Maphead by Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings may always be known as “that guy from Jeopardy!“; that’s certainly how I tend to think of him. For those of you who don’t know, Jennings became a minor celebrity in 2004 when he won 74 straight games of the popular TV quiz show, winning just over $3 million total. I expected a brief time in the limelight for Jennings; when he wrote a book called Brainiac, about his experience in quiz shows and the broader world of trivia buffs, I was unsurprised and wrote it off as a gimmick. When he wrote a second book, Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac, I once again took it for an easy way to ride the short-lived wave of fame that carries intellectuals.

But then I saw Maphead, a book about cartographers, self-proclaimed map geeks, and the strange, occluded subculture of geography and maps. My curiosity got the better of me: I gave it a try.

I bet this guy is great at parties

Let me admit some bias right away: Jennings is a Mormon, a member of a faith that prohibits drinking, smoking, gambling, and requires its members to wear special holy underwear. In other words, members tend toward social conservatism. This doesn’t make them bad people (I know several), but knowing this, I figured that Maphead might be impeccably-researched, but a bit on dowdy and humorless side. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only is Jennings smart, but he has a surprising aptitude for writing. He’s not bawdy, but he’s able to be witty and occasionally irreverent in a way that surprised me.

More important, Maphead is a genuinely interesting look at maps. I’m not naturally good with maps—my natural spatial reasoning is relatively poor—but I’ve had a map bug ever since reading Nicholas Tam’s “Here Be Cartographers” last year. Here’s what Tam says about maps:

It is hard to imagine a world without maps.

Now stop—and diagram that sentence. Break its syntax apart. You can parse it in at least two valid and meaningful ways:

• It is hard | to imagine | a world without maps. The use of maps is so embedded in our daily lives, so essential to our normal functioning, that the idea of a pre-cartographic society is as alien as the thought of a pre-literate one. On top of this, our idea of what it means to be a mapped society is itself confined to our familiarized expectations of what maps are like. How did people get by without maps—or rather, without the sorts of maps we know and understand?
• It is hard | to imagine a world | without maps. Maps govern the way we think about space, and that extends to imaginary or hypothetical spaces. Without a graphic representation on paper or in our heads, our plans for things not yet built—homes, roads, electric circuits—may be cloudy and ambiguous. They may lack precision in the same way we have trouble with describing things that are outside our linguistic abilities. This is a negative definition of maps as a form of language: to be without a map is to be without language, and it impedes us from communicating ideas in the mind—to others, yes, but also to ourselves.

Jennings’ book about maps was more about map collecting and geography than strictly cartography, and the book is somewhat less insightful than Tam’s, but I admit the comparison is not a fair one. Actually, Jenning’s focus is more broad and more shallow, which is unsurprising for a published book; nonetheless, what Jennings does cover is both interesting in content and, I must admit, totally engaging. There’s fluff chapters: his attendance at a national geography bee (emceed every year by none other than Alex Trebec) tends to devolve into a half-admiring, half-horrified shock at the level of intelligence and latent misery in these fiercely competitive children (and their often-absurd parents). Others are a small slice of a specialized topic, such as Jim Sinclair’s “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”, an annual mail-in contest that revolves around some serious atlas fu, and Jennings’ attempt to play the game with his wife and young children illustrate precisely why maps and map wonks have gotten such a bad rap over the years.

Far from being a staid defense of cartography and cartophiles, in fact, Mapheads, whether by design or accident, presents a pretty clear case for both sides. On the one hand, Jennings goes far to illustrate why cartography is so immensely fascinating, and the notion of a visual recording of spatial concepts is such a beguiling, pervasive, and occasionally all-encompassing topic. On the other hand, the niche map collectors and geography bee contestants reinforce the notion of maps as a dry-at-best and masturbatory-at-worst pursuit, best left to brainiac quiz-show winners and their ilk.

But, and this speaks to his wisdom, Jennings finishes the book’s expository arc with the forward-looking aspects of cartography. Last is Google Maps (and its brethren, such as MapQuest, which technically pioneered the concept but was superseded by Google’s own offering and later meta-offering, Google Earth), and the hungry search for a better map database: the hunt to map everything down to a finer and finer resolution. This looks forward to the future, and is an appropriate and prescient ending to Jenning’s whole premise, which is that whether cartography is a niche fetish or a public member of the cultural zeitgeist, its importance to us remains relatively constant. Prior to this, however, is I think the single most important chapter apart from his opening premise: Jennings dives into the wild and wooly world of Geocaching. If you don’t know what it is, I won’t belabor the point: see Wikipedia’s entry for a concise summary. The sudden and startling popularity of geocaching speaks not only to the relative accessibility of maps and spatial data in the era of Google Maps and GPS devices, but to the sort of pioneering spirit that still delights in navigation, exploration, and discovery.

Jennings is (most well known as) a trivia expert, not a mapmaker or a geocaching legend or explorer. Perhaps that is why his amateur enthusiasm for maps, and recently for geocaching, is so engrossing and inspiring and marvelous. It’s the very sense that a non-cartographer could become so engrossed in an internet-based, map-centric activity like geocaching that validates the entire premise of his book, namely that map-making, map-reading, and blatant cartophilia may be a niche of popular culture, but it’s nevertheless an engrossing and compelling one. All laud and honor to Jennings for creating a book that not only celebrates an underappreciated aspect of history and science, but also eliminates (in my mind) his status as a one-hit-wonder of pop culture by showing that apart from being trivial(?), he can also be an excellent chronicler as well.

Supergods by Grant Morrison

I’ve never been much of a comic fan; my brother liked them for the both of us. Despite a flirtation with our local comic store’s annual summer clearance sale, and a long-lived passion for the 6-issue Double Dragon series in 1991, the medium left me largely cold, and I eventually became enamored of the long-form novel.

As a result of either my age or my eventual indifference to the format, I was unaware or unimpressed of most of the important happenings in the medium. I learned most of the historical ones—e.g., the origins the Batman and Superman, and their eventual censorship or transmogrification during the panic of the 1950s—from David Hadju’s The Ten-Cent Plague, and many of the latter-day events either from first-hand knowledge—e.g., hearing about Bane breaking Batman’s back or Doomsday killing Superman—or finally reading the graphic novels themselves—e.g., Alan Moore’s critical 1980s work The Watchmen and V for Vendetta. For what it’s worth, I tried reading Roger Stern’s 1994 The Death and Life of Superman, though it was beyond my 9-year-old self.

I only heard about Grant Morrison through the grapevine; I have yet to read a comic by him, but I ascertained from context clues that he’s become kind of a big deal in the comic world. When my friend recommended Supergods, I decided it would be fun into enter the occluded world of comic books. It’s not a comic or graphic novel, mind you: it’s an interesting blend of comic book history and Morrison’s own life and career in the industry. It works about 50% of the time.

Easily the most engaging portion of Morrison’s book is the first half, where he covers the early history of comic books. In particular, he addresses the creation of the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman characters, among others, noting how the unique characteristics of each reflected their creators and the environment in which they were created. He briefly touches upon the mid-century panic, and notes the excellent The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju. Even more interesting is the way in which characters changed to match the zeitgeist: Superman morphed from a simple do-gooder to a ridiculous über-patriot during the 40s and 50s. Batman began as a dark and creepy detective, but eventually became a silly, camp figure to survive the comics witchhunt—you could argue that the camp peaked either with the TV series starring Adam West or with the 1997 Joel Schumacher film Batman and Robin, both of which Morrison covers. There is, of course, all kind of minutiæ that I’m eliding here; Morrison qua historian is thorough. But while Hadju more or less ends his narrative in the middle of the century, Morrison—obviously—goes on the cover the second rise of comics, with the emergence of the two heavyweights, DC and Marvel, and a slew of imprints large and small.

With this, however, Morrison also begins to inject his own biography into the narrative. This is fine, to a point; but soon he goes down the rabbit hole by relating, for instance, a crazy drug trip he had in Kathmandu and how he thinks it expanded his consciousness blah blah blah… there’s way, way too much hokey hippie drug nonsense going on here, and Morrison—even writing retrospectively—seems to take it very seriously. This whole section is a shambles, made worse by its stark contrast to the solemn comic book hagiography of the first half of the book. It’s a stumble from which Morrison never really recovers, limping wounded across the finish line of the present day and reiterating his thesis.

"And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves"

Said thesis is a good one, too, if a little self-evident. As the title alludes, comic book superheroes are not simply heroes in the sense that Bruce Willis plays a hero in the Die Hard series, or Harry Potter plays a hero in his eponymous series; rather, our comic book superheroes form a sort of modern-day pantheon. They are gods and demigods onto whom we place our own frailties and vices and hopes and dreams. The dominant modern-day monotheisms don’t have these characters like ancient Greece or Rome or Scandinavia; there isn’t an intermediate layer that bridges the gap between humanity and the divine. I suppose you could point to the story of Jesus and the moneylenders, but it’s not quite the same thing, since the pantheons of old were often cruel and capricious. This is why Superman has changed along with culture, becoming the Superpatriot, and a social realist superman, and a dead man, replaced by several different personalities lik an evil robot, a deputized steelworker, and an artificial alien life form. Batman, too, is a vessel for the dark, pragmatic parts of our personality, albeit one with long campy interstice. Our collection of superheroes are a manufactured mythology, highly-stylized forms of our deepest neuroses and sometimes our greatest achievements. It’s not an unreasonable theory, and it explains—in part—why not just comics, but certain individual superheroes, have such staying power, even eighty years after their creation.

If only Supergods hadn’t take such a strange turn halfway through, and Morrison hadn’t decided that his colorful past was perfect material for his argument (why?), the final product would have been so much more impressive.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

I can still remember buying—as a child of 7 or 8—Doom at the local grocery store; it was $5, and came in the form of two 3.5″ floppy disks. At the time, I had no real inclination what it was, other than than package promised a first-person shooter video game that involve monsters and machine guns. What’s not to like? At the time, I could not have known than I was only one of many tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands—discovering the same phenomenon. Of course, I had only bought the shareware version, which comprised the first of three episodes, and lacked the finances to pay $40 or $50 for the full version, but I played those 9 levels over and over again, and my new obsession also caused me to pluck the first of four novelizations from my dad’s bookshelf. Eventually, I would get the full, expanded Final Doom version of the game, and its followup, Doom II.

I could not have known at the time that one of the most popular games of its era, and a game which launched the first-person shooter genre, was made by a couple of mid-twenties misfits on a houseboat. That John Carmack was a child prodigy of programming. Nor was I quite old enough to understand the shareware phenomenon, or BBSs. Hell, I’m not even sure I heard or appreciated the name “John Carmack” until Doom 3 came out in 2004. I certainly heard of John Romero, the glossy-locked rockstar whose company, Ion Storm, flopped hard with Daikatana in 2000.

David Kushner, publishing in 2003, knew this. It’s fitting, then, that Masters of Doom, a retrospective of the preamble and first decade of id Software, begins with the dual appearance of John Carmack and John Romero at a Quake 3 Tournament in Dallas, the former apparent to preside over his company latest (wildly successful) creation, and the latter to talk about the three-year-late Daikatana. Though Kushner doesn’t reveal it within the introduction, those of us who followed video games know by way of history that Quake 3 was wildly successful and Daitakana fizzled and its creating studio ultimately closed. The two wildly-divergent personalities of “The Two Johns”, now the locus of our attention, will come to inform the entire narrative.

Kushner begins at the beginning, as befits a biographer, and shows us young John Romero, a wild child, who skips out on school to dominate the high score lists at the local arcade, to the increasing consternation of his martial stepfather. And John Carmack, a quiet but brilliant young mind whose thirst for computers and knowledge leads him into trouble—and his frank, contemplative manner leads him to a year in juvenile detention. The two Johns meet at Softdisk, a Shreveport, Louisiana, ISP trying to break into the burgeoning and lucrative computer software market, where they become the stars of the company as they switch from Apple II programming to the novel IBM-PC market. When Romero, ever the über-gamer, finds that Carmack has—in his spare time—recreated Super Mario Bros., smooth-scrolling and all—he immediately decides that he, Carmack, and a few of the best and brightest from Softdisk need to form their own software company, eventually known as id Software.

At one time, this was freaky as shit

Enter Commander Keen, the company’s first shareware title, which made them bucketfuls of money after a deal with Apogee Software—later the now-semi-defunct 3D Realms—and later the wildly successful Wolfenstein 3-D, the paradigm-shattering Doom, and the eponymous first entry in the long-lived Quake franchise. It’s important to remember, of course, that John Carmack was all of 23 years old when Doom was released in 1993; these were, after all, just college dropouts, surviving on diet coke and pizza and living together on a houseboat. Carmack was, in technical terms, the center of the group, as he quietly—robotically, even—churned out game engines of increasing—hell, groundbreaking—sophistication. Romero and an amorphous crew of artists and designs worked up the models, graphics, and content for the games, and then become the testers and cheerleaders for the upcoming release. The pattern that Kushner makes clear is that Romero spent an increasing amount of time dicking around with deathmatches and a lot less time contributing salable content for the company. By the time Quake was released, Carmack had kicked him out.

There are a couple of important points to take away from Masters of Doom:

id Software—and therefore Doom—probably would never have happened without John Romero. After the disaster of Daikatana and Ion Storm and the “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch” magazine ads, it’s easy to think that Romero’s the Skreech of the video game world… perpetually loud, obnoxious, and useless. It’s true that his programming skills probably didn’t advance much beyond the Apple II, after which Carmack did all the hard work, and it’s true that he preferred to spend his time as the dilettante of id Software instead of a productive employee, and its true that his oversexed rockstar mannerisms weren’t even particularly appropriate in the Golden Age of first person shooters. But it’s also true that it was Romero’s enthusiasm—his recognition that Carmack was a bona fide genius—that caused id Software to happen. Without Romero, Carmack may have plugged away at Softdisk for many more years—who’s to say where the state of the art would be without that impetus?

John Carmack is smart. But not very savvy. It’s easy to think of Carmack as the “head” of id Software. And I suppose he is, in the sense that he’s one of the few remaining owners and officially the “technical lead”; but Carmack’s always been in charge of the engine, pushing the limits of current PC hardware to create the most advanced, immersive, realistic environments possible. He’s never been the HR director. But like a lot of technical geniuses, social interaction was never Carmack’s strong suit, and for many years of id’s existence, he simply plugged away at his latest engine, irrespective of the social problems that plagued the company (dark, creative types tend to have personality problems—who knew?), and largely oblivious to the content of the game itself, which was usually left to Romero and the other designers. In other words, Carmack makes the “id Tech” series of game engines as advanced as is possible, and the other stuff simply happens. Or at least that’s the way it used to be; I assume that Carmack has blossomed in the last decade and assumed a more general leadership role in the meantime.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Doom. It seems dated now—though there are still actively-maintained ports of the original Doom engine—but Doom really did launch an entire generation of games and gamers. Hair-pulling and knee-jerking from Joe Leiberman and other Maude Flanders types aside, the reaction to Doom and the gaming industry it set in motion has been positive and fruitful. One interesting thing to note is Carmack’s attitude toward software patents; supposedly, when advised to patent some particular algorithm or piece of code, he’s pulled the nuclear option, threatening to quit if forced to file for patents. He’s also released the source code for each id Tech engine as GPL a predetermined span after its initial release, essentially giving both the game (absent the copyrighted textures and models) and his algorithms to the developer community. The book doesn’t mention this, even though the original Doom engine was open-sourced as far back as 1997, though it does emphasize Carmack’s desire to make his engines extensible and modifiable by fans.

Masters of Doom is written as a third-person narrative, though it ostensibly draws on a lot of interviews with those involved. This is always a dangerous ground to travel, since one risks attributing thoughts and words to people who never thought or spoke them. Still, Kushner tends to stay away from sensationalism, despite writing the book for the lay person, and though its 2003 publication date already dates it, it serves as an interesting look at the history of one of the most important and innovative software companies in gaming and the strong, strange personalities that made it happen.

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Several years ago I read Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s , a book of popular science whose title came from a theory about Napoleon’s botched invasion of Russia during the winter. The theory goes, as Le Couteur and Burreson reported, that the buttons of Napoleon’s soldiers, which were made of tin, turned to powder in the extreme cold, thus exposing their tender torsos to the wind. Though it seems implied, the authors don’t come down strong on either side of the historical reality of this. Though the confluence is in doubt—indeed, it seems unlikely—the individual components of the tale are true: there were a lot of dead Frenchmen that winter, and tin—a perfectly solid metal under normal conditions—does turn into powder in extreme cold.

In The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean revisits this tale, but as a side note to yet another tin tale, namely Robert Scott’s fatal 1910 expedition to the South Pole. Many of his caches of food and fuel, which he left on the initial trip, had leaked in the interim, wasting the kerosene and spoiling the potables onto which it spilled. It’s speculated that the fuel cans, soldered with tin, might have succumbed to what is known as “tin pest”. This, too, is largely speculative; the tin pest problem is apparently too tricky to resolve, even for relatively recent history.

Obviously, it's barely changed in 150 years

But such is the sort of story that Kean likes to reproduce in his new book, a rather jovial romp that uses two main storytelling threads. The first is a history of the periodic table itself, beginning with Mendeleev and his contemporaries and leading all the way to Glenn Seaborg’s reorganization in the mid-20th century. This narrative intertwines with the discovery of elements which fill in or append to the known list; though Kean skips the elements that were known early on—e.g., nitrogen or oxygen—he details the discovery of the more difficult substances such as Aluminium, and certainly all of the trans-uranic elements, whose discoveries paralleled our knowledge of atomic science (and, unfortunately, nuclear weapons).

The second narrative thread is that of anecdotes, wherein Kean relates the funny stories, tricks, and other errata that accompany some of the elements. The name of the book, in fact, derives from a popular chemist prank: spoons made of gallium (which melts at just above room temperature) are served with tea or coffee, and dissolve when uses to stir. Often, these quirky stories are simply part and parcel of the discovery of the element itself; a mine near Ytterby, Sweden, produced no fewer than four eponymous elements: Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium, and Erbium; these latter three are all Lanthanides, one of two rows stuck mysteriously at the bottom of the Periodic Table, the way Alaska is shown floating nebulously off to the side of U.S. maps. The Lanthanides and Actinides disrupt the careful lines of the table because of the way electrons behave; the lanthanide series all have to do with the filling of “f-orbitals“, the science of which is beyond me, but which Kean spends no small amount of time explaining. While the f-orbitals are more complicated, the more basic and predictable tenets of electron behavior which govern the chemical properties of elements, such as their propensity to form bonds, are a little easier, and rather important in understanding why the table is arranged the way it is. In this, Kean does the job well enough; it’s difficult writing such concepts for what is essentially a lay audience.

Later elements, of course, necessarily introduce the concept of radiation, and all of the various and grisly stories that go along with it—though Keen tends away from the morbid, eschewing most talk of The Bomb, or the death of the Curies, for instance. Curiously, the race to produce new trans-uranic elements in the lab—even if they exist only for seconds or fractions of a second as they follow a chain of radioactive decay—gets a lot of page space, as Kean brings us up to the state of the art (as of about 2009), which has as much to do with politics now as it did during, say, Germany’s 20th-century dustups or America’s long staring contest with the Soviet Union.

By and large, The Disappearing Spoon is a wonderful little book that is manages to be an entertaining history of the period table and its elements, and a relatively easy [re]introduction to the basic principles of chemistry that make it all happen. I’m a little disappointed that Kean’s history skips over so many primordial elements with their own storied histories and instead focuses a bit too much on the historically-recent quest for synthetic elements, but I suppose that the former has been done before and the latter has not, so perhaps it’s to our benefit that the book mixes historicity with recency.

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason Vuic

The first time I physically remember hearing the Yugo referenced in pop culture was seeing Die Hard with a Vengeance on TV (this must have been 1997 or so, when I was 12 or 13), though I must have known about it before because I laughed: Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson drive a commandeered Yugo down a busy freeway, and when Bruce (John) complains about their pokey pace, Samuel (Zeus) replies “It’s a Yugo; it’s built for economy, not for speed!”

I somehow realized or knew, though I don’t remember how or when I would have learned it, that the word “Yugo” was a punchline for a car only a few steps better than a pennyracer. Jason Vuic’s The Yugo is the story of how the hapless automobile came to be the butt of so many jokes, but also how it ever-so-briefly was a commercial success, and how one enigmatic business was behind it all.

Malcolm Bricklin (born 1939) began his foray into the automotive industry in the 1960s. He made a name for himself by starting an American import company which sold Subaru 360 models to dealers in the United States. To modern readers, this might not seem like a bad idea, but at the time, Subarus were basically matchbox cars, and Consumer Reports labeled the 360 as “The Most Unsafe Car in America”. Bricklin sold his share of Subaru of America, Inc. to his business partner; incidentally, this company would later become a very successful one.

Between the disastrous early days of Subaru of America and the cataclysmic entirety of Yugo America, Bricklin managed to created his own custom car, the Bricklin SV-1, a futuristic car with gullwing doors and an acrylic exterior; 2,854 were manufactured in the mid-70s after Bricklin conned the city of New Brunswick into subsidizing the operation. Bricklin’s habit of making wild, fantastic promises and then completely and utterly failing to deliver are running themes in the story of both Bricklin and the Yugo. It’s very possible that the episode of The Simpsons where Homer discovers a long-lost half-brother (“Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?“) has veiled references to the SV-1, although it probably acts as an umbrella joke for a number of failed car designs.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard...

After the 1979 oil crisis, the 1980s saw the slow return of muscle cars and luxury cars to the American market; prices and sizes crept steadily upward. Bricklin, believing there was a well-defined market for a cheap, small economy car (a blind optimism that would be his downfall), began importing Fiat cars from Italy, but eventually stumbled across a small, cheap export from Yugoslavia, technically transliterated as the Jugo (but pronounced, and eventually respelled, as Yugo). The car was built by the Zastava corporation, a government-controlled automobile manufacturer (and, during the internecine Balkan crisis, briefly and arms manufacturer), in what was then a Communist but not Soviet-block country. To put it succinctly, the Yugo was a copy of a poor Fiat design, made by largely unskilled workers in an environment more concerned about employing everybody rather than increasing quality of efficiency; it was a cheap piece of shit that fulfilled a market niche in a very poor Communist country. That it ever became (ever so briefly) immensely popular in the United States, and thereafter universally reviled and mocked, has a little to do with the fundamentally poor construction of the car and a lot to do with the obstinacy and near-fanatical optimism of its American cheerleader, Malcolm Bricklin.

...they're like, "It's better than yours"....

What many people don’t realize is that despite its current reputation, Bricklin’s imported Yugoslavian turd was, for a very short time, all the rage. Bricklin predicted the market for cheap compact cars—a niche almost entirely unfulfilled in the early 1980s—and he was entirely correct; so when news of a car costing less than $4000 hit, both dealers and consumers clamored to get on the waiting list. The Yugo experiment quickly began to unravel as a couple of things happened. First, the public quickly realized what an unmitigated disaster the car was; even with extensive aftermarket revision, the product coming out of Yugoslavia barely passed minimum U.S. regulatory requirements, and bottomed out on Consumer Reports and other watchdog publication tests. Second, other foreign manufacturers such as Honda and Hyundai began to reenter the compact market with much higher standards of quality, even if it meant a high market price than the excretory Yugo.

Bricklin was eventually kicked out of the company he created with a generous severance package of around $10 million (he was considered too erratic and his history too failure-ridden to attract investors), a move which ruffled his feathers but was much more than he deserved, since the company imploded shortly thereafter. An endless succession of reorganizations, additional loans, and further failures marred the company, and before long their assets were liquidated and the American-Yugoslavian partnership plopped into the gutter of history. Oddly enough, the Yugo itself only stopped being manufactured in 2008; Eastern Europe, with its lax safety laws and continuously-fumbling economy, apparently still had use of such a car until recently.

This all seems a straightforward tale, and it largely is. Even without the benefit of foreknowledge of the Yugo’s demise and infamy, one can quickly determine from Vuic’s exposition that the Bricklin has doomed every enterprise he’s come in contact with. And the notion of a ridiculous subcompact from a struggling Communist country carving a secure niche in the American market is a stretch even without the nearly criminal lack of quality. Vuic’s explanation of Bricklin’s involvement (leadership, if you can call it that), and the details of the Yugoslavian side of the relationship is genuinely informative; certainly, it explained things about the Yugo of which I was unaware. There are stretches however, as Bricklin and his import company keeping kicking the can down the road with more lies and loans, where the narrative becomes monotonous, saved only by the reader’s growing incredulity that such a debacle managed to survive as long as it did.

Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury

If you’re curious as to the strange coincidence that someone named Cadbury is writing a book about the history of British chocolatiers, cease your cogitating: Deborah Cadbury is, in fact, a direct relation of the family which ran the largest chocolate business of the isles, though she is admittedly several steps laterally distant from the immediate chocolate-making family. If, now that you know this, you’re troubled as to the possibility that Deborah Cadbury may not, therefore, be the most reliable narrator, you may once again cool your firing neurons, because I can say with little hesitation that your fears are justified.

Chocolate Wars comes out just as Cadbury, long a staple of British industry, was acquired by Kraft foods in 2010. I can’t say for certain if the book was written in response to the takeover, but Cadbury in her introduction makes no bones about her stance:

This book is a modest challenge to [Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft CEO] and to Kraft. If her wordsa re to be taken as anything more than platitudes, and if Kraft is truly to respect the values of Cadbury, it must understand its particular traditions and history. The story of Cadbury, in a way, is the story of a different kind of capitalism.

This “different kind of capitalism” to which she refers is what she calls “Quaker capitalism”, an umbrella term identifying the successful businesses of 19th-century Quaker entrepreneurs who eschewed massive profits in favor of paternalism. If you remember the less-than-successful planned community of Pullman, Illinois, you understand the basic gist of Cadbury, but while Americans have become leery of planned communities to the failure of many paternal American companies, these sorts of things did work for a long time in Britain, and Cadbury is one of the most successful examples.

The author does not dedicate any verbiage to the origins of consumable chocolate (which, although interesting, is a topic whose scope exceeds that of the book), choosing instead to begin at a time when chocolate consumed in Europe was mostly in the term of cocoa drinks. The undisputed king of global chocolate manufacturer was Nestlé, a Swiss company which got its start selling manufacturing condensed milk and baby formula; to this mix was added first a triumvirate of British manufacturers—Cadbury, Fry’s, and the Taylor Brothers—and later by the American giants Hershey and Mars. So how did Cadbury, at one time the smallest of operations, eventually become the largest chocolate manufacturer on the British isle? Some is luck; some is successful corporate espionage; still some is potentially, as Deborah Cadbury implies, a result of Cadbury’s progressive policies with respect to their employees.

Though told, by and large, in a single narrative, The Chocolate Wars is comprised of two parallel themes: one is the rather mechanical (if creative) expansion of the market for chocolate confections, the scientific or industrial breakthroughs required to satisfy that demand, and the rise and inevitable decline (or rather, subsumption by publicly-traded food conglomerates) of Victorian chocolatiers; the second, though, is a narrative about just what the legacy of such Quaker companies (and, by extension, other long-standing companies not borne of the modern tendency for conglomeration and mergers) tells us about business and what we’ve become as a globe of consumers.

I still don't know what nougat is. Probably for the best.

With respect to the first narrative, Cabury’s book is fine if unspectacular. Cadbury, like other dynastic businesses within its market and without, has a history of by-the-bootstraps work, near-failures, and steady expansion. This linear and rather predictable narrative ends, ingloriously (and the author emphasizes this sentiment) with its merger with Kraft. Consider, for a moment, that between 1824 and 1969, Cadbury was called Cadbury, and made a variety of chocolate confections, mostly famously its “Dairy Milk” bar; in 1969, it merged with a soft drink company, apparently because it provided a short-term profit to shareholders, and from that point it was known as the droll “Cadbury Schweppes plc” until its demerger in 2008, when the soft drink part of its business became the laborious “Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc.” The trail here is clear to see even with Deborah Cadbury drawing particular attention to it; we can watch a simple, prestigious chocolate-making business devolve into a series of financial transactions, marked by names which aren’t indicative of anything except perhaps the umbrella firm which holds them. The notion of shareholders, and a company board acting in the short-term interests of shareholders rather than the long-term interest of the company, is obviously anathema to the livelihood of an autonomous business, and Deborah Cadbury expects us to see this as she does. Most of her narrative, after all, is building up Cadbury as not simply a business, but an institution wrapped up in British nationalism and our rosy-eyed ideals of egalitarian societies and corporate paternalism.

In the second narrative, then, Cadbury’s anti-Kraft sentiment is well-honed and well-placed. It also seems like an inevitability; after all, the successive generations of Cadbury men became less and less Quaker, first consenting to advertising and “fancy boxes”, and then with record profits, expansion, mechanization, and eventually public trading. All of this represents a slow decline into the “modern” economic era, which seems at once coldly sensible and absolutely anathema to the pastoral tale which we’ve been reading, and which our inner selves still want to be common.

There’s a lot to be said for corporate paternalism, especially as relates to the success of firms like Google and modern theories about motivation. The Chocolate Wars doesn’t touch upon them except in the sense that the rise and downfall of Cadbury as an autonomous organization shows us everything that’s good about business, and everything that’s bad about the modern financial system’s approach to them.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester

I’ve been familiar with Simon Winchester only for his two books about the Oxford English Dictionary, namely The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything. I’d made the lazy assumption that Winchester major field of interest was, therefore, dictionaries and language in general. It wasn’t until I picked up Krakatoa that I noticed his bibliography is not only voluminous, but multifarious as well, spanning people, major events, and obviously major publications.

For no particular reason, I happened the other day to be reading reviews of the 1997 film Volcano and its contemporary Dante’s Peak, both summer-blockbuster volcano movies, the latter of which fared slightly better under the critical scorn of volcanologists and the commonsensical layperson, but the former of which was typical studio schlock which played fast and loose with geophysics. Strangely enough, movies like this manage to sell volcanoes short on both ends: despite the way in which the volcano becomes the morbid, leering central actor, they tend to underportray the sheer destructive force and—perhaps even more importantly—the long reach of eruptive effect; at the same time, the caricatured bogeyman the volcano becomes also exaggerates the long build-up and subtle characteristics that are often more important than the loud bang at the end.

The talents of a journalist like Winchester, however, afford us some assurance that the August 27, 1883 explosion of Krakatoa in modern Indonesia, won’t be a tawdry affair. In fact, in keeping proper reverence for the fundamental idea of volcanic eruptions building up over time, Winchester spends no mean amount of time describing everything but Krakatoa. He begins with a history of geology and biology, covering the gradual discovery of tectonic plates, continental drifting, and other mechanistic things which are the ultimate cause of volcanic activity. This is more involved than you might think, and while Winchester’s treatment of geological history isn’t exhaustive, it has invests enough time and supposes enough intellectual curiosity on the part of its readers to avoid thrift with details. It’s followed by a brief history of the acquisition of the Java and Sumatra islands by the Dutch, whose colonial holdings had by this point been otherwise taken by force.

The eruption of Krakatoa is, of course, the pièce de résistance, and while there’s plenty to be said about its violent, fiery throes, the eruption itself was largely as we might expect. On the day when the dam finally broke, the power of the explosion completely disintegrated the small island of Krakatoa, hurled enormous amounts of ash fifty miles into the air, created tsunamis that wiped out whole villages, and generated a soundwave that was heard as far away as Australia. The official reporting by the occupying Dutch tallied the death toll at 36’417.

That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!

Less morbid and exciting but potentially more interesting is the notion that the shockwave from Krakatoa’s final eruption actually reverberated across the global a total of seven times, as though the entire planet was a too-small room and Krakatoa was a bad rock band with a souped-up amp. Think for a minute about the sort of power required to generate a shockwave that will not only traverse the entire planet, but do so seven times. It’s easy for us to visualize the pyroclastic flows (lava), or even the blast of smoke and dash and debris from the summit of a conical volcano (your vanilla science fair variety), but it’s beyond the pale of our imagination and/or intellect to appreciate the scale of forces involved. In a culture wherein a “atomic bomb” is the ne plus ultra of large and destructive forces, does the notion that Krakatoa was equivalent to 13’000 of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima have any real meaning?

Winchester’s tactic, then, is not necessarily to impress upon us the exceptional scale of Krakatoa (though he does that, too), but rather to explain why Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption is important.

It’s not the first; it’s not the last. 1883 is not the first time that the island of Krakatoa or some geological variant of it has erupted; there have been as many as three eruptions in recorded history, and potentially more before that, but we have no real way of knowing. Even more importantly, we can rest assured that despite the apparent finality and resolution with which the island exploded in 1883, the volatile nature of the tectonic plates in that region assure us the formation of more islands and, almost invariably, more eruptions. Out of the metaphorical and potentially literal ashes of Krakatoa have risen its successor island, Anak Krakatoa, which grows 5cm per week. Further eruptions are not a speculation, in fact, as the region has experienced recorded volcanic activity in the intervening years; nothing, however, has come close to matching the 1883 eruption for size or violence.

It was the first major volcanic eruption to occur when relatively fast world-wide communication was a possibility. More important to Winchester, in keeping with his theme of Krakatoa’s eruption as a signal event in a perfect storm of scientific progress, is to point out that Krakatoa’s eruption was the first major calamity to occur in the age of the telegraph. News of the eruption was to reach the Western world (e.g., England, and its papers) within days, which sounds slow in modern terms but was a major achievement for the time. Britain, among other nations, had developed by this point a scientific culture which reacted swiftly to the news (noting, among other things, that their barographs registered the shockwave), even if the geological science which would explain the volcanic liveliness of the region wouldn’t come to fruition for many more years; Though the idea was proposed as early as the 16th century, it wasn’t formalized in any real sense until Alfred Wegener formalized the theory in 1912; even then, the hypothesis was popularly dismissed as nonsense until as recently as the 1950s!

It would be all too easy for the story of Krakatoa be given as a list of casualties, or a loosely-coupled succession of horror stories. This would be, irrespective of its gravity and however accurate, somewhat puerile and narrow in its scope. Though the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa remains the king of the hill in some respects—it’s believe to be the loudest sound in modern history, for instance—it is definitionally not unique. It is fair to say that Krakatoa’s death-spasm simply happened to occur at a particular interesting point in the history of humanity, and our reaction to and presence proximate to this event says every bit as much about our species as it does about volcanology.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

The proposition to create a whole book about what appears a simple and straightforward substance may seem rather daunting. Certainly, one expects that salt could provide a number of amusing or amazing anecdotes, but 500 pages worth? In Kurlansky’s defense, he manages to tell a tale more full-figured than a smattering of interesting errata, but I can’t help but feel as though there was at least 75 pages worth of fluff.

In a move that surprised me, Salt contained very little scientific information about salt beyond a desultory admission of its basic chemistry; to wit, what we call “salt” is actually the compound sodium chloride. Properly, a “salt” is any combination of a metallic element (e.g. sodium, a soft metal) and a nonmetallic element (e.g. chlorine, a deadly gas), and not all of them taste salty. Furthermore, although modern medicine hysteria has fingered sodium as a culprit for hypertension and other ills, the human body needs salt for a number of different things. But beyond these basics, Kurlansky’s focus is very much on salt’s historical and political important, which hinges upon two important points.

For the thousands of years before refrigeration, salt was how people kept food edible. Think about all the foods you currently enjoy which involve some sort of fermentation or brine: pickles, sauerkraut, soy sauce, corned beef, anchovies, etc. Though they are now staples of our diet because we have developed a cultural taste for them (and many of them are damn tasty), they originated not because somebody necessarily thought that putting fresh food and ground up rock in a barrel until it filled with weepy discharge was a good idea for a snack, but because without some way to keep meat and vegetables from decaying, all of our ancestors would have starved to death. It’s difficult to overstate this: without salt, we would not be here. The vital importance of the substance to just about everyone made it a linchpin for governments and societies: governments taxed it as a reliable source of revenue, and people demanded it in larger quantities and lower prices. Gandhi’s famous march to the sea, after all, was about the onerous British salt tax; the French Revolution was—arguably—sparked into life by the long-standing and much-reviled French salt tax, the gabelle.

Eat your heart out, heroin

Salt was a source of revenue and a measure of control for the ruling class. For the very reasons listed above, salt tended to be an important but oft-forgotten player in armed conflict, both internecine and otherwise. Southern salt manufacturing plants in Viriginia and Florida were favorite targets of the Union army during the Civil War, for instance. Although the South lagged behind the North in most supplies and logistical respects, I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that the South’s difficulty in obtaining adequate supplies to salt to feed its troops was a major contributor to its eventual defeat. For as long as salt has been an important component in the preservation of food, its manufacture and distribution has been regulated, taxed, and in many cases monopolized by a single entity given exclusive rights by the government.

Early on, most was was gathering via the complicated process of evaporating sea or marsh water in large, shallow pans and scraping the crust of salt that resulted. Optionally, fire could be used to help the evaporation, but of course that was a lot of energy to expend for a small amount of salt. It was not until historical recency, the mid 19th-century, that large-mining rock salt from quarries or underground mines became cheap; early mines, like the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland (beginning in the 13th century) were dangerous and expensive. The advent of steam power and industrial machinery finally made salt mining viable and drove prices down. The aforementioned Wieliczka mine, for instance, closed down in 1996.

All of this is fascinating and to Kurlansky’s credit. Less fruitful, however, is his insistence upon filling his book with old recipes from various cultures. I can see some merit in including perhaps one excerpt from an ancient Chinese text about the preservation of fish or vegetables using salt. But I don’t exaggerate when I say that the book is full of these recipes, all variations on the same theme, and I fail to see their import to the narrative. To the contrary, they’re distracting and unnecessary, and I can’t understand what motivated Kurlansky to sprinkle them so liberally in what is otherwise an engaging historical treatise.

1776 by David McCullough

I read McCullough’s biography of John Adams three years ago and found it every bit as amazing as the Pulitzer committee did. In the course of describing John Adams’ life, especially his role in the Continental Congress, involved no small number of words about the Revolutionary War; however, Adams being a congressman and not a military man, the martial details of that time period were largely absent from the book.

1776 was, apparently, written as a sort of companion piece to that biography. It’s both trademark McCullough and also somehow disappointing.

I should qualify that last statement by noting I’m not disappointed with the quality of the book, but rather with McCullough’s decision to cover only a single year, and then only the martial aspects of it. He flirts with so many other interesting topics—the signing of the Declaration, for one, as well as the character of George Washington and some of his more dynamic generals—but veers off before covering them intimately because 1776 is by a large a window into the trials and tribulations of the American army; the brilliant acts and enormous blunders of Washington; the overwhelming military power and curious hesitancy of British commanders. This, I find, is disappointing, if only because I could envision 1776 as a book of thrice the length, covering all the topics I would love McCullough to turn his dazzling skills upon.

But what we have is Washington, a rather green general, whose success in Boston in early 1776 was followed by an unbroken string of failures, as his army deserted him, the British snatched New York from under his nose, and he managed to avoid the complete collapse of the rebellion only by dint of repeated retreats. As if the year was tailor-made for the scope of McCullough’s book, however, Christmas of 1776 witnessed Washington’s rather miraculous crossing of the Delaware and capture of 1,000 Hessians (Germany mercenary soldiers) at Trenton, an important symbolic victory that lifted the flagging spirits of the Americans and put wind in Washington’s sails.

Washington had excellent PR people

I’m not exaggerating, however, when I say that the entire middle of 1776 is a savage beating of the American army, and Washington’s competence as a general. McCullough even goes out of his way to describe Washington’s successful retreats as military successes, which generosity perhaps betrays in McCullough the same love for Washington as an icon that all of history has seemed to have for the man, however justified. One gets the sense that our history is as it is because of a fortunate confluence of circumstances. The Bros. Howe, of the British Army and Navy, were conservative, and their wish to spare both British and American lives, if possible, created crucial hesitations which allowed the American army breathing room. A more aggressive strategy by the British would have almost certainly doomed the fledgling rebellion.

McCullough begins his book with George III’s address to congress (this, actually, before his “madness”, likely porphyria, was really an issue, and the monarch was actually quite popular), which is an interesting and important choice. Though much of Britain rallied behind the George’s adamant stance, there was no small measure of displeasure, both popularly and in the houses of Parliament, expressed at the notion of sending warships to America. McCullough doesn’t delve too deeply into the basis for this displeasure, but the reader can ad-lib as necessary: war with America is too costly in money, or in lives; still others may have thought, though certainly they were in the minority, that America deserved to be an independent state if it so desired. The important conclusion to take away is that, despite George’s blustering in Parliament, and the committal of 60,000 combined British soldiers and hired Hessians by 1779, commanding officers on the British side were hesitant to spill too much blood; America was, after all, like Britain’s little brother; Britain had come to America’s aid when it quarreled with France, and France would come (critically) to America’s aid as it quarreled with Britain.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that, disappointingly narrow as it might be, 1776 serves as an illustration of just how precarious the American situation was. It is easy, in retrospect, to ascribe the very existence of the United States to an inherent pluck and indefatigability—Luke demolishing the Death Star and the Emperor both with the Light Side of the Force. But it’s always good to remember just how narrowly and how fortunately the young nation accomplished what it did, when it did, in part because the conflict was, despite what Mel Gibson’s The Patriot might lead you to believe, a time when war was about as civilized as war can be, though of course this isn’t saying much at all.

A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell is known for two things, depending upon the tradition from which you approach him: he’s an early and ardent atheist (perhaps the grandfather of the recent “New Atheist” movement popularized by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett), as made clear in Why I Am Not a Christian. Much less controversially, his contributions as a mathematician and logician (for which see his and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) were perhaps the most important to formal Logic since the early Greeks.

But mathematics and logic were not Russell’s only interests; indeed, he was something of a polymath, and studied/published such various topics as political history, social criticism, and, as we shall see, philosophy. This latter item isn’t necessarily a surprise, or at least it shouldn’t be; while it’s easy for modern readers so far removed from the history of philosophy to think of it in terms of the abstracted and generalized primers we got in college, the origins of philosophy are intertwined with physical science and mathematics—indeed, they’re occasionally indistinguishable.

A History of Western Philosophy sprang from this facet of Russell’s learning, and it was not—then or now—the unmitigated success that Russell’s Principia had been. It was a commercial success, certainly, netting Russell not only a $3’000 advance from his publishers, but a steady income from ongoing sales which lasted throughout his life. The critical reception was decidedly chilly, however. Before talking about what fault Russell’s peers found with his book, it would behoove us to skim over the book itself.

The history of philosophy, at least as Russell has it, breaks down into three overarching categories: the ancient Greeks, both Pre-Socratic and those of the later Socratic traditions; the early [Catholic] Church fathers and the members of the tradition of religious scholarship which flourished between the middle of the first millennium and the early days of the Medieval period; finally, the “modern” philosophers, a rather more disparate category which includes everything from Renaissance philosophers like Erasmus or Descartes to later political philosophers like Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and all the other names you’re more likely to hear.

Russell proceeds more less chronologically, devoting a chapter to each philosopher he deems of note. Some receive more words than others; while some of the earliest Greek philosophers make for little more than summaries, despite their relative influence, it is the heavyweights—principally Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—who receive the most attention, for better or worse. Russell is underwhelmed with Aristotle, believing that the subsequent diminishment of original philosophical thought in deference to his authority is his damning legacy. The author’s opinions are oddly interspersed in the text; one may read for quite some time a straightforward recitation of philosophical before being surprised by a sudden influx of Russell’s own opinions—some of which are valid and argued, and some of which are mere dismissals. Russell’s tendency toward arbitrary omission is aggravating, and seems insufficiently academic for an intellectual of Russell’s stature.

In my mind, the most interest bits of the book were the early church fathers and religious intellectuals, since it’s a subject which tends to get lost. Christian apologetics is weighted so heavily toward more recent writers, and early church history simply isn’t a sexy enough subject to get popular treatment. But I think Russell does a decent job of handling the history, such as the early conflict between the state (Kings, Emperors) and the initial succession of popes, whose legacies range from appropriately holy to positively debauched. Before the pope sat supreme in the Vatican, the institution was a rather more turbulent affair than we modern readers are given to assume. It was in this atmosphere, despite mutual condemnations between the canonical Church and various and sundry heretics, that religious intellectuals generated impressive corpus of philosophical consideration. I include in this august collective not just Christian philosophers, but also notable figures like Maimonides (the preeminent Jewish philosopher). Important, too, is that this period also saw the emergence of Islam, and Russell takes care to tease out the influences that Judaism and early Christianity must have had on the burgeoning new Abrahamic religion. Though he always uses the word “Mohammedan” rather than “Islam[ic]“, it’s also refreshing read about the topic outside our current poison of Islamophobia; though Islam owes most of its foundation precepts (and even large swatches of its holy text) to its predecessors, people often forget just how intimately tied it is to the other major monotheisms.

After many centuries of Pre-Cartesians, Russell finally lands gasping on the near side of the dark ages, where he picks up the early Protestants, and Descartes himself, and proceeds through his own era. Unlike his treatment of, say, Aristotle, most “modern” philosophers receive much shorter shrift by Russell, a phenomenon that appears to exist in clear inverse proportion to their antiquity. Though this was one of the most frequent complaints about the book, it does make more than a little sense; though he often peeks out from behind his wall of intellectual dispassion to editorialize about this or that philosophical precept, Russell is writing a social history, and our ability to judge historical merit grows correspondingly with distance. Is it any wonder that Russell can be so profligate with his words about Aristotle (who Russell thinks is overrated) but so sparing with, e.g., Nietzsche, who’d been dead less than 50 years at the time Russell was writing?

Modern readers must be aware of both the author and the context in which he wrote the book. Russell was an avowed and lifelong pacifist, writing a history of philosophy during the throes of the second World War. He was also a mathematician/logician, and a rather stalwart empiricist, and thus when he produces a tome about the entire history of organized thought on our half the globe, the temptation to dismiss philosophy that encourages violence (Machiavelli, for instance) or does not lead inexorably into the sort of Mechanical Materialism to which Russell at least appears to have subscribed. On the whole, however, Russell has created a compelling and fascinating (if incomplete) collation of western philosophy that still remains an important work more than 50 years later.