Books I'm Reading: Michael Pollan's Cooked

I’ve just finished Michael Pollan’s Cooked (Penguin Books, 2013). At its core, the book is a look at how cooking transforms raw ingredients into something new, but it also looks at cooking from the perspectives of human culture and health. The book is organized into four sections, one each for the elemental forces of fire, water, air, and earth. 

Pollan puts himself at the center of each of his four exlorations. He approaches cooking as a curious amateur, documenting his successes and failures as he gradually gains a deeper understanding of cooking with fire (grilling and roasting), with water (braising and boiling), with air (baking), and with “earth” (fermentation), reinforcing the idea that cooking is a skill that most people have become distanced from but that anyone can reclaim. His hands-on experiences –whether mastering slow-cooked barbecue or keep a sourdough starter alive – ground the broader arguments in tangible, relatable moments. Along the way, he introduces us to a number of memorable characters, including Ed Mitchell, the barbecue master; Harry Balzer, who studies food eating habits among consumers; Samin Nosrat, who introduces the author to “grandma cooking;” the baker Chad Robertson; and fermenter Sandor Katz, among others.

Cooked is partly a critique of modern industrial food culture. Pollan argues that the decline of home cooking has had important consequences for public health, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion. He connects the act of cooking to a greater awareness of ingredients, portion sizes, and nutritional value, while also emphasizing the role of home cooking in fostering patience, mindfulness, and shared experience. The book is more than a culinary memoir. It is a work of cultural analysis.

Cooked is entertaining because it combines intellectual enquiry with genuine enthusiasm for food and the act of preparing food. Pollan presents cooking as a practical and deeply satisfying response to contemporary challenges around eating well. Finally, for those inspired by the prose, Pollan provides four recipes in an appendix at the end of the book, one related to each of the four sections of the book. Recommended. Pollan is always worth the time in my experience. 

 

Books I'm Reading: The Age of the Horse

I’ve just finished reading Susanna Forrest’s The Age of the Horse (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), subtitled “An Equine Journey through Human History.” The book offers a sweeping look at the shared histories of horses and humans, starting with a short section on equine evolution, from the earliest horse-like species about 56 million years ago to the present day. Although a history, the ideas are presented not strictly chronologically but by tracing a number of themes that the author likens to “bridle paths” with sections headed wildness, culture, power, meat, wealth, and war.

The treatment of evolution and domestication traces the shift from Eohippus to Equus caballus, the modern horse, and outlines how wild horse populations have been subdued and made into work partners and food sources in different parts of the world. She discusses everything from Mongolia’s wild takhi herds, the haute école riding displays at Versailles, newly established polo clubs in Beijing, and equine therapy programs for veterans in Arlington, Virginia, drawing on personal anecdotes and archival materials to illustrate how horses have served as labor, as instruments of war, as symbols of wealth and status, and as food. The section discussing the history of humans consuming horses for food and the various ways horse carcasses have been made use of in different periods and cultures I thought particularly interesting. One line, on Page 230, mentioned the boiling of horse’s hoofs for the production of Prussian Blue, a connection that I didn’t quite understand (and one that is not elaborated on in the text). That sent me to the Internet to investigate – which kept me occupied for the better part of a day (details here).

An interesting and enjoyable read. I thought it engagingly written despite a fair number of horse-specific terms that I had to look up along the way. Recommended. 

 

Books I'm reading: History of the Violin

I recently read this 2006 Dover reprint of a book by William Sandys and Simon Andrew Forster originally published in 1864 about the history of the violin and other stringed instruments. It was not exactly what I was expecting. While it covers early precursors of the violin, it does so in a rather haphazard way and there are so many overlapping terms for the earliest instruments that I was not left knowing a great deal more than I already knew. In addition, the book frequently gets bogged down in lists of instruments made by individual luthiers or genealogies of families of luthiers, some of which I skipped through. No attempt is made to define technical terms used and the text is liberally seasoned with Latin and French quotes with no translations.

While the book discusses the famous Amati, Stradivarius, Guarneri, and Stainer families, it also devotes a great deal of time to recent (at the time of writing – that is, 150 years ago) families of violin makers with a special emphasis on English violin makers. These last are hard to keep straight because of the English habit of naming everyone James, Thomas, John, or Charles, sometimes for multiple generations. I came out of my reading more confused than anything. That said, there was enough of interest between the covers that I DID actually finish the book, my skipping of lists here and there not withstanding. Interesting, but I think most modern readers would expect a more organized and objective treatment of the subject than the title suggests.

Books I'm Reading: On Foot to the Golden Horn

My son and I walked together to school almost every day when he was young, a distance of about a mile. The sidewalks were generally empty.  Families that lived a block or two away from the school drove their kids. To the average American (at least here in Santa Rosa, California) walking is not terribly popular. Author Jason Godwin, his girlfriend, and another friend (who drops out along the way) resolved to walk a much greater distance, about 2,400 miles, from Gdansk, in Poland, to Istanbul. According to Google Maps, you can make the trip by car in a little over 23 hours if you don't bother to stop. Godwin and his girlfriend took about six months to cover the distance on foot.

They decided to take this journey in 1990, shortly after the Soviet Union fell apart. Many advised them not to go or offered them only half-hearted encouragement along with vague warnings. But go they did. They slept in haystacks, churches, the homes of strangers, and dismal hotels in some of the poorest parts of Europe, where time seems to have passed more slowly than elsewhere in the world. They are met sometimes with indifference or incredulity, sometimes with hostility, but most often with surprisingly generous hospitality.  

Godwin's On Foot to the Golden Horn (Picador, 1993) is a dreamy travelogue written in evocative prose that seemed worth the time it took to read, although I was never entirely sure of the motive that prompted the adventure and the end seemed a bit anti-climactic; Istanbul was the end-point of the trip, but the story ends just as the travelers arrive there. Godwin's mystery series, featuring the eunuch Yashim as the detective, are more informative about the city itself—or at least about Istanbul as it once was. 

Books I'm Reading: Brilliant Blunders

I belatedly note here that I recently finished Mario Livio's Brilliant Blunders (Simon and Schuster, 2013), a look at instances of error in the thinking of some of history's most brilliant scientists.

Livio looks at a logical gap in Darwin's theory on the evolution of species, which at the time of its publication, lacked a mechanism for natural selection; Darwin was ignorant of Mendel's research on inheritance which showed that traits are passed on to offspring in a way that allows natural selection to work. Darwin was right in spite of this failing.

The author looks at Lord Kelvin's mistakes in calculating the probable age of the Earth. He looks at the eggregious error Linus Pauling made in suggesting a structure for the DNA molecule, a particular interesting case as the error was so glaring. The book presents the curious case of Fred Hoyle who stubbornly attempted to refute the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, and finally examines Einstein's introduction to his equations of the so-called cosmological constant, which he later regretted, although recent research seems to be pointing in the direction of Einstein having been correct. An interesting look at the psychology of scientific thought and, in the current environment, five useful lessons in the importance of dispassionately examining facts with an open mind and a willingness to abandon conviction in the face of contradictory evidence.

Books I'm reading: Strapless

While the focus of Deborah Davis's Strapless (Tarcher/Penguin, 2003) is on the contemporary popular and critical reaction to Sargent's famous painting today known as Portrait of Madame X, there is much here about Sargent the man, his career just before and after the scandal the painting caused, and about the woman who posed for the portrait, one Virginie Amélie Avegno, from New Orleans of Creole descent—later, as a married woman in Paris, Madame Pierre Gautreau—still later, better known as Madame X.

At this remove, it's hard to understand why the fallen strap in Sargent's painting caused such an uproar (oddly, the cover image of the book removes the strap entirely; in the painting, the strap was shown fallen or, later, on the shoulder, having been repainted there by Sargent). As the author points out, at the Salon of 1884, where the painting first appeared publicly, there would have been many nudes on display that ought to have been more controversial, yet these were virtually always in allegorical pieces or the nude figures were sanitized cherubs, nymphs, or other mythical beings. The suggestive strap fallen from the shoulder of Madame X appears to have caused a sensation because it had fallen from the shoulder of an actual person well known in Parisian high society for her unconventional beauty and lifestyle. Given her notoriety, Sargent had calculated that a stunning portrait of Madame Gautreau would attract portrait commissions, but the reception of the painting instead resulted in a temporary setback for Sargent and embarrassment for the sitter who, along with the painting, was mercilessly ridiculed in the press. The finished painting was refused by the sitter's husband and hung in Sargent's studio for decades before he eventually sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it resides today.

Sargent called it perhaps the best thing he had ever done when he sold it. I'm not sure about that: Sargent did a lot of fine work, but, needless to say, it's very good indeed. In particular, the line of the arm resting on the table is perfect, it seems to me, its "profile" as arresting as the profile of Madame X herself. Recommended.

Books I'm Reading: The Jazz of Physics

Yet another book about physics that I read with interest but found hard to process. Stephen Alexander's The Jazz of Physics (Basic Books, 2016) is well written and engaging, but I never got the feeling that I was reading a focused argument aimed at supporting the thesis suggested by the subtitle (The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe). The book seemed more diffuse than that.

The Jazz of Physics claims to shed light on difficult issues in physics by taking a serious look at the idea that music (broadly defined—in fact, here thought of as vibration) is at the core of the structure of the universe. One of those books that I immediately want to read over again from cover to cover in an effort to really understand, but I suspect I'll never get back to this one as there are so many other books to read.

These paragraphs are intended more as a record of my having read The Jazz of Physics than as something that might properly be called a review. Having said that, anyone with an interest in physics and music would probably enjoy reading this book.

Books I'm Reading: The Battle of Britain: Dowding and the First Victory, 1940

John Ray's The Battle of Britain: Dowding and the First Victory, 1940 (1994) is not about the Battle of Britain per se but about its leading figure, Hugh Dowding, Commander in Chief of Fighter Command, and issues of command and leadership in the RAF during the battle.

Although he had essentially won the battle by the end of September 1940, thwarting Hitler's plans to bring Britain to the negotiating table by achieving air superiority over Britain and then threatening an invasion, Dowding was dismissed from his position by November 1940 for failing to respond to changing circumstances. While Ray takes a mostly chronological approach, details of the actual fighting become mostly peripheral with the author instead focusing on how members of the RAF command structure, including the Air Ministry and Churchill's War Cabinet, interacted. Much of the interpersonal drama and the differences of opinion about strategy and tactics appear to have had their roots in the experiences of the lead actors during the previous world war, many of whom had been WWI fighter pilots.

The discussion revolves around disagreements about how best to counter German bomber raids over London, other major cities, and the air bases that hosted the Hurricanes and Spitfires that were, in fact, mostly successful in breaking up German daylight attacks. Dowding was perceived as a stubborn supporter of using no more than one or two squadrons together in a group, while others pushed for use of much larger groupings, or "big wings" of fighters. This controversy was news to me, but, apparently it has been much discussed by historians of the battle over the years, and this book assumes the reader already knows at least the outlines of the background history. The author appears to present new evidence objectively to argue that Dowding was not treated as badly as some sources have argued and that ultimately he was pushed out not so much because of the Big Wing controversy as because Churchill—at first a staunch supporter of Dowding—was eventually persuaded that new ideas were required at Fighter Command, especially new ideas for countering the night bombing the Germans had turned to, causing many civilian casualties. An interesting read, although it might be disappointing to a reader expecting the book to be an account of the battle itself. I read this book, sometimes by candlelight, during the blackouts associated with the wildfires here in Sonoma County in late October 2019.

Books I'm Reading: Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant

This was a surprisingly pleasurable read. Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, subtitled: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (edited by Jenni Ferrari-Alder, Riverhead Books, 2007) is one of those books that's been in my library for years; I can no longer remember when or where I acquired it. It may have been one of those left behind by my father. But I wish I had read this collection of 26 essays about solo cooking and eating alone sooner.

The essays are independent. Some include recipes (always for one), some do not. They can be read in any order, I imagine, but I found the stories had a certain cumulative effect; by the end of the book, I felt like I'd had a moving lesson in the way human beings respond at the intersection of food and solitude—solitude sometimes welcome, sometimes not. This is as much (or more) about being alone than it is about food.

Some of the names were familiar—M. F. K. Fisher, Nora Efron, Mary Cantwell, and Haruki Murakami, for example—most were not.  The writing is somewhat variable. Although good on the whole, one or two of the selections seemed a trifle unnecessarily vulgar to me—but there are real gems here, too. I think my favorite is the essay about asparagus by Phoebe Nobles. I don't want to spoil the fun, so I will say nothing about it except that it had me laughing out loud, which was a touch embarrassing as I read it sitting at the counter of the Pangloss wine bar in the town of Sonoma after a day of work driving wine tasters around the Sonoma wine country.

If I had to complain about anything, it would be the lack of an index. It might be necessary to re-read the book to find a recipe again or a particularly pleasurable paragraph, but this is a quibble; I might re-read it again soon anyway. Recommended.

Books I'm Reading: My Name Escapes Me

Penguin asked Alec Guiness to keep a diary for a little over a year in the middle of the1990s. My Name Escapes Me (Penguin 1996) was the result. It's an idiosyncratic collection of daily jottings that, as the author himself puts it, reveal his "phobias, irritations, prejudices, childishness, and frivolity" (although he's a little hard on himself; he doesn't come across as terribly prejudiced, childish, or frivolous). It is mostly a dryly observed record of what Guinness was up to in 1995, by which time he had mostly retired from acting.

Apparently, he was an art lover. There are a number of pages about paintings he wished he could own. There is a fair amount of travel. There is a great deal of dining with friends and reminiscing about the theater and film. While Guinness drops names left and right, you never get the feeling he's doing it to impress. He simply knew many well known actors and actresses (although a fair number of the early British stage actors mentioned were unfamiliar to me).

Always intelligent, often quite funny (I especially enjoyed the several remarks that reveal he deeply regretted his connection to Star Wars). Not a challenging read, but entertaining and worth the time.

Books I'm Reading: Gorgon

Generally, I find little to complain about when reading anything published by Penguin, and this is a quibble, I suppose, but Gorgon, by Peter D. Ward (Penguin, 2004), once finished, seemed somewhat deceptively titled. The rather long subtitle (The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth’s History) might better have been something like “Deciphering the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth’s History” as the book focuses not on the animals per se but on the author’s involvement in work in South Africa researching the great Permian extinction (an earlier and more pervasive extinction than the better known and much later Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago; the Permian extinction occurred about 250 million years ago). While fossilized gorgons and other animals play a role in the story as chronological markers, the book tells us little about what these creatures were like—failing to satisfy expectations raised by the title and by text on the back cover of the book. I also noted six or seven typographical errors, which is quite unusual in a Penguin publication. Penguin texts are generally perfect in a typographical sense.

The book is worth reading nevertheless—for its examination of the causes of the Permian extinction—including a new (at the time of publication) theory to explain it—and for its look at some of the men and women who endure hardship in remote places to try to find answers to questions about the biological history of our planet. At the same time, it includes some nicely wrought descriptions of South Africa’s Karoo desert region and of the political and social climate of South Africa shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the end of Apartheid in the country he later presided over.

Research by Ward and others seems to point to a number of important conclusions. First, it refutes the idea that the Permian extinction was slow and gradual (until lately, a widely accepted notion). At the same time, the data seem to refute the idea that it was primarily the result of a massive meteor impact, now the generally accepted explanation for the later Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction. Ward lays out a theory suggesting that the mass extinction was caused by a rapid increase in atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide and an attendant decline in oxygen levels, these changes the results of a number of factors, which may have included an asteroid impact, although not one big enough to have been responsible for the extinction on its own.

He suggests that the survival and later flourishing of the dinosaurs can be explained by pre-existing adaptations in precursor species that allowed them to acquire oxygen more efficiently than competitors, and this is consistent with the idea that birds (with similar adaptations: mainly complex lung systems with ancillary airsacs that extend even into hollow bones in some parts of the body) are the descendants of certain types of dinosaur. Essentially, he believes the Permian extinction reflects a wholesale failure of life on Earth to survive a sudden increase in heat coupled with a decline in available oxygen. He closes the book asking whether the period of abnormally low oxygen beginning around the time of the Permian extinction might have implications for the development of other adaptations—namely live birth and warm-bloodedness. I have yet to encounter any subsequent material that discusses these ideas (this book is already 15 years old, and based on research done as much as 25 years ago), so it’s hard for me to judge the reception they have found. I would be interested to learn what further evidence the scientific community has turned up (or not) since Ward’s conclusions were advanced.

Books I'm Reading: Laurie Lee—Red Sky at Sunrise

I wonder if Laurie Lee (1914-1997) is not better known in the US because his name sounds feminine. I imagine it confuses people to learn, if they ever do, that Laurie is a man, Laurie being short for Laurence in this case. It's the sort of thing the British are more at ease with than we are. It may also be that the British, on the whole, have better taste than we do and that they are better educated. Or is that an illusion? Whatever the case, our current president has shown what a fundamentally ignorant, insensitive, mean-spirited people we Americans are—on the whole. The writings of a man like Laurie Lee could never go mainstream here, but perhaps not anywhere. His writing is too pretty to go mainstream. His prose reads like poetry, often requiring the attention and concentration that poetry requires. It can be tiring—although never overwrought and burdensome like the prose of a D.H. Lawrence.

I thought this particularly so in the case of Cider with Rosie, one of the three autobiographical books (originally published separately) collected in this omnibus volume from Penguin (2004). Not surprisingly, Lee is best known as a poet aside from these books.

Cider with Rosie, memories of the author's childhood in the Cotswold countryside, originally appeared in 1959. It's a nostalgic remembrance of his early life in an isolated village before the First World War, before automobiles were common, before the encroachment of modernity. Lee writes beautifully of the countryside, life with his sisters, life with his distracted mother, life with his absent father—his experience of growing up there from the age of three (his first memories) until just before he steps out into the world on his own as a young man—by walking to London (a distance of about 110 miles) and then across Spain.

The opening is beautiful and memorable. He remembers the first time he was out of the house on his own, at age three. 

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.

The prose throughout is as vivid.

The very idea of leaving home by spending several weeks to walk to London and then to walk across Spain (the subject of the second book, As I walked Out one Midsummer Morning, originally published in 1969) is alien in this age. A young American setting out on his or her own would rarely think to walk anywhere today, much less the distance from Scranton, Pennsylvania to New York City to look for work and independence from family. We are coddled and separated from the physical world by our computerized vehicles and computerized devices. Today, walking such a distance simply to get somewhere, or walking across a foreign country is reserved for the well-heeled tourist (always with money and privilege to fall back on in a pinch) or it's an act of defiance, a conscious attempt to return to some kind of ill-defined authenticity. Lee starts out in life by walking to London because he has no other way to go. Later, he walks across Spain, supporting himself by playing his violin in the streets, for much the same reason; he wants to go and he has no other conveyance. He is ill-prepared in both cases and nearly expires on several occasions from heat stroke in Spain, but the kindness of strangers and plain dumb luck save him. Lee at the end of the book ends up in jail and very narrowly escapes getting himself shot. His experience illustrates just how important happenstance often is in determining the path of an individual through life.

At the end of As I walked Out one Midsummer Morning, Lee is in a Spain on the brink of civil war. In the third and final book, A Moment of War (originally published in in 1991), he decides to go back to Spain (having once returned to England) with the idea that the Spanish Republicans deserve his help. Once again, hopelessly ill-prepared, he walks into Spain from France to join the cause, nearly freezing to death in the process. During his time in the Republican army he is met with suspicion and incompetence in a swirl of doomed enthusiasm among his peers that quickly deteriorates into a pool of squalid disillusionment. In the confusion of the early stages of the Spanish Civil War,  in far greater danger of being shot as a spy or dying of hunger and exposure than he is of receiving a mortal wound in the little combat he sees, he absorbs the random cruelty, waste, stupidity, and oppressive boredom that war always brings. In the end, he's sent home, lucky to have come away with his life intact, once again saved by coincidence. We should be glad of it. Had he died, none of these three books would have been written. Recommended. 

Books I'm Reading: On Photography

Having just read Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Other Essays, I felt inspired to finally read her collection called On Photography. I read an old Delta paperback edition (1978—apparently the first paperback edition) that I picked up used somewhere ages ago; although I thought I had a newer edition somewhere. No matter, the content is the same, although newer editions may have worthwhile ancillary material attached. It's a shame that Sontag didn't live long enough to add thoughts in the age of smartphones, Facebook, and Instagram.

This was much easier going than Against Interpretation—not because it is somehow lacking in depth, breadth, or rigor of thought—but simply because the subject matter is so much more familiar to me. I'm able to immediately see in my mind virtually all the images she mentions, none of which are shown in the text (I wonder if there's an illustrated edition?). I know the photographers she mentions. I know most of the history. But this is not about the history of photography or about the work of specific photographers except as useful for the purposes of supporting an argument.

The essays (six of them, although together they read as a single narrative) are mostly about the function of photography within human culture, and virtually every page has something worthwhile to say about the subject. Sontag talks about how photography relates to painting, to travel and tourism, about the way photography levels all events by transforming them into physical records, about ethical issues faced by documentary photographers and war correspondents, about the paradoxical way photographs can shock by exposing what is normally unseen while at the same time anesthetizing us to the shocking through repeated exposure, and about the way photography has come to shape the way we view and understand environments, both natural and man made.

Ultimately, she suggests that photography has usurped reality--that we have become more comfortable relating to images of the world than to the world itself. She was prescient. She had this insight when images were more pervasive than they'd ever been yet still far fewer and far more difficult to create than they are today. In 1977, making a photographic image usually involved film  sent out for processing. There was typically a lag of at least several hours--sometimes as long as a week--between composing a photograph and seeing it. Polaroid cameras were available, but even at the height of their popularity and availability, most images were not made with instant cameras (and a Polaroid image took several minutes to appear). Today, virtually any phone handset can produce an image in seconds and that image can be made visible to hundreds of millions of viewers just as quickly. What would Sontag have had to say?

[A few days later I found the more recent edition I was pretty sure I had (Picador, 1990). The text is identical to the text of the version I read. No illustrations have been added, and there is no additional content. ]

Books I'm Reading: The Monuments Men

First book of the new year. The Monuments Men (2009, Little, Brown and Co.), by Robert M. Edsel, with Bret Witter, is the book from which the recent film was made. It tells the story of the German looting of art treasures in Europe during WWII. This is the same story told in Lynn H. Nicholas's 1994 book The Rape of Europa, but from the perspective of the men and women charged with finding, protecting, and repatriating the loot.

An extraordinary tale in many ways. First, it vividly demonstrates (yet again) the Nazi capacity for organized and meticulously documented criminal activity—activity condoned and encouraged from the very top. Extraordinary that treasures of the caliber of The Ghent Altarpiece were carted away and stowed in salt mines. Extraordinary that Hitler directed all of the looted art to be destroyed at the end of the war, when it had become clear that the war was lost. Extraordinary to think that, at the same time— almost until the day he killed himself—Hitler still had visions of a great museum in Linz where all the stolen art would go. Extraordinary that so few people on the Allied side accomplished so much with so little support from the governments they were serving. The writing is workmanlike, but the tale itself is well worth the time.    

Books I'm Reading: A Beautiful Question

The last book I read in 2018, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question (Penguin, 2015) is one of those books that you immediately want to re-read the moment you're finished with it because it handles such difficult subject matter.

I periodically subject myself to these books on physics, because I want to understand what human beings so far understand about the universe, but I never seem to make much progress. The fault is mine, not the author's.

Wilczek lays out the now-familiar history of the development of quantum physics but approaches the story from a somewhat unusual perspective. His focus throughout the book is on beauty and idealizations of reality and the relationship of these to actual reality as we understand it. His greatest pleasure is in pointing out how human intellect, inspired by notions of the ideal, has arrived at solutions to basic problems that in large part conform to expectations—and in this symmetry, this conformance of real to the ideal, he sees great beauty. He looks at the universe as envisioned by Pythagoras, Socrates, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and then by physicists of the modern era, pointing out along the way how our understanding of the universe points to a positive answer to the question he initially posits "Does the universe embody beautiful ideas?"

I see that I read only 14 books in 2018, which seems a shamefully small number. That's a book every 3.7 weeks. I'd like to be near one every two weeks, at the very least.... So many books. I will have to try harder in 2019.

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: Barcelona

I don't know how long ago I picked up Barcelona, by Robert Hughes (Vintage, 1992). It's been on my bookshelf for a long time. Could it have been sometime after I visited the city, in 2010, prompted by that visit? It's a book I ought to have read before going to Barcelona, but, even long after my trip there, it was a worthwhile read. The book clears up a lot of misconceptions about the city and about Catalonia more broadly. Notably, it makes clear the relationship between Catalan and Spanish (Catalan is not a dialect or corrupt form of Spanish, as so many seem to believe) and it goes a long way toward explaining why Barcelona and the rest of Spain have so long been at odds with one another.

The book is dense, particularly in its first half, which devotes rather a lot of space to political history, with a long cast of characters that can be hard to keep straight, but Hughes is a consummate writer. His prose is lucid and he's a lot of fun to read almost regardless of  subject matter because of that and because of his inventive use of language. The clarity of his writing makes it possible to push through the more difficult sections until you get to what seemed to me more interesting material; Hughes really comes into his own when he turns to art and architecture.

When we think of art and architecture in the context of Barcelona, we tend to think only of Antoni Gaudí. This book puts Gaudí into his historical context and explains his relations with the people that became his patrons, mostly Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi. Hughes introduces a host of other architects working at the time, several of them far better known in their day than Gaudí, most notable among these Lluís Domènech i Montaner, designer of The Palau de la Música Catalana, which is dissected in detail (as are many of Gaudí's most important projects, including Sagrada Familia, which, Hughes notes, has became a travesty of itself). Again, I would like to have read this before having visited Barcelona's many architectural gems years ago, but the critiques were very pleasurable to read nevertheless.

Likely to be a bit too demanding for readers casually interested in Barcelona, but a very satisfying deep dive for anyone with a serious interest in history, particularly history of art and architecture. Recommended. Read it before you go.

Books I'm Reading: How to Paint

I imagine it's rare to finish a book feeling that you've retained nothing at all from reading it, but that's how artist Jerry Zeniuk's book How to Paint (Sieveking Verlag, 2017) left me. Having finished it recently, I'm struggling to recall anything useful in it.

I picked this book up while traveling in Germany, in June, at the museum store in Pinakothek der Moderne, in Munich. I admit that I was attracted to it in part because of its cloth cover and because of the promise of its title—however unrealistic: how nice it would be if you really could just read a how-to book and suddenly know how to paint better. I didn't expect that, but I suppose I was hoping to glean something useful from its pages. I suspect this is a book that needs to be mined during several readings. Happily, it's a short book of 37 chapters of only one or two pages each at most. Some of the chapters are less than a page long. I may come back to it some day. For the moment, judgment reserved. This is a bilingual German/English edition.

Books I'm Reading: The Second Amendment: A Biography

It seemed an appropriate time to buy The Second Amendment: A Biography (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014) when I picked it up, remaindered, at a local bookstore last year. That was before the Parkland, Florida shooting. It now seems even more appropriate to have acquired it. Having just finished the book, I can say it's an excellent introduction not only to the historical context of the 2nd Amendment's writing but to the transformation it's undergone in the past few decades—its transformation from a clause written by the founders out of fear of a standing army controlled by a tyrannical government into a statement of a fundamental individual right to own guns, a transformation effected by controversial court decisions that have had and will continue to have tragic consequences.

The Amendment, stated in full, seems simple: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It is one of the shortest amendments to the Constitution. It has engendered disproportionate discord. While its interpretation—notably, whether it guarantees an individual's right to own and use guns—was first challenged long ago, by 1840 the idea was firmly established that the object of the Amendment was public defense not private gun ownership and that the term "bear arms" was understood to have a military meaning. This view was made explicit in a Tennessee Supreme Court ruling in that year stating, in part "A man in pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms...."

The push to subvert these ideas began in the 1950s and gained steam in the 1970s, although the individual rights view long remained a fringe view even then. By 2008, however, District of Columbia v. Heller had overturned about 200 years of precedent. What made that possible, was intense lobbying by the NRA. Author Michael Waldman points to a survey of law review articles on the 2nd Amendment from 1888 to 1959 and notes that not a single one in that period concluded the Amendment says anything about individual gun rights. The first to contradict that idea appeared in 1960, the start of a flood of writing supporting the view. Waldman quotes one Carl Bogus (a real historian, despite his name) who points out "From 1970 to 1989, twenty-five articles adhering to the collective rights view were published [in law reviews] (nothing unusual there), but so were twenty-seven articles endorsing the individual rights model. However, at least sixteen of these articles—about 60 percent—were written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations." Thus, through strategic long-term planning, the NRA and its supporters were well on their way to success in changing the legal meaning of the Amendment already by 1989. Still, Waldman argues, historians had not at that time (and largely still haven't) changed their view of the meaning of the Amendment—despite subsequent legal developments—which is to say that current law, underpinned by Heller, defies logic and the majority view, reflecting a minority viewpoint vociferously defended by the NRA and other lobbyists for gun manufacturers.

It would take almost 20 more years to get us to the Heller decision, and a willingness to toss aside the 2nd Amendment's initial clause "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...." Waldman points out that Justice Scalia, in his majority opinion in Heller, essentially ignored that clause, as does the abridged quote of the Amendment on the wall of the lobby of NRA headquarters, which reads only "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" as if the prefatory clause does not exist. What allowed the Heller decision to, as Waldman puts it, use "pages of highly selective historical readings from two hundred years ago that ignore the history of the past hundred years" to essentially rewrite the Constitution was a shift in public opinion among a disproportionately vocal minority, coached and underwritten by the NRA. Essentially, the Heller decision became possible because of NRA influence on public opinion. The 2nd Amendment doesn't and never did mean what Heller proclaims it to mean, but Heller has established a new basis for interpreting the Constitution.

Waldman's book is well worth the time it takes to read for the deep context it gives to the current difference of opinion about gun law in the United States. The essential conclusion I have drawn from reading the book is that I have been right in my conviction that the 2nd Amendment's meaning has been perverted, that District of Columbia v. Heller, like Citizens United, was a disastrously misguided decision, but that we are stuck with it. We are forced to live with it and to die with it, for the time being, at least.

Books I'm Reading: The Billionaire's Vinegar

I recently finished a book about forged art (specifically, about fake Vermeers). Mentioning that book to a friend prompted her to lend me The Billionaire's Vinegar, by Benjamin Wallace (Three Rivers Press, 2008), another book about forgery--in this case, forged wine. The emergence in 1985 of bottles of wine from the 1784, 1787, and other vintages purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, supposedly purchased by him during stays in Paris at around that time, was big news taken up by newspapers and news magazines around the world. I remember the stories. Skepticism wasn't far behind. The Billionaire's Vinegar is a nice piece of investigative journalism that goes a long way toward unraveling the mystery behind the discovery of the wine, its sensational sale for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the doubts about its authenticity and the authenticity of other antique bottles, and the investigations that ultimately exposed the Thomas Jefferson wines as having been faked by one Hardy Rodenstock, whose real name was Meinhard Görke.

Rodenstock was a genuine connoisseur, it seems, and, at least at first, had a talent for discovering genuine old bottles, usually buying them from forgotten cellars at old estates in Britain and Europe. He was something of a showman, too, and became known for staging incredible vertical tastings of some of the world's most sought-after wine. Inevitably, the supply of genuine bottles (small to begin with) began to dwindle following a boom in the world of fine wine actions that fueled demand, prompted collectors to sell old wine, and spurred old wine sleuths to find it. Rodenstock turned to forgery. As is so often the case with good forgers that eventually get caught, he began to get a little reckless--coming up with finds that began to seem too good to be credible. However, in a familiar pattern, some who initially judged some of his questionable wines to be genuine stubbornly stuck with him even as suspicion grew, because their reputations had become entangled with his. Michael Broadbent was the main casualty. Jancis Robinson was peripherally tainted, although less so.

Among those who bought fake wine from Rodenstock were the Forbes family and billionaire Bill Koch who brought his wealth to bear once his suspicions were aroused, funding an extensive (one might say obsessive) forensic investigation into the Jefferson bottle and others he had bought. Koch ended up spending several times the $150,000 or so the Jefferson bottle cost to ultimately determine that not only was it a fake but that Rodenstock had sold a string of highly questionable bottles over the years, notably old vintages of Chateau d'Yquem and other old Bordeaux in great years and in large-formats (imperials of 1921 Chateu Pétrus, for example, although the chateau had no record of any such bottling)--precisely the sort of rarity that collectors lust after. As in the case of Han van Meegeren's forged Vermeers, Rodenstock's forged wines cannily exploited the desires and assumptions of their victims, along with sometimes sketchy record keeping and simply the passage of time.

Koch ultimately filed a civil suit against Rodenstock in 2006 and won a judgment against him by default in 2010. Broadbent, meanwhile, unhappy about how he was portrayed in The Billionaire's Vinegar, sued Random House (which initially published the book) for libel. The dispute was settled out of court but the agreement stopped publication of the book in the UK and, according to the Wikipedia article on Hardy Rodenstock, the settlement forced Random House to state in court that allegations in the book were untrue, yet the company made no changes to the text and it appeared in all other markets. Given that and the ease with which books can be acquired from anywhere through the Internet, the stay of publication in the UK seems to have been a fairly hollow victory for Broadbent. The Billionaire's Vinegar is a mystery solved, a tale of greed and big money, and a cautionary tale all in one. Well researched, briskly written. Recommended.
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