You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News by Cracked.com

In my review of John Dies at the End, by Cracked’s pseudonymous senior editor David Wong, talked briefly about how the resurrected humor magazine’s new online format works surprisingly well. I find it consistently funnier than, say, The Onion, whose satire is more biting but which I find terribly formulaic.

The relative success of the new website and its list-based articles eventually spurred the editors to do what most successful humor websites eventually do: take their existing content, add a couple of new pieces, and attempt to sell it to fans that have already read the material online. See Stuff White People Like and Maddox’s The Alphabet of Manliness for just two examples.

As an admitted (casual) fan of the website, my critique of You Might Be a Zombie‘s contents will obviously not be negative: if you’re familiar with the contents of the website, then you’ve already read 90% of the book.

On the real Cracked.com, this would have a funny caption

I can say that I am disappointed but not surprised that Cracked‘s use of stock images and witty captions was excised—since, of course, grabbing stuff from a Google Image search might fly on a website, but doesn’t quite pass muster in the publishing industry. Though the writing at Cracked tends to be good anyway, one of the best parts is this sort of contrapuntal style. Though the writing is the same, the transition to book format simply isn’t lossless.

You’ll notice, too, the crass (but, we’re talking about a humor website, so who cares about crass?) way in which Cracked names the book from a single article about zombies, I suppose hoping to tap into the current zombie zeitgeist that Max Brooks unleashed on the world with The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. The whole enterprise just seems a little half-assed and unfortunate; I can’t blame them for trying to make money with a book, but I say rather firmly that you’re much better off just reading the website.

For those unfamiliar with the website, however, a typical Cracked article follows the format “[Number] [Thing]s [Shocking Qualifier]“. For instance, “Five Awesome Things You Didn’t Know Were Making You Sick”. It doesn’t pull the same sort of shenanigans that the nightly news does, where, e.g., they’ll warn you to tune in at 11 to find out how your washing machine might kill your children, and then it turns out to be that putting a child in a washing machine and running it through a cycle can be fatal—who knew?—and you feel cheated and stupid for ever thinking that your local news has anything interesting to say.

No, the writers in this book have a little more dignity than that, though of course one should take everything with a grain of salt. You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News has no citations for any of its information; the website, at least, is littered with hyperlinks, though they tend to be to obscure references in Google Books or etc., so often the [Shocking Qualifier] about [Thing] is a bit dubious. As I mentioned, the allure of Cracked is its irreverence, well-timed and well-put captions, and laugh-out-loud humor; if you want sterling factual content, go read Snopes or The Straight Dope, or arm yourself with a grain and salt and go down the rabbit hole that is Wikipedia.

For fans of Cracked, I would encourage you to seek out new content by bespoke writers. Robert Brockway, for instance, who is represented in this collection, has an existing book (Everything is Going to Kill Everybody) and is currently self-publishing a sci-fi novel in episodes (Rx). David Wong, author of the zombie article for which this omnibus is named, wrote John Dies at the End (the sequel for which is coming out later this year). These are likely to be a better use of your time that the You Might Be a Zombie itself.

Super Mario by Jeff Ryan

We were a Sega household growing up; I’m not sure what drove my parents to wrap up a Genesis one Christmas instead of a Nintendo, but my childhood was nonetheless more about Sonic the Hedgehog than Mario the “plumber”. That being said, we had no shortage of interaction with Nintendo products either before or after, generally playing them at friends’ houses. Or, as was the case for a number of years, occasionally renting an original NES from the video store for the weekend.

It was impossible to avoid Nintendo’s cultural impact in the late 80s and most of the 90s, even as other manufacturers began to make inroads into the console market; and far from being simply a video game company, Nintendo cultivated a brand that included magazines, mail order merchandise, and a two-hour commercial called The Wizard. And while Nintendo had various hits, and its name alone could sell swag, its name was intrinsically linked with a little Italian named Mario Mario.

Super Mario (the book) is a history of Nintendo, but its narrative linchpin is Mario, who represents its sudden rise from a card game company to the largest video game maker in the world, its eventual decline as a stodgy moralist in an emerging market of dark and violent games, and its ongoing resilience despite everything.

Seriously, this guy's worth about a billion dollars

Of critical importance is the young (in 1981) Shigeru Miyamoto, a student designer who was assigned to work on a product that would eventually become Donkey Kong, now a classic but then something of a gamble. Though some people forget, the character of Mario was first introduced in Donkey Kong, not in the later Super Mario Bros. game for NES; the time, rather than a plumber named Mario, he was a carpenter named Jumpman. Miyamoto eventually became the creative mind behind not only Donkey Kong, but also the entire Mario franchise, as well as the Zelda, Star Fox, and F-Zero franchises. In other words, it’s startling how much of Nintendo’s early dominance and overall success in the video game market is directly attributable to the work of a single man.

But so it is, largely because Miyamoto has a knack for creating not only iconic characters, but engaging gameplay; there have been missteps of course, such as his decision to make the original Super Mario Bros. 2 so difficult that a totally different version had to be released in America. It’s tough to say in retrospect which is worse: the insanely difficult original, or the turnip-throwing substitute, replete with a gender-confused, egg-spitting dinosaur.

Nintendo became largely a victim of its own success. Its rise to power in the video game market coincided with a national panic about the corrupting influence of video games and their content, given voice by the hapless Senator Joe Leiberman; Nintendo, already infamous for its strict policies about game content, felt comfortable pointing to itself as a family-friendly company whose games were largely appropriate for all ages, and contained little in the way of controversial content. That this tactic was successful doubtless cemented the wisdom of the policy in the minds of Nintendo execs.

But a funny thing happened in the latter half of the 1990s. Nintendo, resting comfortably on its laurels, didn’t push forward with technology, and the end result was an exodus of developers from Nintendo’s cartridge-based N64 to Sony’s new Playstation (and later Microsoft’s XBOX). At the same time, the kids who cut their teeth on Mario were now growing up, and no longer wanted family-friendly video games, but rather war simulations, violence, sex, and all the wonderful R-rated stuff that we’ve become so used to. Because Nintendo still firmly abided by its strict content policies, it once again missed the boat, and its place in the market faltered. Even its 5th-generation console, the Gamecube, stuck to a proprietary disk, and once again failed to impress most reviewers.

Nowadays, the console marketed is dominated by talk of the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 and all of the massive, immersive games available for them. Nintendo’s current-generation offering, the Wii, was much-derided at its launch for being underpowered, and for its library of games once again skewing toward children and families.

You've come a long way, baby

And yet… as of 2012, the Wii has moved about 95 million units; the XBox 360 is in second with 66 million, and the PS3 in third 59 million. This, despite all the jawing about the Wii being a niche console, or its game library too narrow, is the strength of Nintendo: its brand still moves units, and it manages despite its foibles to stay successful in a market it no longer easily dominates.

It’s a precarious existence: Miyamoto is so treasured that he is not allowed to ride his bike to work for fear that he’ll be killed in a traffic accident. It’s difficult to say just how Nintendo would fare if Miyamoto vanished tomorrow; they certainly have a built-up stock of intellectual property, but game makers must continually look ahead and innovate or they will be trampled in the forward march of progress.

That Mario has lasted so long is a testament to the lovability of the character and the long-lasting impact of the games (and their place in history as some of first mass-market video games), even after a number of missteps such as Mario-based education games. It also underlines the fact that there is no substitute for a love of craft and good design when it comes to video games. For all the hundreds of Mario clones and generic platformers, none have captured the same visual design, control, and cultural mania that Mario has. As a metonym for Nintendo as a whole, Mario has served Ryan’s narrative admirably.

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.

Half Empty by David Rakoff

Four years ago, I read David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable, a book of collected essays. Rakoff, an out gay man, reads like a more curmudgeonly and hyperliterate version of David Sedaris, like the bastard love-child of Sedaris and Chuck Klosterman. Years later, Rakoff’s next book, Half Empty, capitalizes on his dark worldview by offering a series of loosely-connected essays in defense of the notion that pessimism is not all bad.

Half Empty doesn’t offer any central thesis, per se; there’s no stated hypothesis. I assumed, in fact, that it was simply a small collection of previously-written essays which all simply captured the dour, comic voice of a middle-aged, openly-gay Jewish cancer survivor. Oy! The book begins by noting Julie Norem’s The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, a 2002 book that defends pessimism as a natural—indeed, smart—defense mechanism, by preparing for the worst and causing its practitioners to analyze circumstances and events more carefully than their bubbly, optimistic peers. Rakoff said in an interview on The Daily Show, however, that Half Empty was, in fact, an engineered defense of pessimism. It is “essentially about pessimism and melancholy. All the other less than pleasant to feel emotions that because they are less than pleasant to feel have been more or less stricken from the public discourse but in fact have their uses and even a certain beauty to them”, according to an interview with The Daily Californian.

One important thing to note about Rakoff is that his writing style is, despite his frequent comparison to David Sedaris, far more literate and intellectual. Consider this passage (a single paragraph) from a section about Salt Lake City, Utah:

It’s a paradoxical feeling to have in the City of the Saints, since the streets of Salt Lake City are a steppe-like 132 feet wide. This breadth was decreed by Brigham Young so that a team of oxen and a covered wagon might be able to turn around in a full circle unimpeded. (An almost identical pronouncement was attributed to Cecil Rhodes when he was overseeing the layout of the city of Bulawayo in Rhodesia. Is this bit of hypertrophic urban planning just a standard issue paleo-Trumpism? One of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nineteenth-Century Men with Big Ideas?) The avenues yawn open, human proximity is vanquished, and the nearest people seem alienatingly distant. Such space between souls, such an uninterrupted vista of sky must imbue a populace with a sense of possibility—lebensraum and all that jazz. And yet, walking back to the car from the Castle of Chaos, I think of these teenagers, and they couldn’t look more fettered—a world away from the crowds at the Gatewall Mall, a bi-level outdoor shopping center constructed to look like an Umbrian hill town (if Umbrian hill towns had California Pizza Kitchens). If landscape shapes character, then it is never more clear than here, where I encountered the closest thing resembling a crowd in Salt Lake City. People, many of them in Halloween costumes, stroll eight abreast like one of Brigham Young’s mythic team of oxen, never moving faster than the speed of cold honey. I have never been in a public space in America where a sense of how to walk among others was so completely and confoundingly absent. People stop abruptly, cut across lanes, and generally meander as blissfully unaware as cows in Delhi.

Look at the key components of this paragraph: invocation of a “paradox”; a reference to a short-lived African state and its magnate founder; a sarcastic invocation of a pop-psychology idea with a popular historical reference; a hyphenated neologism skewering a modern businessman; a pretentious and controversial use of a German phrase; an invocation of an underrecognized geographical region of Italy; a reference to historical/mythical Mormon culture; and a reference to the protected status of bovine mammals in Hindu India. That’s a lot of references for a single paragraph, and yet it’s not a rare occurrence for Rakoff, who likes to couch so much of his relatively mundane subject matter with references and allusions to things which are—in fairness—much more interesting.

Still... bitchin' beard

In a turn of events so twistedly appropriate it could not have been planned, Rakoff—a survivor of Hodkins lymphoma in his 20s—was diagnosed with a malignant in his neck during the writing of the book. This revelation and its aftermath comprises the lengthy ending segment at the end of Half Empty, and ultimately one could disregard the entirety of the book except the opening chapter (wherein Rakoff introduces the pessimism-as-defense-mechanism hypothesis) and the last, and the resulting questions to the reader are positively delicious.

First, is it any more appropriate for a author promoting pessimism to be diagnosed with cancer while writing it? Never mind that the actual diagnosis of a malignant tumor (a very slight chance, according to his doctor, who assured him it was likely benign) seems to validate Rakoff’s downcast worldview; imagine for a moment that Rakoff was not already a cancer survivor, and that he had considered his symptoms (pain in the arm, which he noticed after working out) a mild and minor ailment rather than the possible harbinger of a potentially-fatal ailment? Would he still be alive at the time of this writing? And how does a dominantly-negative worldview affect the treatment and recovery of a two-time cancer patient, in a medicinal niche all-too-often dominated by a tired clutch of slogans about “hope”? I’ve talked about this notion before with a friend (in particular, a friend whose father has since been diagnosed with multiple myeloma) who disparages the emphasis on “hope” as a shortcut which avoids the necessary long and hard slog through invasive and terrible treatment, and which undercuts the pragmatism necessary for making decisions which afflicted with a potentially-fatal ailment.

As for the middle chapters of the book, they constitute typical Rakoff fare: they are excellent self-contained pieces, though their inclusion as stepping stones in a book governed by an “organizing principle” (Rakoff’s phrase) isn’t necessarily so much a body of argument as it is a typical body of work by Rakoff. This isn’t surprising: how does one justify one’s own worldview via journalism without, essentially, sounding as one normally does? It is impossible for familiar readers of Rakoff separate argument from author.

For all that, of course, Rakoff remains an impressive journalist, whose breadth of knowledge—and the balls to invoke such knowledge in his work—seems to surpass that of the aforementioned Chuck Klosterman, and without the sniveling pop-culture apologism. Rakoff is an old-school cynic, just old enough to be curmudgeonly and old-fashioned without going Andy Rooney on us. It’s a niche too often unfulfilled between the aged network journalism group and the up-and-coming MTV generation of cultural descriptivists that dominate journalism today.

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 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.

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ recent diagnosis of cancer is bad news for all the readers who appreciate his profound and prolific output as a writer of political journalism, social commentary, and literary review (this latter, naturally, encompassing both the former). A man who “writes faster than most people talk” naturally generates no small œuvre. Hitchen’s last book of collected writings was Love, Poverty, and War in 2003, and it’s no surprise that Arguably, his latest compendium—and morbidly, the last which will not be posthumous—is a hefty eight-hundred pages of essays hand-picked from Hitchens’ various media—Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and no few introductions to reissued classics—without likely exhausting the pool.

The topics selected here, of course, tend away from his articles for Slate which are more topical, and would not fare well when several years removed from their source. More impressive to me, as always, are Hitchens’ monthly literary reviews for The Atlantic and his various and sundry topics of criticism for Vanity Fair. In this respect, of course, one does not even need to buy the book; most of the essays reproduced here are still viewable online, with the exception of his introductions to published books. But it’s easy, especially given The Hitch’s prolificacy, to overlook the significance of this particular set of essays plucked from the much larger corpus. More interesting than any individual essay itself, perhaps, is the fact that it is in this collection at all.

All American

The entries in Arguably are grouped loosely by some shared subject or quality. First in queue is a series of pieces about [in]famous Americans, ordered roughly by chronology. Some are old Hitchens hobby-horses, including Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; another chronicles Jefferson’s handling of the (Muslim) Barbary pirates as a way of presaging the current global problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Even more interesting than this, perhaps, or because Jefferson in particular and the Founding Fathers in general are hardly untrod territory, are his essays about Twain—at least obliquely, as the main thread of the essay is Hitchens’ excoriation of Fred Kaplan—and Vladimir Nabakov as revealed by the famously transgressive Lolita.

Some of these topics are simply here because they are Americans by nationality. Others seem to be here because they say something distinctly American; there is no surprise that Hitchens’, early a socialist and lately a something, should find no small import in the topic of Upton Sinclair, perhaps the most famous of early American socialists, and the way in which his points of issue are persistent… for which see Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), not necessarily for the gruesome details of figurative and literal sausage-making, but for dwelling on “those whose lives are lived at the point of production”.

Eclectic Affinities

The next section strikes me as miscellany, or a dumping ground for essays that would not go easy into that dark category. Incidentally, however, it contains some of Hitchens’ best pieces of this anthology. Of particular note are his treatment of Dr. Samuel Johnson (he of the first appreciable dictionary) in a review of Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography; a review of an poetic anthology by Philip Larkin, whose contribution to the world of poetry is perhaps critically underappreciated because he is more infamous than famous.

There’s a customary piece on Animal Farm (Orwell is never far from Hitchens’ pen), but even more interesting is a historical piece about Karl Marx’s early career as a journalist (the lens through which Hitchens reviews a compendium of Marx’s early work), before he became better known as a social philosopher of sorts. Hitchens finds it fascinating, as I do, to see the germ of Marx’s later calling present in his journalism: Marx’s targets tended to be the suppression of free inquiry and the maltreatment of the lower class of the sort that typified the mid-to-late 19th century. I can imagine that Hitchens himself must feel some intimate connection to this topic, as the germ, if not the later sprout, must have been at the root of his own early attachment to British socialism, and his lifelong distaste for tyranny.

Amusements, Annoyances, and Disappointments

I would categorize this section as the humorist in Hitchens, or at least Hitchens at his most playful, for it not for the inclusion of a somewhat more serious piece about the late Stieg Larrson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels. Others are sufficiently lighthearted, notably Hitchens’ controversial piece on why he thinks women simply aren’t as funny as men unless they’re lesbians, but also (among others) a piece on political sex scandals in the wake of Larry “Wide Stance” Craig‘s rather public debacle, a scathing denunciation of Prince Charles, and, oddly enough, a well-worded rant on how much Hitchens hates it when waiters at upscale restaurant presume to pour wine that a table has already purchased.

Offshore Accounts & Legacies of Totalitarianism

A much longer section—no surprise given the subject of Hitchens’ contemporary journalism—deals with foreign policy, much of it having to do with the “Axis of Evil” and associated actors, including North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. One notable inclusion is the tale of Hitchens experience with waterboarding, wherein the journalist—a staunch support of the invasion of Iraq, remember—concludes quite definitely that the experience constitutes torture… this at a time when conservatives all over the map were falling over themselves to, at best, declare it “harsh interrogation” or some other sickly euphemism or, at worst, make barely mask their disappointment that America isn’t doing much worse. Hitchens’ essays on the Middle East are very much in line with his public appearances and other essays, and not of particular note. More interesting is his essay on the Jewish lobby and the latent anti-Semitism which is still disturbingly widespread; or his more general view of humanitarian intervention, which helps to illuminate the underlying ethos that informs his political and social positions.

It would be easy to say that Middle East foreign policy has come to dominate Hitchens’ writing in the last few years; more accurately, it has come to dominate his TV appearances while the War in Iraq was still big news and before his phase as an outspoken atheist took over following the publication of God Is Not Great. In his writing, Hitchens remained as global as ever, and his aversion to totalitarianism remained as consistent as ever, whether near the fertile crescent or not; hence the inclusion of his thoughts on Vietnam, Cuba, Tunisia, and postwar Germany. There were those on the Left who puffed up their plumage and got very offended when Hitchens became perhaps the most vocal and eloquent proponent of military intervention in Iraq, and it seemed somehow incongruous with his leftist history. But one can easily see a thread which has informed all of Hitchens’ positions, including his apparently strange stance on Iraq, and which persists today in other locales as well.

The next section (“Legacies…”) deals again with foreign policy, but through the lens of literary reviews, including books about or reviews of Victor Klemperer, Isabel Allende, and Arthur Koestler. Because the locus of these reviews ends up being less about the book and more a lesson in history and Hitchens’ own opinion about the foreign policy involved, it once again makes sense that these essays directly follow his collection of essays which deal more immediately with his political ideals and foreign policy implications.

Words’ Worth

The final section, and the one which stands out as my personal favorite, deals both with words and the rights to use them. This latter topic touches upon such obvious and contemporary issues as the Danish cartoons lampooning Muhammad and the violence of response, or the autography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali apostate who became active in Dutch politics and now works at the American Enterprise Institute).

With a lighter heart, Hitchens touches upon the foibles of language, such as the rise of “like” as a filler word for young adults, or the particularly British phrase “fuck off”, and ends with a rather poignant piece about the accumulation of books in his apartment, which (though written in 2008, before the news of his cancer) seems as though it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the acceptance of death. The accumulation of books—of knowledge—either read or unread, known or unknown, and the realization that one cannot finish or store them all.

Like all compendia, Arguably has crests and troughs, some absolute and some arising from the reader’s judgment. Of no departure from history, and of no surprise to longtime readers, this collection embodies the best and worst about Christopher Hitchens: an acerbic wit, a vast hunger for knowledge, a boastful bit of pride, a decent, solid, but occasionally old-fashioned worldview, a stubborn but consistent political worldview, and incredibly talent for wordsmithing, and a mind with few equals in this generation. It’s difficult to say, as of December 2011, just how much longer Hitchens will be around, but Arguably is another volume of examples, as if we needed any, why he will be sorely missed when he’s gone.

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.

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick

Social Engineering was my hobby horse as an undergraduate IT major; I say this as though I’m an old veteran of the IT industry, but I’m not—I’m a fresh-faced, startup-mentality programmer. One of the reasons I always focused on social engineering in my various papers and projects, however, is I was exposed early to the idea of Kevin Mitnick. This isn’t to say I was particularly familiar with his exploits, or even well-versed in the technology of his area, but the notion that you could con your way into systems without necessarily programming or “hacking” was easy enough to understand.

At the time Kevin David Mitnick dominated the national news, there was no first-person narrative available for consumption. Prior to his conviction, of course, Mitnick would not publish a book of his exploits; after his conviction, one of the restrictions placed upon him was an inability to profit from books or films about his hacking for seven years. In the meantime, several books came out from journalists of varying proximity to Mitnick himself. One was Jonathan Littman’s The Fugitive Game, a narrative crafted in part from Littman’s conversations with Mitnick while he was on the run from the FBI. The other is Jonathan Markoff’s Takedown, which is a largely sensationalistic work with as much fiction as fact; Markoff, as it happens, was a New York Times reporter who was responsible for most of the hysteria and a lion’s share of the misinformation about Mitnick in those years. The idea that Mitnick had access to secret NSA databases, or that he’d hacked into NORAD, or that—as one prosecutor actually said in court—he could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, was largely the invention of Markoff the Fabulist and the long trail of phone company stooges that Mitnick left writhing and thrashing in his wake.

zomg hacker!

Ghost in the Wires is the first attempt by Mitnick to tell the story of those turbulent years in his old words. On the one hand, this means that we can avoid any speculation and hearsay; on the other hand, it’s a convicted felon writing about his years performing felonies. I’m not familiar with all of the laws in this regard, but it’s possible—hell, likely—there are arrestable offenses that Mitnick committed that nobody knows about. It’s unlikely that Ghost in the Wires contains any revelations, but at least we can expect it to be better than Takedown.

Our popular conception of hacker emphasizes their technical skills; we picture strange men in dark rooms interpreting binary code and issuing cryptic commands into a command-line prompt; coding malware in C and Assembler; sniffing TCP/IP packets and cracking encryption keys. Certainly, there’s an element to hacking which involves all of these things. There’s also an element, at least in Kevin Mitnick’s case, which involves fraud and impersonation and blustering into order to trick and manipulate one’s way into systems, rather than managing the entire feat via technological skills alone. Many modern writers tend to forget, when writing about Kevin Mitnick, that he was a very skilled technologist; because so many of his “hacks” involved simple impersonation, it’s easy to forgot that he was an adept at hacking computer systems programmatically, especially when it came to the de rigueur enterprise system of that time, DEC’s VMS. Ghost in the Wires reminds us that, though social engineering was often used to acquire information, or access to a system, technical expertise was needed to do anything with that access.

It’s been hypothesized (see Douglas Coupland’s JPod for mention of the subject within a fictional narrative) that the programming or technical community has a higher-than-average incidence of autism-spectrum disorders, simply because of the way disorders like Aspergers tend to emphasize concentration and technical ability. For a hacker like Kevin Mitnick however, such a diagnosis is impossible; as he himself mentions, his real skill as a hacker came from his ability to speak boldly with strangers while impersonating system users and to modify his story on the fly. Stutterers and bashful speakers need not apply when it comes to calling Nokia in Finland and pretending to be one of their U.S. engineers.

I see three main points to take away from Ghost in the Wires that are interesting and/or important:

It sucks to be one of the first well-known hackers in popular culture. Preceding Kevin Mitnick’s rise to infamy was Kevin Poulsen, perhaps the first “hacker” in the modern, pejorative sense of the term, to be arrested with national attention. But Mitnick captured the media attention in a way that, I think, has yet to replicated. His exploits came at a time when our culture was just young and naïve enough to believe just about anything told to them about technology, but invested enough in this whole “Internet” thing to be frightened by the possibilities. He was a scapegoat, at the right time; I would say “with the right crimes”, but of course most of the public panic about Mitnick’s abilities was based upon fairy tales.

Technical expertise or no, the ability to bullshit well is paramount. Technical brilliance will only get you so far in life; to achieve anything truly impressive requires bridging the gap between what can be accomplished with computer code and the real-life (personnel security, physical security, security through obscurity) obstacles in the way. This is also a frightening proposition for CIOs and network administrators, because it underscores what is still the case just about everywhere you go: people are the weak link in your security. Forget about that unpatched Apache flaw, or SQL injection, or overly-broad permissions—actually, don’t forget about them: they’re still important—because even a perfect technical system is meaningless when employees distribute credentials without performing the same sort of identification, authentication, and authorization steps that any decent information system implies.

Kevin Mitnick without an FBI manhunt might still be a minimum-wage worker. What happened to Kevin Mitnick was ridiculous. I don’t mean that Mitnick should necessarily have escaped punishment for hacking, as technically he did commit fraud and intrusion; however, the charges levied against him were farcical and largely fabricated; his five or so accumulated years spent in prison, including a long stint in solitary confinement, an injustice. The hysterical hue and cry in the media who latched onto the salable story of Mitnick-as-terrorist is an indictment of the journalists involved and the slavering readership who pay money for salacious sensationalism. All of that being said, one could argue that without an FBI manhunt, high-profile court case, and front-page coverage, Kevin Mitnick might still be a poor loser working Tier 1 tech support by day and hacking for fun at night. Instead, he’s now at the helm of a thriving security consultancy and manages a busy schedule of corporate speaking engagements. A worthwhile trade-off? Hard to say, and though Mitnick recognizes the irony, he doesn’t make any easy statements as to whether he’d do anything different; as readers, we end up not being sure what we think, either. It’s not satisfying in that regard, but at least Mitnick respects our intelligence.

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.