Notes From a Small Island is more overtly comical than Down Under and a little less so than Neither Here nor There.

In all cases, though, he manages to bring across other points, as well. Though the U.K. is, physically speaking, so much smaller than the United States (and lord knows Bryson has driven across enough of the latter), it’s surprising how much of the former is still country, and just how many distant hamlets and coastal towns there are that one never hears about. In the dense cities like London or Manchester, it’s difficult to ever be alone since the population density is so high, but much of Bryson’s narration focused on the interstices: the rolling green hills between villages; the long, quiet (usually) train rides with cups of coffee. One gets the feeling that, though he’s thrilled to find towns which are thriving (and, more to the point, which haven’t effaced the historical buildings in favor of tacky modern contrivances) and peopled, he even more enjoys a contemplative solitude that seems somehow very much in keeping with the mild-mannered British spirit.

Though Notes From a Small Island doesn’t exactly answer the question about what it means to be quintessentially British (and, in fairness, it was never a stated goal), Bryson’s ability to make one yearn to see what he describes certainly makes me want to go there and see it for myself. That, I suppose, is one of the highest compliments you can pay to a place.

A Short History of the American Stomach by Frederick Kaufman

When I got Frederick Kaufman’s A Short History of the American Stomach, I had expected something along the lines of Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses, perhaps with the cultural slant of Bill Bryson’s Made in America.

The key word here is “short,” since the official page count of 224 is a generous one, and even still describes a dimensionally-small book with large print. For all intents and purposes, A Short History of the American Stomach isn’t really a history at all; rather, it’s a collection of separate essays by Kaufman (or seems as such), linked by a shared theme of gastronomy and bound in a small volume.

Then, too, “history” implies a work of scholarship, and while Kaufman strikes me as a very intelligent man, I admit to being more than a little peeved by the complete lack of citations, endnotes, or bibliography, despite his frequent use not only of obvious references, but direct quotations. Like Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange, Kaufman’s book is pseudo-gonzo—a mix of armchair historian and investigative reporter.

The misleading title notwithstanding, I found a lot of what Kaufman said to be genuinely interesting: his thesis falls into two essential points:

1. Americans in particular fetishize food.
2. This is not a recent phenomenon.

He covers ground in roughly that order, beginning with a chapter on both the commercialization and the sexualization of food in America. As an ideal example of both, he cites the Food Network, a relatively recent television station which has, in the narrative arc of Emeril, become a major player in the television market. Food isn’t just nourishment anymore: it’s entertainment. And why not, given that televised food tugs so many of the same strings as pornography?

[Barbara Nitke] and I watched as Giada [De Laurentiis, Food Network star] prepared sopme italian cookies. As usual she was dressed in a tight, sleeveless top. “Now I can touch the dough and elongate it,” she said. “I’m getting it all over my fingers.” When Giada squeezed a lemon, the camera moved in for a close-up of the abundant yellow stream. “All that juice,” came Giada’s thick voice-over. “Oh my god,” said Nitke. “It’s watersports.”

But of course this shouldn’t be surprising: both the culinary and sensual realms deal overtly with the senses, involving as they do the looking, touching, smelling, and tasting (less so with hearing, though given Kaufman’s description of Giada’s voice-over, perhaps I should reconsider my position). They both produce pleasant chemical reactions in the brain; they’re both entertaining. It’s more interesting that we don’t more often consider the many overlapping elements of food and sex.

As if to spite this introductory melding of the culinary with the coital, Kaufman then takes us back to the foundation of America, noting the curious gustatory habits of the Puritans, who, though sexually repressed, were known to throw a hell of a banquet. They were also, however, prone to fits of fasting, generally believing it to be a red phone to God, and so it is often by the power of the stomach that men lived their lives.

It is impossible to overemphasize how important the stomach was to people of earlier ages; they were, in a word, stupid. They can be forgiven for attributing just about every malady under the sun to “dyspepsia” since medical science hadn’t given them many other options. And indeed, when you consider how much diet affects health, and how sensitive the stomach can be to other ailments, it’s hardly surprising that the well-meaning Cotton Mather to write “It may be one of the truest maxims ever yet advanced by any of the gentlemen, has been that a distempered stomach is the origin of all diseases.” Conversely, certain foods gained an official blessing—usually for an arbitrary reason—as panacea for all ills of the stomach; Mather was particular fond of whey.

Some of you might see the pattern already: the Cotton Mathers are alive and well in the 21st century, blaming the gastrointestinal tract for everything from cancer to sunburn. Sometimes they come in the form of the raw foodists (which Kaufman covers), who insists that raw milk boosts immunity, or that processed food contains the vague but frightening “toxins”. Or, even better, that a colonic or laxative (or, if you’re lucky, both) will “flush” the GI system and therefore the whole body.

The raw foodist movement—and really the organic movement as a whole—is a reaction against the increasingly technological nature of food production; we’ve been using hybrid grains for quite some time, but it’s becoming harder and harder to find food that hasn’t been somehow enhanced, multiplied, or increased by science. Kaufman’s final chapter details the story of oysters in America: the original east-coast population of the tasty mollusc was depleted, and via a number of contrivances, eventually replaced a more hardy breed. Work continues, in fact, to breed the perfect race of oysters which are both wildly populous and significantly larger than normal; the same process has happened to bananas, which is a little-known fact about a more widely-appreciated food.

As astute readers may have noticed, there is not much about the above that is tied very tightly to America; certainly, the Old World has far stranger culinary peculiarities than us, and genetic engineering and its resistance movement (raw foodism) exists in Europe, too. Excepting that Kaufman’s chosen examples are geographically within America, his point is not culturally American. But this is not necessarily a bad thing: Kaufman’s book is still a pocket version of Michael Pollan, and still contains interesting little non-fiction vignettes about the larger field of gastronomy.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

I’m perfectly well aware that Bill Bryson can be funny. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid had me laugh out loud; A Walk in the Woods, too, was hilarious.

But most of Bryson’s writing—and humor—is in long form. That is, Bryson writes books. There was a time, however, when he wrote a sort-of weekly column for a British newspaper (The Mail on Sunday Night and Day during the years he lived with his family in New Hampshire (he’s since moved back to England). I’m a Stranger Here Myself is about Americana, but not in the same way as The Lost Continent, nor is it about America in the same way that Notes from a Small Island was about England.

The book is actually unique among Bryson’s publications because it isn’t a monolithic work, but rather a compendium of Bryson’s weekly column. Each “chapter” is only a few pages long, the product of explicit editing for length; he has less license for wandering narratives or long story arcs, and I feel as though he forces a terse sort of wit as a result. Bill Bryson is not Dave Barry; his somewhat predictable sign-offs are therefore droll, but border on turgidity, as though forced and unnatural.

Still, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the book was bad or uninteresting. Though terribly compressed, Bryson’s column was still funny and insightful. What I actually found most fascinating was the idea that Bryson, a native-born American but a British expatriate, was writing about America for Englishmen. While it’s certainly both easy and common to take a Seinfeldian “And what’s the deal with X?” approach to comedy, the usual context is that of an audience which lives within the culture being lampooned. I’m a Stranger Here Myself is sort of an inverse of all Bryson’s other travel writing, at least to me as an American. Whereas I might marvel at the strangeness of the Antipodes in Down Under, one comes to realize that America can be just as strange, at least if you don’t live there.

He talks about the death of small downtowns as they cede to superstores with giant parking lots; he talks about American post offices, which are must nicer but apparently also much lazier. He talks about the New Hampshire woods (in what, I think, is one of his better pieces). He most often self-deprecates, preferring to paint himself as a clumsy buffoon, hapless around home repairs, technology, and sports. I find him at his most charming when talking about his hobby horses: the woods and the evaporation of small towns as I mentioned, for instance, as well as a fascinating piece about the dying (and resurgence) are particular regional accents such as that of Martha’s Vineyard. That is truly Bryson at his best; the Seinfeld-meets-Andy-Rooney pieces are funny, but don’t play to Bryson’s strength.

It certainly is not the best introduction to Bryson: reading this, you would not get a good impression of his extraordinary talents as a writer and observer. For people who are Bryson fans, or for the lucky Brits who got to read this column when it was current, I imagine it was quite the pleasure. I recommend this book anyway (as I do with any of Bryson’s book), but I suggest you start with a different one.

A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

I’m something of an iconoclast; I used to enjoy telling people (smugly, as only an over-informed grade-school boy can be) that George Washington was the 8th president. I took fewer cheap thrills from knowing that Columbus wasn’t necessarily the saint we so often make him out to be, though I stopped of damning European imperialists and other overindulgent tropes of that sort—more on this later.

The premise of A Voyage Long and Strange seemed to me straightforward: our usual thoughts of America’s discovery tend to either Columbus’s bumbling voyage (which never actually touched the eventual U.S.) or the landing of the Pilgrims, who teemed ashore on Plymouth rock with armfulls of pumpkin pies, turkey legs, and ornate wicker horns filled with inedible gourds.

This didn’t happen, of course, which is Horwitz’s point. When visiting the underwhelming Plymouth Rock on a sightseeing trip, he was amazed to discover just how little he knew about the humble origins of our county, and so began a long trip to discover just how we came to be.

The points he covers are everything you might expect: he begins with the Vikings, Greenland, and Newfoundland; he then veers far south for Columbus, and then hops all over the country for several different Spanish conquistadors (Cortes, de Soto, etc.); finally, he returns solidly to the east coast in time for the pilgrims and other hardy peoples from England. At this level, Horwitz provided nothing new under the sun.

What surprised me, however, was how far Horwitz went into order to research his material. A Voyage Long and Strange is something of a tell-all history book, yes, but it also contains quite a bit of travel writing, as well, usually flitting between the two more quickly than seems warranted. When researching Columbus, for instance, he visits the Dominican Republic; his own travails as a report almost overshadow his story of Columbus, in fact, the D.R. being so readily available for comedy.

I don’t like Horwitz’s travel writing as much as that of Bill Bryson. He tries to be funny, but he’s not that funny; he attempts to tie his experiences as a traveler back to the historical topic he’s contextualizing, but I feel as though the result is highly inconsistent, certainly made that way in part by Horwitz’s inexpert switching between his gonzo journalism and the People’s History-style exposé. The silent mirth we may imagine as he interviews whatever yokel in his latest destination who protests dumbly that [insert topical explorer] is the real discoverer of America only lasts so long: it’s akin to watching trashy TV under the guise of it “being funny.”

This, I think, is Horwitz’s attempt to deal with a difficult topic—that is, most of the people to whom we ascribe the discovery of America were not nice people, the Spanish conquistadors in particular. But in any in-depth conversation about America’s discovery and colonization, we come to the inevitable and unpleasant notion that Europeans despoiled the land and—whether purposely with guns or inadvertently with smallpox—thousands or millions of indigenous peoples. It is impossible for us to simply say “Well, the Europeans shouldn’t have come over,” because otherwise we’re wishing for the nonexistence of our country as we know it; neither can we simply shrug our shoulders and say that, horrible though it may have been, it happened a long time ago and there’s nothing we can do about it (and eggs, omelet, etc.).

And perhaps that’s the whole point: America’s history is messy, violent, and occasionally glorious. It would be silly and disingenuous to pretend that the whole thing was a Coke commercial, but that doesn’t necessarily condemn America as a land defined by the mistakes of its discoverers. I don’t sing Columbus’s praises, though I do recognize that he somehow fits into the complex historical choreography that ultimately caused me to sit here typing this review.

Like Horwitz himself, A Voyage Long and Strange wandered considerably, and not always for the better. It’s excellent fodder for thought, though, if nothing else. As the Los Angeles Times opined: “Part history, part travelogue—and mostly just great fun… This is history on a global scale, and Horwitz tells it surpassingly well.” I will agree with the sentiment if not the degree.

Made in America by Bill Bryson

There are few things I like better than a good book about linguistics or etymology. The only thing, I think, that could possibly make one any better is if it’s written by one of my favorite authors—namely Bill Bryson.

In fact, Made in America was my introduction to Bryson: I purchased the book (a mint-condition hardcover) for $0.25 at the library and absolutely devoured it. Not only did the book initiate a long and storied appreciation of Bryson’s writing, but I think I can honestly credit the book with inspiring my lifelong love of language.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a book like, say, Pinker’s The Language Instinct; there’s no talk of deep grammars. It isn’t even really like Baugh’s A History of the English Language. It’s really blending of etymology and anecdote, the latter of which seems to be the quality which distinguishes it from its competitors. Bryson’s continued fascination with all things interesting—his quest for peculiar miscellany or errata seems unending—is woven into the book.

Then, too, Made in America isn’t a holistic look at the English language. It doesn’t touch on its Anglo-Saxon origins, its influence from Norman French, or the introduction (perhaps “invasion” is more accurate) of Nordic elements. It doesn’t mention how we construct phonemes, or any of the grammatical fabric that underlies the language. Rather, it’s a book about vocabulary. Sure, the first bits of the book, detailing the arrival of the first pilgrims, dealt with some of the differences in pronunciation, and the historical legacy of Shakespeare and Chaucer. But soon after, American English forks, becoming its own entity, and the structure of the language itself flattens out, ceasing the rapid change that it embodied for several hundred years.

American English is notable, then, for several reasons: first, we quickly became a world leader in, well, everything, and so cultural events which spawned new words and phrases (cars, for instance), tended to come from the United States. For this reason, Bryson generally divides the chapters up by subject matter, rather than a strictly chronological list of American neologisms. There are chapters on travel (cars, hotels, interstates, Burma-Shave billboards), on food (McDonalds, burger joints, fast food), on media (television, radio, prime-time, commercials), and anything else tied to Americana. Reading the book now, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that it was printed in 1991, since it’s therefore missing that last 18 years of linguistic innovation, especially with regard to computers and technology.

The study of American English, then, is less linguistics and more anthropology, and Made in America like an informal cultural history of the United States, emphasizing throughout how these cultural trends gave birth to new words or whole areas of news words. It is, in short, fascinating, aided by Bryson’s utterly delightful writing and dry wit. The book remains one of my favorites by him, and I recommend it heartily to just about anyone.

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is a noted fan of the English language. My first real exposure to him was a $0.25 hardcover copy of Made of America, which was all it took to cement a deep and abiding love for everything the man writes. The Mother Tongue is his first attempt at linguistic writing, and while perhaps I didn’t enjoy it as much as Made In America, it is nonetheless a wonderful book.

Bryson starts by considering just how versatile, how widespread, and how confusing the English language is, and how these very traits seem, to some degree, mutually exclusive. Yet puzzingly, a language which is relatively recent in its current incarnation (certainly recent compared to its Latinate cousin and its Germanic forebears and ProtoIndoEuropean great-grandfeather), has managed to become a force to be reckoned with throughout the world. Ironically, and I couldn’t help but notice this, Bryson’s message in the book—that English is, also ironically, the new lingua franca–is to some degree going away. Certainly, if conservatives are any trustworthy source, America itself is today being overrun with Spanish-speaking immigrants other “impure” dialects.

After an impressive introduction, Bryson takes us back to the earliest days of what might be called “English,” which was some strange offspring of Saxonic and Anglo (the latter of which actually died out completely). As it morphed into English, having deviated from (what is today) German some years before, it all eradicated Celtic, picked up a lot of French (and Latin, by extension) after the Norman conquest, changed rapidly around the time of Chaucer, got fast and loose at the time of Shakespeare, and even today shows a remarkable flexibility that almost nullifies its inherent complexity.

Bryson quotes Baugh and Cable extensively. The first time I read The Mother Tongue, I had not read the former’s wonderful History of the English Language, and so I felt as though Bryson’s book was both more sensible and more predictable this time around. If you hadn’t, be prepared for a large-scale information download when you read The Mother Tongue. I personally, would also recommend Baugh and Cable’s delightful tome, if for no other reason than reference.

But such interesting information does not entirely belong to the eras of vikings or playrights. Some of Bryson’s most interesting storytelling is contemporary. The idea that British English and American English are rapidly drifiting apart, for instance, is addressed (the result? In vocabulary, yes, but not so much in syntax), as well as a juxtaposition of English’s dominance as a global language with its penchant for malapropism.

One final point that Bryson drives home is that grammatical prescriptivists (i.e. people, such as dictionary-writers, who try to dictate grammatical or orthographic policy) are Sisyphus; though there is merit to promoting standards of usage (I promote just such a thing on the web), English as much as any language is a living, breathing thing. It is eminently populist, driven by usage and not mandate, which is why we inherit many of our Latin words from the Vulgar Latin, and not the bookish classical Latin

I think that Bryson may get even more excited about linguistics than he does about travel, which is saying something. The Mother Tongue is a marvelous book, following up magnificently with his rather more continental Made in America. If you like Bryson, like linguistics, or you’re just curious about English, pick this up.

Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson

When my girlfriend went to Germany this summer, her tales of Germany’s quirks made me think immediately of Bill Bryson and one of his early books, Neither Here Nor There. Realizing that I last read it before the start of this meme back in 2005, I thought it would be the perfect time to dust it off and enjoy it all over again.

There are startling bits about Neither Here Nor There, especially if you’ve read a lot of Bryson’s more recent work. It’s downright bawdy at times, which doesn’t bother me, but does come as a bit of a shock. The only other book which approaches this style is A Walk in the Woods, I suppose because these are both largely narrative books, rather than the more detached kind of exposition you might find in one of his books about language.

Neither Here Nor There is a travelogue of Bryson’s trip across Europe in the early 1990s. It’s a strange hybrid of the “present” and flashbacks of the author’s first trip(s) across Europe, one of the times with a crass young man named Katz, the sort of comic-relief boor that enjoys “Pull my finger” jokes and thinks that volume is a sufficient substitute for the inability to speak a foreign tongue.

Young Bryson (and Katz) tends to chase women, smoke semi-legal hash in Amsterdam, and party into the wee hours of the morning in clubs that are hip in a way they can only be in Europe. Latter-day Bryson mostly wanders around the cobble-stone streets of Old Europe alone, either in a “I’m a tourist, but not an annoying one” sort of way, or a “What kind of strange, alien people are you?” sort of way. It becomes clear that he has an undying love for the bucolic Europe of his childhood imagination, satisfied most thoroughly by small Italian villages where everyone knows everyone else, and you can sit for hours at a Bistro, drinking coffee, and alternating between reading thick tomes about the Bubonic Plague and people-watching.

More broadly, Bryson laments the inevitable conundrum of travel-friendly Europe: tourism thoroughly kills the small-town, Old-World charm that makes these places worth visiting in the first place. The author starts in the godforsaken frozen north, looking for the Aurora Borealis, works his way through the middle of Europe, which he comes to find is largely overrun with touristy crap, finding only a few quaint places which slake his thirst for the pastoral, being utterly bored in Switzerland, which apparently has all the charm of a sterile cotton swab, and then becoming entirely depressed when visiting Eastern Europe, which at that time was still either suffering under Communism, or suffering from the transition from it.

Bryson, inexplicably, finds a particular joy in the sensation of being utterly at odds with his surroundings when on vacation. Instead of being a source of stress, not speaking the local language appears fun to him (or so it would seem from his narration). Outside of the usual travel literature, it’s strange to find someone, especially an American, who isn’t an accidental tourist, traveling abroad while simultaneously trying to make his/her destination as much as possible like the place he/she just left. Bryson likes museums, long walks, good beer, good (but not too exotic) food, and downtown cafés. Out of that, he manages to make some of the most amusing travel writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.

As I will invariably say with anything by Bryson, you’ll do yourself a favor by reading this. Neither Here Not There is funny, informative, occasionally touching, and utterly difficult to put down.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

I picked up Bonk entirely on a whim: it was sitting precociously on the shelf of new books at the library. It wasn’t until later, when I was reading that, I noticed that “Amazon.com customers who bought Bonk also bought: When You Are Engulfed In Flames.” And was also asked by a friend of mine if I’ve ever read Stiff, which is Roach’s previous book. Clearly, the stars had aligned on this book in some way.

I’ve said before that I compare every “[science|history|other] made fun” book to the superb Bill Bryson, who I believe has mastered the right proportion of fact, narrative, and whimsy. An unfortunate side product of this is that every science-related book that I read ends up falling pitifully short of my unfairly high standard.

Bonk is a book about sex—not just any sex, but sex through the eye of the Scientific Establishment™ both contemporary and historical. Needless to say, the studies of Alfred Kinsey make an appearance, though they don’t play as large a role as you think. There’s mention of other sex studies of old (Masters & Johnson, for instance); the overriding theme throughout the book seems to be that sex is very complicated, but it’s also such a touchy subject that there’s no good way to learn about it.

Mostly, I find the author interesting: she’s an attractive 30-something woman, and by her own admission a student of the old school of sex—that is to say, it stays in her bedroom with her husband and nobody else needs to know anything about it. Her involvement in the topic of her book grows as the pages turn; at one point, she convinces her husband to let a doctor perform an ultrasound on their naughty bits while they, er, reconsummate their marriage on a hospital bed. She feels the newly-prosthesetized penis of a Taiwanese man suffering from 8 years of impotence. She goes to conventions/galleries featuring sex machines: literally that machines do nothing but mechanically thrust a fake rubber penis, and which have apparently spawned a whole category of fetish porn. Interestingly enough, Roach’s reasons for attending such a conference are not curiosity about particular fetishes, but the fact that famed sexologists of old (Masters & Johnson, again) used just such a device in order to test female physiological response.

The book is an interesting mix about the vagaries of erectile dysfunction, the vagaries of female sexuality and sexual physiology, the heated debate over vaginal orgasm (!), the continued quest for scientific knowledge about sex and its effects, &c.

I keep hearing about Roach being the “funniest science writer,” and I admit that I got a few chuckles out of the book, but mostly her humor comes in casual asides to the reader, and more often humorous footnotes. But it’s strangely detached from the meat of the text: Roach will very seriously cover a topic, ever the responsible journalist, and at the end of a thought or section will suddenly tack on a quip as though it was an afterthought or a poorly-timed delivery—and yes, some of the quips go for the easy laugh, as you might expect in a book about sex.

I mentioned that Kinsey plays a relatively minor role in the book, and that’s true: Roach isn’t merely a Kinsey worshiper; in fact, she seems very careful to not be particularly enthusiastic about endorsing any sort of school of thought other than a modern, pragmatic one. In other words, you won’t likely find anything offensive in here unless you think that God only accepts missionary style.

So is it worth it? Having not read any of Roach’s other (recommended) books, I can’t compare Bonk to any of them. The latter didn’t blow me away, but it was a solid read nonetheless, and remained interesting more or less throughout. If you’re looking to laugh uproariously, this isn’t for you. If you simply want a quirky look at the scientific history of sex, this is your book.

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks

I have read Oliver Sacks before. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was a fascinating book, but it could get a bit dry at times, consisting as it did of short, informal case histories without much in the way of frame narrative or Bryson-esque exposition. I picked up Musicophilia both because I still like Sacks and his writing, but also because the book’s subject—music and music therapy—is very much a part of my life: my longtime girlfriend, Allison, is studying to become a music therapist, and while I’ve never had the disposition for such a line of work, I’ve always been fascinated by the potential neurological effects of it.

I rather enjoyed this book; I would say I enjoyed it even more than The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat; to start, I think Sacks writing has improved in 20+ years. Second, it seemed more focused, tied as it did around music rather than various and sundry neurological disorders common only by virtue of their disorderly nature.

Sacks covers a lot of different neurological disorders: the book ranges from people stricken with amusia, or have in some way are bereft of the ability to either enjoy music emotionally or even hear music as music, to those who suddenly gained an undying passion for music after being struck by lightning. These are all fascinating, and Sacks spends quite a bit of time talking introducing these case histories, and exploring the possible neurological reasons for these things; there is, too, a certain tawdry fascination with the broken—or sometimes enhanced—minds of other people: we can suddenly feel glad that a symphony doesn’t sound to us like the clanging of pots and pans.

But I think the most endearing thing about the book, and what I had hoped it would cover, is the rehabilitative effects of music for those suffering from debilitating diseases. It’s truly a remarkable thing, the way that music in the brain is both an entirely separate entity from speech and motor ability, and yet it manages to have an effect on both. Parkinsonian patients who can barely move are suddenly graceful when dancing to a rhythm; patients with severe aphasia can still sing lyrics, and in doing so eventually rehabilitate their ability to speak without singing.

Another very interesting thing I learned is that I have a common and relatively mild form of synesthesia. This neurological syndrome was the primary plot device in a book I read last year called The Beautiful Miscellaneous. Looking back at my review, I was so underwhelmed that I never even mentioned the word; I was, however, fascinated by the condition. The most famous cases of synesthesia are those synesthetes who can taste music, or whose perfect pitch is due in part to the precise color associations they make with musical pitches.

I don’t have anything that dramatic, but according to Sacks, grapheme-color synesthesia is the most common kind, and among the possible symptoms—letter-color association, number-color-association, and day/month-color association, the link between days of the week and color is even more common yet. I definitely have that, and discovered that my mother and brother both do, as well. We all, perhaps to a letter degree, have letter-color synesthesia, as well.

So, the book happened to shed light upon a curious little fact about myself I had long ago stopped thinking about, assuming everyone else thought that Tuesdays were green days, too, or that the letter S is blue.

Every time Sacks puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, now), he manages to be insightful and informative. That he doesn’t have the narrative genius of a Steven Jay Gould or a Bill Bryson is easily forgiven in the face of how damned interesting his books are anyway. Musicophilia may just be his best yet.