She Has Her Mother's Laugh

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
© 2018 Carl Zimmer
672 pages

Overhearing discussion of heredity a few hundred years ago would have meant only one thing:  being in the presence of noblemen, who stood to inherit their fathers' titles, lands, rights, and responsibilities.  Heredity quickly became a scientific concept,  and is now more commonly associated with biology than law, but genes aren't all we inherit. She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a meaty exploration of the history and present tracking of inheritance, genetic and otherwise.

Much of the book is a history of attempts to figure out heridity, beginning with mental impairment and the suspicion that it was something which could be passed down from generation to generation. This came of age when interest in biological inheritance was white-hot: Darwin and Huxley were at work, and various animal fanciers were creating ever-more elaborate breeds of pigeons and the like by monitoring traits from generation to generation and promoting the birth of different  variants.  It wasn't at all difficult for people to decide that imbecility was a distinct trait which could be controlled against, if all its present carriers were prevented from reproducing. This 'effort' was initially conceived as sterilization, but in the 1940s those efforts took on ghastly and murderous proportions Hitler's regime.

Aside from the outstandingly massive moral problems of controlling other people, including their ability to beget life,  there's also the scientific problem that "imbecility" is not one thing, created  by one trait. Mental impairments are diverse, and stem from all manner of biological hiccoughs. Many people in the Victorian age who were 'imbeciles' merely suffered from a metabolic disruption: they were unable to process a substance common in foodstuffs, and ingesting it slowly poisoned them, giving their skin an odd hue and eroding their mental faculties.  Children who were diagnosed early with this syndrome could be put on an appropriate diet, and be perfectly healthy members of society. Biology is chemistry in action, but the genes aren't the only chemicals in the solutions: they're constantly interacting with the substances of their mother's body, or the outside environment. Even if eugenicists had won, we would still have sick and infirm people, because there are so many variables. 

Other 'inheritance' issues are similarly problematic.  Take race, for instance; the human eye might look at a Norwegian, a Nigerian, and a Chinese citizen and declare them to be three obviously different kinds of people, but if that same eye were to look at their genes it would be unable to tell much of a difference beyond ordinary individual distinctions. Humans, for all our passionate in-grouping and out-grouping,  are far more alike than we are different -- biologically.  That doesn't mean our in-grouping and out-going is irrelevant; it  probably won't ever go away, because crucial to understanding human inheritance is realizing we are fundamentally cultural creatures. We don't come out of the womb sniffing wine and venturing opinions about the ballet, but we're as hungry for teaching as we are for food. When compared to chimpanzee juveniles, human youths are far more imitative.   Heredity cannot only apply to genes, or even biology (we also inherit bacteria from our parents):  it has to apply to culture, as well,

Zimmer also includes a chapter on CRISPR, and the admittedly scary potential that puts in our hands. Yes, we can eradicate genetic disease. We  can also turn our children into gross experiments, tinkering with their bodies to produce barbies or ubermensch. Society needs to think long and hard about the implications.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a steak of a book, of obvious interest to anyone with an appetite for human biology.

Some of my highlights:
"In Morgan’s own research on flies, he had learned to respect the power of the environment. His students discovered one strain of flies that developed normally if they were born in the summer but tended to sprout extra legs if they were born in the winter. It turned out that the researchers could get the same outcomes in their lab simply by changing the temperature in which they reared the fly eggs. It was thus meaningless to talk about the effect of their mutation without taking into account their environment."

“It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights,” Pearl [Buck] wrote. “Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot speak or communicate with anyone, the human stuff is there, and he belongs to the human family.”

"To eliminate imperfection would demand eliminating humanity itself."

"We were three people of African, Asian, and European descent from three corners of the world. Three races, some might say. And yet we shared far more than what set us apart."

"Textbooks say that the human body has about two hundred cell types, but recent studies have rendered that figure a laughable understatement. No one can say how many cell types there are, because the more scientists examine cells the more they break down into more typed. Immune cells may all carry out the same mission to save us from pathogens and cancer, but they are an army with hundreds of divisions. All our cell types are seperate branches on the body's genealogical tree, like rival dynasties descended from a first monarch."

Seeing Further

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society
© 2010 Bill Bryson
512 pages

Although Bill Bryson is  chiefly known for his humorous travelogues, he has been known to venture into other nonfiction at times, and in fact the first science book I ever read for fun outside of high school was his A Short History of Nearly Everything.   I wasn’t too surprised, then, to see his name on a history of the Royal Society.  What did come as a surprise was the tenor of the contents, because Bryson was the editor here rather than the author, and the contributing scientists deliver a far more thoughtful history than I’d anticipated, one that’s almost introspective.  Rather than a straightforward chronicle of discoveries made and lines of thought pursued year by year,  the essays are more  thematic, emphasizing  through moments and movements  the evolution of natural philosophy and the development of a distinct discipline which rebuilt the world. (The history of the Royal Society itself appears at the beginning of the book, then the individuals and their contributions take over.  One of the earliest essays, dwelling on the rise of scientific materialism,  argues that the greatest disruption to traditional thought was the idea that the entire cosmos was made of the same material thing, that the stars had fallen from a heavenly realm and were instead pedestrian, subject to the same laws as apples and the dead leaves of autumn. In the monist world, where was the otherworldly?  Another explores the tension between logic-driven natural philosophers and experiential ones in the late medieval period, whose work would eventually dovetail together. It’s not all introspection, as chapters on the important of mathematics (undergirding science) and engineering (applying science) bring us out of the clouds and closer to earth.  

Empires of Light

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World 
© 2004 Jill Jonnes
464 pages

Empires of Light is less a history of how the United States became electrified and more a biography of three electrical titans – Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse -- as they pursued their own electrical projects in cooperation and bitter conflict. All three were passionate, heedless inventors who loved plowing their money in money into new ideas, sometimes at the cost of bankruptcy. They differed sharply, however, on the best way to distribute electricity. Edison preferred the safe, expensive, and density-demanding direct current. Westinghouse and Tesla both viewed alternating current -- which was easy to ramp up the voltage or ‘speed’ of electricity, and transmit at long distances -- as far more promising, allowing them to reach places that didn’t have the population density of New York City or Pittsburgh. Alternating current was more dangerous to work with, however, and Edison used his rivals’ volatility for all it was worth. When the State of New York considered using electricity for the death penalty, Edison – borrowing a page from Marc Anthony’s funeral speech lauding Caesar’s assassins – praised the merits of Westinghouse’s AC for killing people. He hopefully speculated that perhaps in the future death row would be the “westinghouse”, and killing someone with electricity would be a verb – “He was westinghoused”. Sheer economics, however, shifted favor to AC’s court, and by 1930 even Midwest towns could count on the lights being on. Edison would return to his phonograph and open the doors for moving pictures and Hollywood, while Tesla – whose AC projects had made possible the electrification of Niagra Falls – would drift from idea to idea, all of which were ‘ahead of their time’, and none of which ever became realized. One that came close was a radio-controlled mini-boat.

Although Empires is often entertaining – between chapters on patent wars, anyway – the combination of biography and business/technical history didn’t quite click for me, possibly because I was chiefly interested in the electrification of the US and less so in the projects (The White City, Niagra) that allowed Westinghouse to prove AC’s worth. Readers will glean only a flicker of information about the pace of electrical expansion, chiefly through the cited sales of AC light bulbs. These men certainly merit reading about: Edison and Tesla are both legends, but Westinghouse made his reputation in brilliant but boring improvements to railroad brakes and such, and his and Teslas’ expansion of the AC system accomplished the same for the electrical infrastructure of the US.


Related:
Phillip Schewe's The Grid: A Journey into the Heart of Our Electrified World is more about national electrification, but its history jumped from Edison's early attempts at municipal power transmission to governments co-opting power companies as public utilities.

The Disappearing Spoon

The Disappearing Spoon
© 2010 Sam Kean
400 pages

A massive poster of the periodic table is as elemental to the image of a science classroom as the rows of graduated cylinders and microscopes,   but there is considerably more to that table than other reference materials --  like  a table of statistics about planet volumes,  orbital velocities,  and composition, for instance.   The periodic table’s peculiar shape, its neat columns and rows,  are not only orderly in themselves but speak to cosmic order;    elements which are very near each other in terms of their number of protons, neutrons, and electrons are worlds away from one another in their physical characteristics – and the reverse. The Disappearing Spoon is a human history of the periodic table, built on the author’s suspicion that every element had a story worth telling associated with. Perhaps it was discovered on accident; perhaps it consumed generations,  or lead to the collapse of armies and the failure of expeditions to the South Pole.    Many of the stories here address the elements’ discoveries, including rivalries to isolate them first – rivalries between men and nations alike.  The stories cover a lot of ground between them, and include as much history and literary references  as they do chemistry.    All in all, it's great fun...but despite the title, there's no Matrix jokes.  Turns out the disappearing spoon is made of gallium -- just pop a gallium spoon into a cup of tea, and it melts away.  

The Age of Napoleon

The Age of Napoleon
© 1975 will Durant
870 pages

Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me – or didn’t.  Will and Ariel Durant intended for Rousseau and Revolution to be the final volume in their epic history of Western Civilization, but grew bored waiting for the Grim Reaper to show up and claim them.  They decided, therefore, to scratch an itch, and devote a final volume to Europe in the age of Napoleon.  No individual has ever dominated a single volume in this fashion; even Charles the Fifth,  in The Reformation, would disappear  in chapters chronicling Persia and Arabia.   But Napoleon’s story encompasses not just France and England, but Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria,  and Russia.  The emperor does move backstage at times – in the chapters on  English poetry and novels, for instance – but he is never completely gone.  This final volume manages through Napoleon’s person to be just as comprehensive, but more tightly bound.

The Durants open with a more involved chronicle of the French revolution that concluded Rousseau and Revolution, this one making more obvious that the revolution was a slow but quickening crumbling of royal legitimacy that collapsed into the chaos of revolution after a few sudden shocks.  The king’s decision to attempt to escape France in fear of his life was one such shock, demonstrating that he was and remained an actor – not a prop.  From here, the Durants follow the Wars of the Coalitions, as the various nations of Eurrope fell in to and out of alliances with or against France, with the enmity between England and France being the only fixed point.  In 1807, with Napoleon  enjoying one of his greatest triumphs – the subjugation of Prussia, and the pretended friendship of Russia –  the Durants pause to cover  both French and English culture, including one hundred pages on English poetry alone.   They then alternate  sections on the culture of Germany, Russia, Italy, Iberia, etc and sections on the Napoleonic wars as they encompassed these regions.

Related to this volume’s unusual dominance by one person is the unusually heavy amount of military coverage here. The Durants typically dispatch wars in  a few sentences, concerned with them only as a background to  the social or political events that develop as a consequence.  There’s no getting away from battles and Napoleon, though, even considering the energy he poured into the political administration of France and Europe, and the long-term effects that energy would have.  The result is not a military history, however; there are no maps of battles.  Instead, the Durants treat the readers with their usual balance of literature, science, economics, etc.   there is a section on Jane Austen, for instance.  Another prominent author, Germaine de Staël,  maintained a long rivalry with Napoleon; she wrote a celebratory survey of German culture that pined for more amity between France and the Germans, and was present in Russia when Napoleon drove towards Moscow.  Beethoven, of course, merits a full section of his own.

Napoleon reliably described himself as a Son of the Revolution, even though his policies ended some revolutionary dreams.  His concordant with Rome, for instance,  re-established the Catholic Church in France, albeit in a corralled form. That was a far cry from the total secularization (or de-christianization, depending on the revolutionary), dreamed of by many – those who redrew the calendar and butchered France's artistic legacies,  those who in a just heaven will be consigned to  war forever with the whitewashing Puritans and the sculpture-smashing Wahhabis,   as well as others who would destroy art and heritage for ideology. Napoleon did apply much of the revolutionary, modernizing spirit to those parts of Europe he conquered  -- overwriting their ancient laws and traditions with constitutions from his own pen.   Although Napoleon kept faith with some of the past as convenient -- his concordant with Rome, for instance -- the Durants observe that in his army and state,  merit reigned, allowing even commoners to advance.

Although the Napoleonic wars have never been of great interest to me, the Durants' volume created an actual enthusiasm in me about the subject. As usual, I was impressed with their critical but forgiving evaluation of Napoleon, whom they regard as one of the singular men of history.  His reputation owes not just to his role in closing the violence of the revolution, or in his spectacular battles -- but pouring so much energy into his work, and being so successful in combat and in administration, that he transformed Europe,  planting seeds that would flourish throughout the 19th century. A century after his final defeat at Waterloo, an even greater war -- one spurred by changes Napoleon wrought -- would be harrowing the soil of France in blood, bones, and cannon once more.

And now, dear readers, what's next in Will Durant's Story of Civilization?

C'EST FINI! 

Lost Enlightenment

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane 
© 2015 S. Frederick Starr
618 pages

Lost Enlightenment takes readers back to a time when Central Asia was the crossroads of the world, a hub of both commercial and activity. Here are celebrated the lives of cities which, in this time, were hosts to capitals, universities, and more.  Now they are dust, at best eroded columns in a desolate landscape. In Lost Enlightenment, readers follow Starr east to Baghdad, Merv, and a few other jewels. Though he touches on the political highlights of the region between the Arab conquest and the death of Tamerlane, they are important here only as far as their role in fostering the  arts and sciences.    Although diminished slightly by the complete lack of maps -- and in Central Asia, surrounded by the great mass of Eurasia, there are precious few borders to define the area --  Lost Enlightenment is a weighty accomplishment.

Most readers have heard of the 'silk road', though much more than silk traveled its routes. The sheer bounty of thinkers and creators here, many of them polymaths and 'renaissance men'  -- though with no need for the renaissance bit.  Starr marks the beginning of this enlightened period with the Arabic invasion, but not because the Arabs came bestowing wisdom among the poor benighted natives. The area was already culturally rich and commercially sophisticated, and its geography frustrated any attempt at sustained conquests. Thus the Islamic Arabs and Central Asians of diverse ethnicities and religions --  Buddhists, Christians ,and Zoroastrians just for starters --  lived with and engaged with one another, iron sharpening iron.   There, philosophies and religions from across Eurasia came together, drawn to the trade cities of Central Asia like a savanna water hole. (They were, literally, water holes -- most were near oases). Long used to weighing opposing ideas against one another, Central Asia even tolerated (at times) freethinkers who spoke out against virtually everyone. Here, in this intellectual marketplace of ideas, this constant mental competition, the arts and science flourished -- for a time.

What caused their end?  Something as complex as a society doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and there's no shortage of little things going wrong for the area of central Asia. The most obvious agent of downfall were the Mongols, who didn't merely raid civilization: they often destroyed it utterly.  Some regions lost an estimated 90% of their population, and those who were not murdered were driven away in fear.  Genghis Khan should be condemned by all mankind if only for his destruction of Baghdad,  then a shining city upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but he cut a bloody path jut getting there, leaving behind him ashes and blood-soaked dust. Khan emptied Central Asia, but even before that the arteries were hardening, people receptive to arguments made by theologian-intellectuals like al-Ghazali, who rebuked philosophical materialism in his Incoherence of the Philosophers.  This hardening meant that even when the leaders stumbled upon something revolutionary, like the printing press, it never flared into potency as it did in Europe.

Lost Enlightenment is a considerable survey, mostly intellectual and cultural with a pinch of politics. I certainly welcomed it,  knowing virtually nothing about this area. It is astonishing to hear of places like Afghanistan being hubs of civilized thought, but such is the way of history. Civilizations rise and fall, flower and perish.


* "Central Asians" seems as clumsily artificial as "Yugoslavians" , but the author uses it in lieu of anything better. I suppose it's easier than "Iranian-Turkic peoples".

The Voyage of the Beagle

The Voyage of the Beagle
© 1839 Charles Darwin
448 pages*

As a young man, Charles Darwin lacked sharp direction. His father wanted him to become a doctor, but he hated the sight of blood.  His passion was natural philosophy, the observation and study of the natural world,  and he briefly considered becoming a country parson so that he would have the time to pursue that passion. A chance opportunity to join the crew of the HMS Beagle, assigned to survey the extreme southern end of South America,  gave him more occasion to practice natural observation than he might have ever expected. It was on that journey that he collected the data that would produce his first book,  a monograph on coral reef formation, and stir his imagination about life's abundant variety.

Voyage consists of a log by Darwin, divided into sections of interest, and follows him and the Beagle  from England to South America, then across the Pacific back to England again. Darwin's real purpose on the ship was to keep the captain company,  a man who would have otherwise had to have made conversation with common sailors.   Virtually all of his commentary is given over to descriptions of Darwin's time spent on land, aside from brief mentions of dolphins frolicking.   Young Darwin explores the surrounding area every time the ship puts into port, but he is often dropped off for several days on end, trekking into the interior. Voyage is a work of scientific journalism, describing the flora and fauna of South America's rims and outlying islands. Darwin's commentary reveals an already practiced scientific mind, especially in the area of geology.  The author is most famous, of course, for his insights into biology, particularly the way natural selection forces living populations to change over time.    His  chapter on the Galapagos island and its famed finches drops a hint of the patterns Darwin was beginning to detect:

"Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends."

In addition to detailing the behavior of pumas and the native economy of this-or-that group of Patagonians, Darwin has a few extraordinary experiences. At least once he is marooned in-country during a revolution, and as the Beagle is sailing up the coast of Chile, there is a volcanic eruption and several earthquakes.  Darwin does not limit his commentary to the plants and animals he collects; he also has much to say about the peoples they meet, and here he comes off rather nicely. He views Spanish and English civilization being created in these distant lands an improvement on say, human sacrifice, but recognizes that the age of 'discovery' has also been one of violent ruin for many.   He takes in the many strange customs he sees not with condescension, but with wonder -- with the exception of commenting on stagnant rural economies.  Upon departing the eastern coast of South America on the return trip, he sighs with relief that he will never again witness a slave-country; in Australia, he exhibits a strong sympathy for the aboriginal peoples, who have lost their land to both Polynesians and the English.

For the reader with a scientific appetite and the willingness to chew on pages of description, Voyage is appealing.  This is not some layman's travel guide to South America, obviously, but a book intended for those who wish to learn about the land's geography and life. In 2016, of course, there is added historical appeal; not only in exploring a continent not yet hit by industrialism, but in seeing a giant of English scientific achievement in his youth, still gathering material awaiting the imaginative spark.

*I read from an online version from Literature.org, so pagecount is taken from an Amazon edition. 

Genome

 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
© 1999 Matt Ridley
317 pages

  The human genome is a recipe book, divided into 23 chapters, but considerably larger than Matt Ridley’s Genome. Were it to scale, he writes, a genuine version of the genome in book form would be closer to the size of a stack of bibles.  Genome visits each of the human cell’s 23 chromosomes in turn to learn a little something about human nature. This is not An Ancestor’s Tale in miniature, as Ridley addresses the entire natural history of human kind in the first chapter.   Subsequent chapters cover subjects as diverse as the genetic basis for language and sex differentiation, and as ambitious as free will.  Health and disease occupy much of Ridley’s attention; after genetic disease is covered by itself,  these diseases  are used to illustrate other subjects.    One oft-used example is that of the prevalence of sickle-cell anemia among people of immediate African ancestry;   carrying one allele for it greatly reduces exposure to malaria, a scourge of the continent.  For the genes, losing a few carriers to sickle-cell anemia is a better bargain than losing a greater number to malaria. In evolution, as in economics, there are no solutions – only trade-offs.  Nothing is simple; many conditions like asthma are caused not by one gene flubbing, but by different genes in different populations. Genetics is a subject that can quickly get too detailed for lay readers to enjoy, but Ridley finds the right balance between narrative and specifics, and he has an sly wit.  In a chapter on the sinister history of eugenics, he notes that the Soviet Union never adopted a eugenics program; they were more interested in murdering clever people than limited ones.  The take-home lesson is the human body is not one thing with a becraniumed control tower;   even our flesh is dynamic,  our genes warring with one another and vying for control between themselves and the brain they forged and maintain.   Though it may lose something in being slightly dated, Genome is an eye-opening bit of popular science that offers plenty of insight into history, as well. There was a reprint in 2006 that may have more current information.

Related:

• Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine,  Randolph Nesse,  George Williams
• The Red Queen, Matt Ridley
• The Ancestors Tale;  The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

The Age of Voltaire

The Age of Voltaire: A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756
898 pages
© 1965 Will and Ariel Durant

            The ninth work in Will Durant’s sweeping Story of Civilization, The Age of Voltaire picks up with the death of the Sun King in the dawn of the Enlightenment.   It’s an age of tumultuous change; though its survey ends before the French revolution, Europe is already in the throes of the industrial and scientific revolutions. New worlds are opening; not only are new goods flowing in from the recently-discovered parts of the globe,  but western man’s entire worldview is shifting. The modern age is dawning.

           Voltaire follows the titular philosopher as he travels from France to England, Germany, and later Switzerland, though the first three countries are Durant’s focus here.  As with the rest of Durant’s integral history,  this book carries weight because it examines not only political and military history, but considers in depth the literary, artistic, philosophical, and religious developments of the time. These ideas are not isolated from one another;   individualistic philosophy drives changes in both politics and religion, weakening the claims of absolutist monarchy and state churches alike. England grows with the times;  her king is superseded by Parliament and the prime minister. France hardens and resists, but the tide of history sweeping Europe will break it as surely as the waves break shorelines. 

           Of course, in this era it's less a gentle tide and more of a water-cannon. The radicals of the era are not content with careful, prudent change; no, things must be set on fire. Christianity is beyond reform for the rising philosophes; the world must be overturned, priests must die, churches must be burned. This is the  cradle of the French revolution, the nursery of those who would  take a machete to society until their ideals are satisfied. On a more constructive note, science and technological prowess are abounding, and Durant sets aside a large segment of the book to look at it seperately. 

       Durant is a genteel moderate on the religion and philosophy debate; from Our Oriental Heritage on, he has favored religion as an institution offering stability, comfort,  beauty, and more to the human race, though he is never blind to its abuses. His conclusion, a dialogue between a pope and Voltaire, makes plain his attitude that the tumultuous era his history is heading into is one of mixed blessings; while Durant is thankful that the rise of the philosophes advanced human liberty, checking the abuses of monarchy and organized religion alike, in their enthusiasm they became arrogant.

Benedict: You thought it possible for one mind, in one lifetime, to acquire such scope of knowledge and depth of understanding as to be fit to sit in judgment upon the wisdom of the race --upon traditions and institutions that have taken form out of the experience of the centuries. Tradition is to the group what memory is to the individual; and just as the snapping of memory may bring insanity, so a sudden break with tradition may plunge a whole nation into madness like France  and the revolution. [....] We should be allowed to question traditions and institutions, but with care that we do not destroy more than we can build. 

p. 788

As with his judgment of the impact of the reformation, the entire dialogue puts his tender appreciation for both sides, and the wisdom in appreciating them both, on display.  I suspect his criticism will grow a little sharper in the next volume.

1493

1493: Uncovering the New World that Columbus Created
© 2011 Charles C. Mann
690 pages

Although Christopher Columbus's reputation as an intrepid explorer doesn't withstand historical scrutiny,  Charles C. Mann believes Columbus has a legacy still worth honoring. No, he didn't prove the world to be flat -- that's a myth peculiar to American schoolrooms -- and his attempt to establish that the world was smaller than conventional wisdom held would have failed were it not for the existence of the Americas. But Columbus made the world smaller, through his actions -- for he not only 'discovered' the new world, he aggressively promoted interactions between it and the old. What began as the Colombian Exchange, we now call globalization -- and its effects have been profound from the start. Such is the story of 1493.

Throughout most of recorded history, the economies of large polities tended to be self-contained spheres.  The economies of the Roman and Chinese empires, for instance, were largely separate  aside from a trickle of activity along the silk road.  The modern age is marked, however, by a world economy. No sector of the Earth, no community however small, conducts business in a market smaller than the entire globe. This dense interconnectivity is made possible by both by powerful transportation, in the form of fast-moving planes, ships, and delivery trucks, and the near-instantaneous telecommunications networks. It began, however, with enormous trade galleons tying Spain to central America, and its holdings there to  China. The influx of so much silver into China's markets played havoc with its economy, leading to decades of instability. Crops from the Americas became staples of the global food market, allowing for a prolonged population boom in China and alleviating famine in Ireland, at least until the new crop the Irish came to depend upon, the potato, was hit by blight. The habitat of both plants and animals spread wildly, and it wasn't just large fauna like pigs and horses that found new ground:  bacterial populations flourished, and with them disease. In 1491, Mann detailed how the human landscape of the Americas was laid waste by the arrival of European diseases like smallpox; here, another population, that of the west-coast Africans, is reduced to slavery because of their resistance to malaria.

People tend to like histories of themselves, of great people doing great things -- but this is a material history, very much in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steels, one which demonstrates how human history is often driven by outside factors -- here, by access to resources and the economic changes they allow. Although humans are active as agents, initiating the changes, the outcome is never what they expect: the effect is rather like Odysseus' sailors opening up the bag of wind and being blown wildly off course.

 Mann's history of early globalization covers the changes being wrought across the globe, missing only the mideast. Though dense, Mann is quite the storyteller, at least until the final leg of the story when he wanders into the rubber plantations of South America and the story loses some steam, getting lost for a while charting the growth of communities of runaway slaves in the jungles. The  work isn't as tightly focused in its latter half as in the first, but Mann does tend toward the informal, combining standard narrative with merry anecdotes from his first-hand explorations of the subject. Early on, he spends three pages detailing how he investigated a word Columbus used, eventually concluding that yes, he did mean exactly what we think he meant. The investigation is interesting to a word-nerd like myself, and amusing for its irrelevancy, but it's an example of the way he tends to wander off.

1491 was for me, the book of the year in 2010. Earlier in the summer,  when I looked back over the past five years and reflected on the stand-outs, it ranked among them. Its sequel is strong -- it puts up a good fight -- but it's not quite in the same class.   Even so, I'd recommend it to those interested in the economic impact of the age of discovery, especially if they like rubber-tree plantations.

The Sun's Heartbeat

The Sun's Heartbeat: and Other Stories from the Life of the Star that Powers Our Planet
2011 pages
290 pages

Consider the sun. For thousands of generations, it has loomed over our kind, radiating heat and light down from above, illuminating our lives and stimulating growth. The ancients worshipped the sun, and not without cause:  its description as the giver of life is more literal than poetic.  Such is the strength of the sun that it crosses a chasm of 93 million miles in only eight seconds, and its every fluctuation can have dire consequences for those of living on Earth.  It is all-important, almost mythical -- and only in the 20th century have we truly begun to understand its reality. An inspiration for divine perfection and stability through the ages, the sun is a writhing, chaotic ball, containing energies that stagger the imagination. In The Sun's Heartbeat, Rob Berman reflects on the importance of the sun -- on how our understanding of it has matured through the ages, and how utterly mesmerizing it still is.

We know, of course, that life is impossible without the sun:  the food chain rather depends on it. But how many people appreciate that life as we know it wouldn't even exist without solar energy? Not only is the sun the source of all our energy, but its cosmic rays stimulate the mutations that make evolution possible. And even more fundamentally, our atoms were forged through the life and death of stars:  their pulsing cores turn basic elements into the heavier ones which constitute the planets and ourselves.  Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent American astrophysicist, writes that this knowledge makes him want to grab people in the streets and ask -- "Have you heard this?" Berman shares the same excitement about the sun, the same giddy enthusiasm: solar science is clearly kind of awesome to behold.  While his zeal for communicating can be a little awkward of times, like an high school teacher using teenage slang, it's expressed perfectly in the chapters on the aurora and eclipses.  His description of totality is taken with such care that all the fear, reverence, and wonder of the ages is reborn on the page. This is the peak of a work that abounds in captivating  pieces on the history of solar science, starting with Galileo peering at the sun through a telescope and discovering its spots.  Berman conveys to the reader an understanding of the sun framed through a history of our questions about it, and the approach succeeds wonderfully. Its slight weakness in organization is more than overwhelmed by the fascinating information and the passionate way it is presented.

Related:
Storms from the Sun: the Emerging Science of Space Weather,  Michael J. Carlowicz

The Age of Louis XIV

The Age of Louis XIV
© 1963 Will and Ariel Durant
816 pages

To read Will Durant is to feast from the smorgasbord of human history. Before the reader lies the full scope of human concern, frailty, and accomplishment, like so many varied dishes. The chef is a master: Durant's supple use of the English language seasons even the most mundane of subjects to the point that they sound exotic and entertaining. After positively binging myself by reading The Age of Faith, The Renaissance, The Reformation,  and The Age of Reason Begins during the summer and fall,  I was absolutely stuffed with the heritage of the west. Now after a wintry break, I'm looking forward to digging in again...and did so with The Age of Louis XIV, a tome covering the bloody retreat of religion and the rise of some of Europe's most famous or infamous leaders -- the Sun King in France, Peter the Great in Russia, and Cromwell in England.

Durant opens on France and England, as France emerges as Europe's cultural leader. The bloody religious wars are not over: religion is still quite relevant to the European mind, but happily its desperately violent attempts to hold on to power continue to ruin its credibility among the peoples of the continent. As the power of the church declines, those of the state rise, and no autocrat epitomizes this more than the Sun King, who built Versailles as a monument to the State and himself, and whose example was an inspiration to every other king in the continent. The growing strength of mechanized industry and commerce allow for the consolidation of power: the king's traditional enemy is not his people, but the rest of the aristocracy, and these men who base their strength on agricultural potency are being out-spent by the growing middle class, who for the moment see the king as their route to power. England proves an exception, beheading one king and attempting to institute a commonwealth...only to find itself enduring the regime of a miserable Puritan dictator, then returning to monarchy -- but this time, of a decidedly limited sort. In this work, the English king is losing influence -- and the House of Commons is gaining it. Soon, I suspect, I will be reading not of the Hanoverians but of prime ministers, of Tories and Whigs.

Although religious persecution is alive and well, religious thought is increasingly impotent. Durant is an author generally kind to religion in general, seeing it as an essential part of the fabric that holds societies together, but here the philosophy of the hour is concerned not with theology, but of humanity. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke's works receive the attention formerly given to religious treatises, and Isaac Newton merits his own chapter. Durant curiously underplays Newton, whose work constituted a veritable revolution in the mental landscape,  introducing the idea that the universe is a rational place knit together by laws which can be understood. This is his legacy, not the beliefs of the man himself -- Newton wrote extensively on theology and even dabbled in quackery like alchemy.  For scientifically-minded readers, Louis XIV is a welcome relief from the constant religious debate of previous books.  Like the rest of this series, the book is a comprehensive history which covers not only politics, science, and philosophy, but literature, the arts, and trade as well. Economics doesn't seem to be very well represented here, but Durant may be saving full elaboration  on early industrial economies until the arrival of Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations.

The Enlightenment is on its way, and I for one am looking forward to what lies ahead. As Alexander Pope wrote in his An Essay on Man -- "Go, wondrous creature; mount where science guides!"

The Ingredients

The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements
© Phillip Ball 2002
216 pages

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium [...]

(Tom Lehrer, "The Elements").

Chemistry is not an arcane subject solely practiced in a lab with flasks of mysterious looking fluids. It is nothing less than the study of what everything is made of, and how the elements work together. In The Ingredients, Nature editor Phillip Ball introduces readers to the human story of chemistry -- its history, importance, and some fundamental concepts.

The title is partially misleading;  Ball's work isn't a comprehensive catalogue of the elements, but an introduction to appreciating the field. He begins with the Greeks,, then uses the discovery of oxygen to cover the birth of modern chemistry. A following chapter on gold illustrates the fact that attempts at chemistry have been  pervasive throughout human history. Subsequent chapters introduce the periodic table, and thus our modern understanding of chemistry, and establishes its basis in physics by examining the basic parts and how they came to be discovered. "The Chemical Brothers" covers isotopes -- different 'flavors' of particular elements, like Carbon-14 and Uranium-236 -- which have practical uses, from dating to nuclear energy.  The final section ("For All Practical Purposes") examines the role of various sundry elements, many of which are not commonly known by the public, as parts of products we use every day.  Ball accomplishes the same thing here that Spangenburg and Moser did in their "On the Shoulders of Giants" series: he imparts to the reader an understanding of the fundamentals of chemistry and the personalities that shaped it, while never coming off like a lecturer.  The result is a breezily fun but thorough grounding in the subject, and one worth your while in the interests of general scientific literacy.

[...] these are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,

And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered!

(Tom Lehrer, "The Elements")

The Age of Reason Begins

The Age of Reason Begins
© 1961 Will and Aerial Durant
729 pages

"We are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood. To hate a man because he was born in another county, because he speaks a different language, or because he takes a different view on this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human...Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in considerations of language, nationalism, or religion." - p. John Comenius, b. 1592

After struggling through two centuries of Catholics and Protestants screaming at each other in The Reformation,  The Age of Reason Begins promised deliverance:  bring on the Enlightenment!  The opening chapters encouraged those newfound feelings of belief: enter Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare!  Look, in the table of contents -- there's Montaigne! An a full section devoted to science. Glory, hallelujah. And yet,  The Age of Reason Begins is just as dominated by religion as The Reformation; almost moreso, because its contents are almost wholly devoted to religious wars and interdenominational persecution.  England and France's wars are followed by the Thirty Years' War, to the point that I began to look forward to sections on architecture and literature because they promised some relief from the constant bloodletting. And yet, as Durant points out, these conflicts helped clear the way for the Enlightenment. The utter savageness and prolonged nature of these conflicts  --  and the fact that there were no good guys, only a multitude of opinionated, bloodthirsty cretins who caused me to yell "A plague on ALL YOUR HOUSES!" at least once while reading --   sapped faith's credibility in the minds of Europeans. In desperation to escape the insanity, they turned intstead to philosophy and science.  Thus a grisly read offers relief by ending on a happier note.

The Tragedy of the Moon

The Tragedy of the Moon
© Isaac Asimov 1978
224 pages

The Tragedy of the Moon collects seventeen sundry Asimovian essays  which will prove a delight to most Asimov fans.  The essays were originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, but have been edited and arranged specially for the book. This is one of his more diverse collections: while science is a common element of most of the essays, only two are pure or 'hard' science. The rest combine science and culture, as when Asimov writes on the history of calenders and the week in western culture. I'd never really wondered why the week has seven days, at least not enough to look up the answer.  As Asimov deftly explains in "Moon over Babylon", it comes from lunar festivities which occurred every seventh day. This also has some bearing on the Jewish 'Sabbath', and this essay is rich in history and etymology. While the good doctor's nonfiction output is generally fascinating, I liked this collection most for including more of Asimov's informality:  some collections tend to be staid and to the point, but Asimov's winsome personality shines through the pages here as he constantly kids and charms the reader, both in-text and in footnotes.

If "It's by Asimov!" isn't enough for you, the list of essays follows.

1. "The Tragedy of the Moon" Asimov reflects on how the absence of a moon rotating the earth may have sped up humanity's acceptance of heliocentrism and hastened the growth of scientific progress in general.
2. "The Triumph of the Moon" examines how the moon has been a boon to humanity, though his three triumphs listed are more indirect than I'd imagined. 
3. "Moon Over Babylon" concerns the history of the week as a timekeeping period, and is one of my favorites.
4. "The Week Excuse" sees Asimov argue for a more sensible calender (and make a terrible pun, for he is "not ashamed of myself in the slightest").
5. "The World Ceres" is both explanatory and speculative, as Asimov ponders how humanity might use Ceres for mining and tourism
6. "The Clock in the Sky" regales the reader with the story of how humanity figured out the speed of light.
7. "The One and Only" focuses on carbon's unique suitability for becoming the backbone of life.
8. "The Unlikely Twins" tackle two very different manifestations of carbon: graphite and diamond, and explain how they can be so different and yet consist solely of the same element.
9. "Through the Microglass" focuses on the discovery of microscopic beings like bacteria and their importance in the fields of medicine and biology.
10. "Down from the Amoeba" struggles with the concept of "life": are viruses, sperm,  and red bloodcells 'alive'?
11. "The Cinderalla Compound" builds on this and addresses the discovery of nucleic acid and DNA. 
12. "Doctor, Doctor, Cut my Throat" features Asimov reducing his surgeon into a laughing fit and lecturing on hormones.
13. "Lost in Translation", which also appears either Gold or Magic, is an interesting departure from the rest of the book,  stressing the importance of social and cultural context when translating or reading literature from eras past. He uses the Book of Ruth as his prime example, seeing it as not just a love story, but a triumphant endorsement of universal brotherhood. 
14. "The Ancient and the Ultimate" sees Asimov slyly defend books while pretending to lecture on the supremacy of cassettes (heh) in the future of communication. 
15. "By the Numbers" addresses both hypocrisy -- people complaining about technological societies and taxes while freely enjoying the benefits of both -- and the need for a society in which computers manage things. (Such societies often appear in Asimov's works, often using a global computer  called  MULTIVAC.)
16. "The Cruise and I" relates the story of Asimov's cruise off the Florida coast, where he watched the last Apollo takeoff -- which happened to be the first nighttime launch. Asimov usually avoided travel, so I relished this humorous take which ended in splendor as humanity reached out for the moon yet one more time.  Carl Sagan was on that very same cruise, and he appears in the essay twice.
17. "Academe and I" sees Asimov look back on his careers as an author and professor of biochemistry, giving a minibiography of himself along the way.

I for one enjoyed myself tremendously reading this.

My own copy, purchased in used condition (obviously so) last week. 

Electric Universe

Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity
© 2005 David Bodanis
308 pages

When you're in the dark, and you want to see, you need

Electricity, E-LEC-TRICITY!

(School House Rock, "Electricity")

Every now and again, I misjudge a book and find it a superior surprise. I picked Electric Universe up thinking to read an introduction to electricity, but found instead a rich history detailing the human discovery -- and use of -- electricity which contains stories of curiosity, intellectual courage, romance, adventure, and wartime bravado. In addition to providing clear, picturesque descriptions of how electrical processes work, Bodanis examines how electricity has changed society as a whole from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age.

 Electric Universe is truly a multi-genre book.  I checked it out for the science, as my understanding of electricity is somewhat dim. Like Brian Silver in The Ascent of Science, Bodanis is talented at making electricity understandable at its most basic level,  then applying that explanation to technological applications. The science continues throughout the book, culminating in a chapter on biological nervous systems. Bodanis places a great deal of emphasis on the scientists and technicians who sought to understand and use the hidden powers in nature to illuminate, link together, and revolutionize the world. I never knew that Edison was a patent-breaking scoundrel,  nor did I realize that Nazi Germany had its own sophisticated version of radar. How has a movie not been made of the daring Würzburg raid, in which a scientist parachuted into occupied Europe, escorted by grizzled paratroopers, to take over a German radar installation, learn its secrets, and return to England? There's even a film-worthy moment of all-on-the-line drama when the raiders' retreat is blocked by German machine gunners, who are defeated the last moments by the reappearance of previously lost Scottish highlanders, firing their rifles and yelling out old Gaelic battle-cries.

Modern society is entirely impossible without electricity and the various technologies -- like radio and computers -- which developed from its understanding. The transformation of society through these technologies fascinates, and Electric Universe is a history of that transformation with human-interest stories to spare. I read it in two sittings, pausing only to go to bed for the night, and consider Bodanis an author of interest for the future. Electric Universe is a definite recommendation.

Disease Fighters Since 1950

Disease Fighters since 1950
© 1996 Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser
164 pages

Spotting this excited me, as Spangenburg and Moser's history of science series (On the Feet of Giants and its expanded and revised successor) were delights for me in the past two summers. Disease Fighters is less a history of medical science and more a collection of interrelated biographies in science. The authors frequently tell what the scientist in question discovered, but never explain what that something is. There's not a lot of science here, and the only audience I imagine it being useful to are children and teenagers who  are curious about careers in the medical field. Possibly they might be inspired by these stories of people who put their minds to work for the benefit of all humanity.


Related:
Medical Firsts, Robert Adler
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Roy Porter

These are both titles in medical history.  Porter's is grander in scale.

This Week at the Library (6/5)

Once more, I have kept my head above the water and am finished with term papers and finals for this semester. I had the good luck to do research on topics I enjoyed (history of science, the Great War, and Robert G. Ingersoll), but unfortunately I was unable to give many of the very interesting books I used in the process of reading their full due here. Still, there are a few titles I'd like to pass along...

• From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: the Royal Navy in the Fisher Era is a five-volume set covering British navy history during the Great War. I used it while writing on Germany's use of submarines in that period. The book is incredibly detailed (there's a reason it consists of five volumes of books, each near four hundred pages), but not dry in the way I initially suspected. I used three volumes of it (1-3) in my research. The set I had access to included generaous sea-maps in the back, tucked inside the back cover. 
• The U-Boat Wars by Edwin P. Hoyt served me well when researching Germany's U-boat use in the second war. The book posesses a curious format: while Hoyt generally sticks to a historical narrative, his style when recording specific battles reads like historial fiction. It's aimed at lay readers, and included many useful tables recording the damage done by U-boats (and the damage done unto them in return). I learned that the U-boat fleet remained active throughout the war, although by '45 technological improvements and the widespread use of destroyers implementing those improvements turned them into an irritant rather than a menace. 

In writing on the maturation of heliocentrism and its role in demythologizing the western worldview (following the contributions of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo), I drew from a few books including those I've read here in the past:

• Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser's The History of Science from the Ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, which I read two years ago. While re-reading it for background on a general "history of science" paper, I realized heliocentrism and its naturalistic implications were steadily developed through a course of contributors, and made a thesis out of that.
• Theories for Everything, one of my first reads here.At the time, I said that it was one of those books I wish I had in my private library. It is now. 
• Spotting It All Started with Copernicus: how Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution by Howard Margolis justified my idea. I used it for tracking the astronomical models taught in universities: it fell right in line with my thesis, but I was too exhausted from note-taking by the time I spotted this book to give it a full scan. 

While I wrote on submarines, heliocentrism, Robert Ingersoll, and did two final exam papers for my History of Europe (1914-1945) and Gilded Age classes, I somehow got some leisure reading done. This past week, I read....

• The Last Juror, an old favorite by John Grisham that uses the perspective of a newspaper writer and owner to track the history of a small southern town during the 1970s, ten years occupied by  Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement,  the rise of marijuana trafficking in the US, and a heinous murder. Easily the most interesting of Grisham's works, for me.
• Next I read another book in the Hornblower series, this time Commodore Hornblower. The good captain is forced to navigate the Baltic Sea, maintaining and building England's anti-Napoleonic alliance. The book sees Hornblower fight on both land and sea when Napoleon invades Russia. 
• I finally finished Hard Contact, a Star Wars novel focused on the trials of four Clone Commandos and a young padawan, who invade a planet occupied by a tyrannical overlord in an attempt to destroy a genetic virus that could be used against the Grand Army of the Republic's clone troopers. The book maintans the humor of the video game that inspired it.
• Lastly I read David Attenborough's the Trials of Life, a book documenting the life of animals as they bear young, feed, grow and fight, court mates, build shelters, and work together. The book is completely fascinating and full of wonderous pictures.

Next week:

• Plato's Podcasts: the Ancients' Guide to Modern Living by Mark Vernon. Has a fun title, right?
• The Iron Heel, Jack London 
• The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, Tenzin Gyatsao
• Iron Coffins, Herbert Werner. 

Lost Discoveries

Lost Discoveries: the Ancient Roots of Modern Science -- from the Babylonians to the Maya
© 2002 Dick Teresi
453

I spotted this while collecting books for a paper on the emergence of Renaissance science, and it looked so interesting that I knew I’d be reading it properly instead of scanning and making notes. I’m glad I did, for it’s as enjoyable a book about human history and science as I’ve ever read.

Author Dick Teresi establishes from the start that while the traditional western-centric narrative of scientific progress is simplistic, chauvinistic, and incorrect, previous attempts at a multicultural view of scientific history have repeated those mistakes while being patronizing to boot. The traditional narrative, which Teresi believes began only 150 years ago, holds that science was born in Greece, where it defined the classical world until that era’s demise. While the ideas of the Greeks were kept safe by the Arabs,  scientific progress did not resume until the Renaissance, and science has remained the province of the Western world ever since -- only becoming global after colonialism exported it. Attempts to overturn this narrative have gone so far as to reduce the Greeks to nothing more than unoriginal borrowers, and given rise to wild speculative theories like ancient Egypt having gliders and using the Pyramids as air-control towers.

Teresi hopes -- and I think, succeeds -- with this book to project a broader and fairer view. Chapters on mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry, and technology show that cultures across the globe have all explored the natural world in their ways, and that further, many systems of thought are the result of interplay between these cultures. The combination of Greek and Indian ideas in math, for instance, supplemented the Arab world’s own knowledge in the same. Cultures have had different approaches, often ignoring parts of science while promoting others as their cultural values suggest, but no culture has failed to investigate the world in which they live. The book thus appealed to me in the same way history as a whole does: it reminds me that so many people have lived and asked questions, just as I do, and they have tried to answer those questions in a delightful variety of ways.

There is, however, a difference between explaining the natural world and doing so scientifically. Teresi’s use of science in this book is limited to the popular use of it -- information relating to the world we live in. Lost Discoveries records a range of empirical and speculative approaches on the part of people to find the truth. Only one chapter suffers in content, that of cosmology. After explaining the modern view -- theories based on the big bang -- Teresi then repeats every mythological story that references an eternal universe that begins with massive expansion and that might tend to be cyclical in having a growth, death, and rebirth cycle. This is reaching: those stories are supernatural accounts, not investigations of the natural world. Contemporary science remains based on Greek, Indian, and Islamic math, or uses Babylonian calendars, or used Chinese technology. How are these account of cosmic birth a root or base of modern science? They have their place, but I don’t think it is in this book.

Despite this weakness, the book as a whole is strong. I enjoyed it immensely and recommend it to anyone interested in the global history of our attempts to explain the natural world.  Teresi presents a varied, rich, and fair account that has increased my appreciate for the human heritage as a whole.

Medical Firsts

Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome

© 2004 Robert Adler

232 pages

A little over a year ago, I read Science Firsts, a fairly enjoyable book that prepared me well for a summer focusing on the history of science and was pick of the week in its time. I wanted to read more from the author, but I had no access to this book, which is identical in approach and different in topic. Like Science Firsts, this book consists of a dozen chapters, each written on a particular innovation or novel approach in the field. The ideas are varied: the first chapter concerns Hippocrates' patient-centered approach to medicine, another addresses the discovery of viral diseases, another is on the development of the Pill, and so on. Most of the innovations have a specific thinker attached, and so most of the book reads like Profiles in Medical History. The later chapters -- concerning topics like the worldwide coordinated effort to destroy smallpox and the human genome project -- focus more on the thing itself rather than the person driving the change. The personality-centered theme of the book isn't necessarily a weakness: these men and women are worth honoring. (I don't think I'd ever heard of Abu Bakr Al-Razi, but I'm glad I have now. According to Adler, he was a man of the Enlightenment before his time.) The chapters read well: I don't think you have to be scientifically literate to enjoy them and learn something, and indeed I think the book is aimed for more casual readers.

Related Books:

• The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Roy Porter
• Theories for Everything, various authors