Books I'm Reading: American Eclipse and The Education of a Coroner

I've recently finished two books—David Baron's account of the total solar eclipse visible across much of the American West in 1878, The American Eclipse (Liveright, 2017) and The Education of a Coroner (Scribner, 2017). The 1878 eclipse path stretched from the northern tip of Idaho to the heel of Louisiana. Author Baron suggests the eclipse offered the first opportunity to show skeptics that American scientists could hold their own against more seasoned investigators in Britain and Europe, and it was the first total solar eclipse widely visible in the Western United States since the nation's founding, according to the book (although there appears to have been a total eclipse on August 7, 1869 with a path that stretched from Alaska to North Carolina; perhaps that eclipse came too close to the end of the Civil War for much to have been done about it), but as many as one hundred expeditions were organized to view the 1878 eclipse.

Baron focuses on three groups of eclipse viewers. One was organized by astronomer James Watson, known as a planet hunter (more precisely, as discoverer of asteroids), who appears to have been chiefly interested in the opportunity the eclipse seemed to present to see the planet Vulcan, said to orbit the sun inside the orbit of Mercury (he claimed to have seen it; the claim proved a distraction to the pursuit of astronomy for many years subsequently). Another group was led by Maria Mitchell, a pioneer among women interested in the heavens. The third group included inventor Thomas Edison who was eager to gain the respect of serious scientists. He brought with him his "tasimeter," a hyper-sensitive heat-detecting invention with which he hoped to measure the heat of the sun's corona during the eclipse (it proved a failure).

Trips into remote parts of Colorado and Wyoming presented numerous difficulties. All the groups had to put up with primitive accommodations, while Maria Mitchell and her all-female entourage (primarily gifted students of astronomy she taught or had taught at Vassar) had the additional burdens of dealing with prejudice against the undertakings of a woman scientist and of trying to locate equipment lost by a railway company more interested in a feud with a competitor than it was in locating luggage critical to her investigations (ultimately recovered in the nick of time). Edison garnered far more attention in the press than Mitchell, despite her credentials.

Although the book seemed a bit anti-climactic as it devotes little space to the eclipse itself (being focused on the events leading up to the event), it appears to have been meticulously researched and it is well written and entertaining. Recommended.

John Bateson's The Education of a Coroner, subtitled "Lessons in Investigating Death," presents a selection of cases handled over the years by Ken Holmes, who worked for 36 years in the Marin County Coroner's office, starting as a death investigator and ending his career as the county's coroner. The case studies involve everything from obscure but intriguing incidents such as the discovery of a Golden Gate Bridge suicide with no labels in his clothes and no suicide note who was identified only by chance more than twenty years after his body was found to a few high-profile cases, such as the case of the so-called  Trailside Killer, whose first victim was found on a Mt. Tamalpais trail in 1979.

Beyond the case studies, the book is interesting for the procedural details it gives, for its look into how coroners operate in general, for its local focus (many of the locations discussed will be very familiar to residents of Northern California and San Francisco), and for its look at how politics impinged on the career of Mr. Holmes. Worth the time.

Books I'm Reading: To Cork or Not to Cork

When I open a bottle of wine, I usually look at the cork, if the wine has a cork. I look at it mostly to see what might be printed on the cork, what condition the cork is in, and, secondarily, to see what kind of cork it is. I've noticed over the years that there are many types--natural cork, composite corks of various description, composite corks with natural cork disks on the ends, and a number of styles of plastic corks. Then there are screw caps. What's the ideal closure for a bottle of wine?

Everyone seems to hate plastic corks. My own experience with them has been negative--particular the kind that is a single block of molded or extruded plastic. They can be exceedingly difficult to extract and they are so stiff that it's virtually impossible to re-close a bottle with a plastic cork. Plastic lacks cork's resilience, and, according to Taber, plastic corks don't seal very well. They tend to allow air to leak into the wine.

The main problem with corks has been taint with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA, and a few related chemicals, which, even in the tiniest quantities (as little as two to three parts per trillion is detectable by some people; virtually anyone smells the tell-tale mousy, cardboard scent of a tainted cork at about 12 parts per trillion), can ruin a bottle of wine--often many years after purchase, by which time the buyer has no recourse.

In his book To Cork or Not to Cork (Scribner, 2007), author George M. Taber looks at the causes of TCA taint and modern responses to problems with natural cork, weighing the pros and cons of each approach.

According to Taber, a consensus seems to have emerged that screwcaps in many instances make much more sense than corks, especially in wines intended for early consumption and as long as winemaking techniques take into account the way different types of closures affect aging; under a screwcap, wine gets very little oxygen, making it vulnerable to reduction effects over long periods of time, whereas plastic corks (and bad natural corks) don't seal well, causing the opposite problem, oxidation. The advantage is that screwcaps can't be tainted with TCA. That said, cork continues to be favored for it's aesthetic qualities, especially for more expensive wines, and in certain markets. France, for instance, steadfastly rejects screwcaps, while New Zealand has wholeheartedly adopted metal closures, even for fine wines.

The proliferation of composite corks made from scrap cork (the bottle-closure equivalent of particle board), plastic corks, and screwcaps has made natural corks better. A complacent cork industry (with a centuries-long monopoly on wine closures) was finally forced to modernize around the end of the last century when it started losing significant market share to alternatives. Cork oak growers have consolidated, cork manufacturers have upgraded equipment to eliminate contact with the ground and other wood products during curing (that can harbor TCA), and, most importantly, eliminated the use of chlorine to bleach cork, as the presence of chlorine has been found to promote formation of TCA. Non-chlorine cleaning and bleaching have also allowed the manufacture of better composite corks, which allow use of waste from production of natural cork stoppers.

So, what's the best way to close a bottle of wine? As is so often the case, the answer is complex. Taber does a good job of presenting the arguments for and against putting corks in wine bottles in prose that never seems heavy, despite the somewhat dry subject matter. To Cork or Not to Cork is perhaps not for everyone, but it's likely to entertain and inform anyone with a serious interest in wine or anyone afflicted by the sort of intellectual curiosity that makes just about any subject worth reading about.