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.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter

One of the benefits of being an armchair linguist is that I have absolutely no qualms about veering from, say, Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language or the nominally rebellious but practically canonical works of David Crystal to less academic but infinitely more pleasurable works of dedicated amateurs like Bill Bryson. Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue falls into the latter category (though McWhorter sometimes resembles Crystal in tone), not only because McWhorter is a sort of nuovo-linguist, the sort who would wear sneakers before tweed jackets, but also because this particular book was intended to be a shorter and more information introduction to McWhorter’s sphere… essentially a 250-page brochure for modern linguistics.

Celtic

McWhorter’s particular niche is creole, but this isn’t a book about creole, as it described a time long before any creole we’d be familiar with. In the context of English’s origins—as in, the displacement of native Britons by Anglo-Saxons and Nordic peoples—his driving passion is a defense of the influence of Celtic. There seems to be a resurgence of linguists jumping on this wagon—rightly, I think—lately, among them David Crystal, but because McWhorter is primary a linguist (think grammar) rather than an etymologist, most of his defenses have to do with grammatical and syntactical points than morphological ones. In particular, he cites the pervasive use of the “meaningless ‘do’” in English and the existence of the present participial form (words ending in -ing) as features seen only in Celtic and English and nowhere else, including all the other Indo-European languages which form the vast majority of English’s vocabulary and grammar. For example, in modern English we might phrase a question as

Do we derive any language features from Celtic?

But in every other language which touches English, the question invariably becomes something like:

Derive we any language features from Celtic?

Note that this latter form is grammatically correct English as well, although it sounds old-fashioned, like something out of Shakespeare or a bad actor from Medieval Times. More to the point, however, this latter form communicates the same thing without the odd insertion of “do”. So what does do… do? Not much, but because it happened to be a basic feature of Celtic, it found its way into Welsh and Cornish. Consider McWhorter’s examples from Welsh (English on the left, Welsh on the right, obviously):

Did I open? Nes i agor
I did not open. Nes i ddim agor
I opened. Nes i agor.

There are others, of course, but I won’t describe them all. The “meaningless do” is McWhorter’s favorite, and I think his most compelling argument for rethinking Celtic’s linguistic influence on English. Most histories of the language seem to assume that when mainlanders invading the British Isles, the existing Celts were either wiped out, or integrated so quickly and completely into the invaders’ culture that little trace was left to the posterity of language aside from a smattering of Celtic place names. McWhorter points out, rightly, that this notion is unlikely, the former because of recent DNA evidence which seems to indicate that the British don’t share as much genetic legacy with their neighbors across the North Sea as a genocide/displacement would necessitate, and the latter because historical records seem to indicate the subjugated wealhs (Welsh) as a subservient but nonetheless categorical group. The dark time in America’s history when African blacks were brutally subjugated did not see African culture dissolve, but rather the culture was absorbed to some degree into the host culture.

Semitic

After coming out strong with an excellent section about Celtic, and additional interesting reading about the Nordic influences on English which are neither new nor controversial, the book sags a bit in the middle by switching tacks entirely to talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and why its largely bunkum. You might remember this from Guy Deustcher’s Through the Looking Glass, which is a fuller and more effective treatment. McWhorter’s examination lasts only a chapter, and seems like an odd interlude between his exposé on Celtic and his final chapter on the influence of Semitic (the language family that gives us Arabic and Hebrew) on Proto-Germanic.

This latter notion is new to me, and admittedly it isn’t nearly as compelling as McWhorter’s views on Celtic, but it makes for interesting reading nonetheless. He notes a couple of coincidences. First, the Proto-Germanic feature wherein consonants remain constant while vowels change to case, and he asserts the same pattern holds true in Semitic languages as well. It might be a misunderstanding on my part, but based on what I read in And God Said, this seems like an oversimplification of Semitic word construction, and I’m leery of accepting it on face value. To make a long story short, McWhorter’s hypothesis is that Semitic influenced Proto-Germanic by way of the Phoenicians (and that it was at least partially responsible for the shift described by Grimm’s Law). It’s a bit of a wild swing, though admittedly McWhorter understands this and doesn’t phrase this chapter as boldly as his first, instead opting for a lot of “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…” and “What a strange coincidence that…”.

It’s a rather limp-wristed and unfortunate way to end an interesting little book. Though I like a bit of speculation as much as the next guy, I feel like McWhorter had an excellent 150 pages about Celtic and Nordic influences and wanted to ride that wave to his guesswork about Semitic. And inserted a chapter on Sapir-Whorf just for the hell of it? Maybe to get a round 256 pages? In any case, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue was 50% excellent and 50% simply OK. I will say that it was refreshing to get a purely grammatical treatment of English’s history instead of the usually etymological approach, and I think it shows off McWhorter’s skill as a linguist and a writer. Perhaps one of his other books, such as The Power of Babel, is a more thoroughgoing affair.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief, along with its armful of literary awards, is technically a book for young adults, though, like the best young adult books (see John Green’s œuvre, which includes An Abundance of Katherines), it is really written for adults both young and old. The label may stem in part from the fact that its main character is a young girl; for some reason, stories written about children tend to be immediately dismissed as being written for children as well.

It is also, let us admit, yet another entry about the Holocaust into a very crowded market; more to the point, there are many memorable books about the Holocaust we already have. What new quality does The Book Thief give us?

I mentioned John Green specifically because he has in fact written a review of The Book Thief for the New York Times. I recommend reading the review, if for no other reason than Green’s approach is somewhat mechanical, of a sort which speaks to his experience navigating the fickle border market of young adult fiction.

The Book Thief‘s narrator is none other than Death himself, though we aren’t given to understand his nature aside from the fact that he doesn’t own a scythe, wears the robes for comfort, and is apparently prone to wistful and melancholic contemplation of the human race. And rather obsequious narration of all this. But it’s fitting, I suppose, that a kindler, gentler Death be our tour guide; his relative omniscience gives explanation where necessary, and the nature of his task is the preoccupation of the book. It is about World War II, after all.

Not quite like this.

The narrator, by his own admission, cares little for leaving surprises until the end; he’ll routinely say that this character or that will die at the end of a particular section, and then return to his narration. The “why” and “how” is much more important than the “what”, according to him, which is a common (and, admittedly, true) device that I’ve talked about before. Though the “why” and “how” in Nazi Germany in the middle of the Allies’ bombing campaigns is also considerably less interesting, since most of the “how” that occurs in The Book Thief is dumb, violent misfortune.

In stark contrast to the story, which, though touching, is one of a tempest, Zusak’s prose is structured, elegant, and rich like chocolate. One effect of a narration by Death is that the usual points of distraction are blasé, and one notices the craft with which terrible things are described. That Death, soon after carefully cradling the soul of a suicide, makes his exit “into the breakfast-colored sun”. These sorts of phrases initially seem nonsensical until one actually stops to think just what “breakfast-colored” is; the idea is Zusak’s, but the creation of the color is the reader’s. I love this approach to description; it has the potential for so much more power than if the author does a more straightforward comparison.

At the center of The Book Thief is the book thief herself, Liesel Meminger. When the story opens (after Death’s rather overwrought introduction), Liesel is traveling on a train with her brother and mother to Liesel’s new foster family, and her brother dies quietly in his sleep (we aren’t told from what). Later, at the graveyard, Liesel steals a book called The Gravedigger’s Handbook, for no other reason than she is young and afraid and confused, but this theft, we are told, is but the first of many books that Liesel will ultimately steal. Though Death fails to mention it, he too is a book thief, since he carries with him a book that Liesel is yet to write, which he plucked (will pluck) from a pile of rubble at the book’s end.

Liesel is only eleven; some of the book is dedicated to the typical travails of a young girl in a new place. Bullies and friends, mean teachers, learning to read; if it weren’t for the looming specter of war and the frowning visage of Der Führer, Liesel could just as easily be in Des Moines, Iowa. But there is an undercurrent, which we cannot forget because Death constantly reminds us, of foreboding, which not only stamps the more mundane events with swastikas, but reminds us of promised destruction and death to come. It is reminiscent in style of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, though much less about an imperious youth in summer and more about an imperious youth in a terrifying police state; the particular prose, sometimes bordering on florid, is entrancing, and when such talk about colors is coming, apparently, from Death’s mouth, it’s enough to make us forget that the character-as-narrator is rather impenetrable and not well-used.

Unlike personal accounts of the Holocaust, which might describe 6 or 12 months in the unmitigated horror of a concentration camp, The Book Thief is only obliquely about the Holocaust itself, and only lately a tragedy, most of its unfortunate events packed into the end of the book. For most of its length, it is a character drama, set in a small German town; Hitlerian imagery and hidden Jews are not themselves the story, but mechanisms by which to achieve the story of Liesel Meminger’s growth, and the dispensation or thrift of her affection. It is, to borrow Death’s explanation, about their colors, and the beauty inherent in everything both good and bad. Zusak’s plot, while sprawling, nonetheless feels a little thin and unfulfilling; what saves it in the end is his gift for prose.

Hunting Evil by Guy Walters

It has been more than a half-century since the Nazi rise to power; in that time, the Nazi ideology, its adherents, and its titular leader, Adolph Hitler, have come to be known in a stylized, somewhat exaggerated way. This is not to say that such opprobrium is any way undeserved; while the Nazis may not have been the most imaginatively cruel men to have murdered in the 20th century (regimes such as Pol Pot come to mind), the sheer scale and enthusiasm of their extermination of more than six million noncombatants has made them the favorite secular devil of the popular mind. Hence things like Godwin’s Law and the constant comparisons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Hitler (the former because, I suppose, he’s apparently a warmonger? and the latter because he apparently wants to gas your grandmother).

Needless to say, Nazis hold a certain place in the popular imagination, and for much of the civilized world, we desire nothing more than the application of justice to the outstanding iniquity of the Holocaust. That’s why figures such as Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi-hunter, are so revered, and why books about the topic sell so well.

Simon Wiesenthal

I mention Wiesenthal specifically because Guy Walter’s new book, Hunting Evil, does not treat the man well at all. If I were to summarize Walters’ depiction, in fact, it would be this: Wiesenthal is a pathological liar and braggart whose actual contributions to the capture of fugitive war criminals amount to some tiny fraction of those he claims in his many memoirs This sounds harsh, and as Walters himself notes, it is a dangerous thing to say about a man who became an icon of the Jewish community and therefore a frequent target of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers and other cranks of the worst sort. But, as Walters prefaces and readers come to understand, Wiesenthal’s role in the several-decade hunt for fugitive Nazis was important not because he was personally involved in the capture of Adolf Eichmann (which he claimed, but which is not true), for instance, but because his prominence turned the notion of bringing war criminals to justice into a cause célèbre, when previously it had suffered from governments too cash-strapped or uninterested (read: distracted by the threat of Communism) to devote many resources.

Walters excoriates Wiesenthal frequently in the book, but this is generally a product of Walters’ (impeccable, it must be said) research having to deal with the disparity between apparent fact and Wiesenthal’s popularized fiction. It seems as though every story Walters tells necessarily butts heads with some statement Wiesenthal made either in his memoirs or in a periodical. For this reason, Hunting Evil occasionally seems to vilify Wiesenthal more than seems indicated, but the criticism is usually the same: Wiesenthal exaggerates (or fabricates from whole cloth) his involvement in an event or his knowledge of a situation in order to stroke his ego and boost his fame.

Rats from a sinking ship

No one denies, however, that Wiesenthal was in at least six concentration camps; he was a victim of the Holocaust, to be sure, and his thirst for vengeance was neither unanticipated or unsympathetic. Most of the German officers anticipated reprisal, too, albeit from occupying governments and not vigilante Nazi hunters, so when the war was lost for Germany, a great many SS officers went into hiding, among them Adolf Eichmann (the “architect” of the Final Solution), Josef Mengele (the “Angel of Death”, a doctor who performed gruesome experiments on camp inmates), Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”, a high-ranking Gestapo leader in France). These men were icons of a much larger group of war criminals—a classification which included a lot of officers but few rank-and-file soldiers—some of whom were caught immediately and prosecuted and some of whom fled to South America with the help of a sympathetic network of Germans (especially women), the Catholic Church (especially associated with the fascist Catholic Ustaše regime of Croatia), and some undiscerning Hispanic countries, especially Argentina under Juan Perón.

Curiously, some didn’t go into hiding right away; Barbie worked for several years as a spy for the CIC (U.S. army intelligence), where his lack of punishment was viewed as secondary to the value he brought to the intelligence organization’s fight against the looming Communist threat. It is easy to be shocked at the apparent callousness of this—placing anti-Communist strategy above the fight for justice with respect to the Holocaust—but one must also remember that in the period immediately following the war, the extent and detail of the Holocaust was not well understood; hindsight lends us a great deal of clarity. In any case, the CIC soon disposed of Barbie, but helped him flee to Argentina, and later to Bolivia. It was not until 1983 that he was extradited to France (where the bulk of his crimes against humanity occurred), convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The hunt for these criminals was a mixed success; in some cases, they were caught and put on trial; in others, such as that of Mengele, they managed to evade capture and prosecution for the rest of their miserable lives. To some degree, this reflects that haphazard approach to Nazi hunting that marked those decades: a rather unspirited attempt by most governments (including, it must be said, the United States) was eclipsed by private Nazi hunters such as the Klarsfelds and the aforementioned Wiesenthal (the latter in enthusiasm, if not in results), and in some cases handled by Mossad, the Israeli secret police, who were the responsible party in the case of Adolf Eichmann.

Slightly less than novel

Adolf Eichmann

Followers of Wiesenthals books are accustomed to no shortage of noir-style sleuthing and derring-do; to this general category of fantastical (if not downright fictional) publications, add a whole subgenre of Nazi thrillers, kickstarted by Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File. Much of it revolves around fugitive Nazis and underground movements, not least of which is ODESSA, perhaps the most infamous of Nazi networks.

As Walters shows, not only is the ODESSA network purely a myth, but the process of Nazi hunting was not nearly as exciting or novel as its popularizers made it out to be. The rate of success was relatively low, and that usually done with tedious paperwork and requests through diplomatic channels. Perhaps only Eichmann’s abduction from Argentina breaks this mould. Though little known immediately after the war, Eichmann become one of the most sought-after Nazis once his role in the Final Solution came to be known, and Wiesenthal began writing about him at length, and was the only fugitive Nazi tried by the state of Israel after his kidnapping by Mossad. Only Martin Borman captured the popular imagination more, and only then because he actually died in 1945 and became the Nazi “Elvis”, spotted just about everywhere.

It becomes almost too easy, when Walters writes about Eichmann’s life in Argentina, to forget that he is an escaped Nazi and one of the masterminds behind the slaughter of more people than I can realistically visualize. He has a family, after all, a wife and children; he works several jobs; he has health problems. He is only brought to justice once entire decades separate his crimes and his capture. It wouldn’t be fair to say that one begins to sympathize with him, but one feels lulled into a false forgetfulness abruptly terminated by a trial long overdue (Eichmann is ultimately found guilty and hanged, the only man to receive the death penalty in a civil case).

Implications

There are two questions that arise from Hunting Evil, one of which Walters more or less asks, and one which he doesn’t. The first is the notion that when Walters writes his book, any remaining Nazi fugitives are now oct- or nonagenarians. Efraim Zuroff, Wiesenthal’s spiritual successor, says “The truth is we have maybe five or six years left to get these former Nazis before they are all dead”. To some, that means an evasion of justice for their crimes, however distant; to others, it represents a large investment of manpower and money to apprehend ailing senior citizens who may die before ever being tried. One may sympathize with this latter viewpoint more if it hadn’t been the popular viewpoint when the fugitives were younger, too.

The second question is one implicit, I think, to all discussions of the Holocaust, and it is raised most famously by (whom else?) Simon Wiesenthal, in his book The Sunflower. Ostensibly, he (a prisoner in a concentration camp) to the bedside of a dying Nazi, who asks his forgiveness for having killed some three hundred Jews in a single day. According to Wiesenthal, he was so disgusted he walked out without saying a word. Given Wiesenthal’s track record with tall tales, such an event may or may not have occurred, but the book is famous for asking a tremendously difficult question: can you forgive a Nazi? One assumes that the Nazi must regret his crimes; certainly Barbie and Eichmann never appeared to, and so Hunting Evil doesn’t enter into that debate, but I think any reader doing any research into the Holocaust is obliged to read both books.