Tag non-fiction

DOUBLE REVIEW! SO MUCH SCIENCE!

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Death from The Skies by Philip Plait
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

 

I normally don’t review two books at once. There are reasons not to do it now: these two books have more in contrast than they do in common, and my reading of both was quite different: Death From the Skies I read over the course of a couple of months, a little here and a little there; Guns, Germs and Steel I tried to read straight through, and failed to complete — at least partly because that is not, for me, the best way to read popular science.

But these books do have some important things in common: they are both popular science non-fiction, DFTS in the hard science of astronomy, GGAS from the social science of anthropology. Both are about death, destruction and the end of civilization as we know it. I finished one only a few days before I gave up on the other, which proximity promptly juxtaposed them in my mind (YES! Been waiting for a chance to say “juxtaposed.” That alone is enough reason to review them both together.). Both have, for me, an interesting premise. Neither includes zombies.

Now let’s get to the more extensive and interesting list of the differences. DFTS is about future death and destruction: the book is a list of all of the ways that the universe could wipe out all life on Earth: asteroid impact, massive solar flare, black hole fly-by, gamma ray burst, supernova, even alien invasion. GGAS is about the death and destruction that has happened in the past, specifically to the human race, caused by the rest of the human race. It asks one essential question: why is it that some civilizations have been able to thrive and grow, and others have not? And when civilizations come into contact with each other, and one or the other is destroyed or subsumed, what determines which civilization survives and which dies?

It’s an interesting subject, I think. Diamond takes as his prime example the conquest of the Incan empire by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Why was it that the Spanish empire managed to overcome the Incan empire? Why wasn’t it the other way around — Incan ships crossing the Atlantic, Incan soldiers wiping out hordes of Spanish troops, and an Incan general capturing the Spanish king, demanding an entire room full of gold for ransom, and then executing the king anyway, as Pizarro did to Atahualpa, the Incan emperor? Or why couldn’t the Incas fight off the Spanish, and establish their own hegemony over the Americas? Diamond examines this and every other contact between civilizations that he can, and in exhaustive — and I mean exhaustive, fatiguing, meticulous, infinite as well as infinitesimal, and finally brain-numbing — detail, he explains.

Here’s the spoiler: it’s the title. The Spanish conquest of the Incas was accomplished not by Pizarro, but by smallpox, which had been dropped off on the coast of Mesoamerica ten years before, by Hernan Cortes and his troops in Mexico, along with the various explorers and traders who followed Columbus’s lead to the New World. Atahualpa wasn’t even supposed to be the Emperor of the Incas: the emperor of the Incas for thirty years before Pizarro’s attack was Huayna Capac, who led the empire to the height of its size and power — until he died of a fever, probably either smallpox or measles. Along with his successor, his eldest son Ninan Cuyochi. The empire was the divided between Atahualpa and his brother Huascar, who proceeded to wage a civil war for control which Atahualpa won after several years of fighting — right before he was captured by Pizarro. The battles that did occur between the Spanish and the Incas were won by the use of guns, steel weapons and armor, and mounted cavalry, none of which the Incas had.

Diamond actually explains every reason why the Incas didn’t have cavalry, why the Europeans had the deadlier diseases, why they had better weapons, why they had guns, why they had better ships, why they had writing; it has everything to do with the ecology, the geography, and the histories of the two areas of the world, the Americas and Eurasia. And honestly, it’s pretty interesting.

The problem is that Diamond writes sometimes like a popular science writer, but much more often like a scientist, which he is. And that’s fine. But like all scientists writing treatises about their research, his goal is to be meticulous and scrupulous in explaining how he came to his conclusions, rather than to make the book interesting. And I think he succeeds in that: because I felt like he asked the same question ten or twelve times, from different angles — why didn’t the Incas have cavalry horses? Why didn’t they have large domesticated mammals? Why didn’t they have the same agricultural productivity? Why didn’t they have the same population? Why didn’t they have the same specialization of professions within society? Why didn’t they have writing? — and every time gave a complete answer, but every time it was the same answer: geography, ecology, and history. Over and over and over again.

And then he moved on to Australia. And then Africa. And at that point, I just couldn’t take it any more, and I stopped reading it.

Now Phillip Plait: that man knows how to make a popular science book interesting for the average reader. Every chapter describes a new way that the universe could kill us all. Each chapter begins with a hypothetical description of that death, how it would arrive, how it would progress, and specifically how it would kill us (Generally speaking, Robert Frost was right: fire, or ice.); then the chapter describes the science behind the cataclysmic event; then it describes the probability of that event happening, based on our knowledge of the universe. He goes from the most concrete elements to the most abstract, and because of that, by the time you get to the abstract stuff, you’re ready for it, and you understand what he’s talking about, and you want to know more — generally because the description of the deaths is pretty horrific, but the probability of any of them happening is “Pretty danged small,” or else it’s a certainty — but not for billions of years. Like when the sun dies. Definitely going to happen; definitely going to kill us; definitely not due for about 7 billion years. It’s comforting, really.

(Not all of it. The first chapter, on asteroid impact, is actually pretty scary, as is the second, about massive solar flares wiping out our power and communications. The solar flares couldn’t kill us directly — but I’ve read enough post-apocalyptic fiction to know that if the power and communications go, Road Warrior and cannibalism are not far behind. And I would not do well in that world. The alien invasion one is much more speculative — but it’s creepy as hell. Robot spiders. That’s all I’m going to say.)

And here’s how Plait handles the science: he makes jokes — good ones, including a Spinal Tap reference. He explains the science, but he also makes it clear why we should or should not know the details. An example: before Plait gets into the chapter about the end of the universe, he takes a few pages to discuss scientific notation (And I apologize for the formatting — the exponents were superscript in my draft, I swear. Don’t know how to make it happen on WordPress.) — our planet is 4×10^9 years old, the universe 1.3×10^10. The end of the universe will come sometime around 10^70 years from now. And Plait was smart enough to know that people would think, “Wow — that’s sixty times the current age of the universe. That’s a really long time.” But the thing is, it’s not. 10^15 years is not six times as long as 10^9 years: it’s 1,000,000 times as long. That’s the age of the Earth lived over again one million times. And I’m thinking about my summer break in four months, and it seems a long way off. 10^70 years is so absurdly far into the future we can’t even fathom it. And Plait explained that, in a way I could understand. It helped.

Plus he explains all the awesome stuff about the universe. I feel like I understand black holes better now — just in time for me to watch Interstellar on Hulu. And now I know that spaghettification is a thing. My new favorite thing, in fact.

So here’s the point: I’m glad I read part of GGAS. I’m glad I didn’t spend any more time reading the rest. If you are terribly interested in prehistory and the rise and fall of civilizations, you may want to read it — it is very clear and easy to understand, and yep, it’s thorough. But for me, I’d rather read about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda in a few tens of billions of years. GGAS just made me want to play Civilization on my computer.

Which I may just go do now.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

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Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

by Patton Oswalt

 

I can’t tell you how happy I was to unwrap this gift from my wife: not only am I a tremendous Patton Oswalt fan; not only have I been reading bad books lately; but it was Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic “Christmas Book Flood” tradition which we tried out this year – you give each other a book for Christmas Eve and then spend the rest of the evening reading. Okay, I waited until Christmas Day to read most of it, and finished it on Boxing Day – but this was an excellent present to start off the Christmas gifts with, and an excellent book to read.

In some ways, it reads like Oswalt’s standup: it’s eclectic and unexpected, shifting subject and pace and even genre with no notice at all: you read the prologue, and then the first piece, which is a personal essay about Oswalt’s youth – and then the second piece is a mock-up of movie notes on an imagined zany comedy about an amnesiac getting married. And the first piece is so interesting and insightful and intelligent that it takes you quite a while to realize that the second one is entirely – not. Well, no, it’s still interesting: but now it’s interesting because it’s a joke, not because it is a reflection on the moment when one realizes one is an artist at heart; even though that realization came to Oswalt in an amusing circumstance, the essential concept of the essay is to describe that self-realization, which, like most great insights, slipped away again almost immediately, to return only in fragments spread out over years –and, I hope, truly recovered for Oswalt in this writing.

Because Patton Oswalt is an artist, a comic artist. This book has humor in every way it is possible to have humor: it has over-the-top toilet humor (The amnesiac bride piece has it all – drunkenness, vomit, nudity, dildos falling onto sushi platters – all the classic gags.); it has subtle and ironic humor, often dark and often self-deprecating; it has one-liners and pieces that are all one long set-up for the final punchline. There are visual jokes as well as literate ones. And like any great comic artist, Oswalt has managed to include a number of genuine insights, frequently hidden as jabs thrown at the world and society’s ugliness and stupidity. Because as Oswalt tells us in the title piece – which title comes from a very effective system of dividing the nerd world, into those who prefer zombie stories, versus spaceship stories, versus wasteland stories – he is a wasteland guy, a fan of the Road Warrior: one who would, in his imagination, destroy the world and society, in order to focus on the last remaining survivors and their idealistic quest to keep their own sense of what’s important, even in a world that has gone mad around them. It’s a quest that Oswalt has stuck to, and a torch of reason and compassion that he carries still, and that carries through this book. It was a joy to read it, to laugh along with him, and even more, to think with him.

The Genius of Dogs

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The Genius of Dogs
by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

This was a good read: it was a decent book with fascinating information in it, and not just because I love dogs. Though that certainly didn’t hurt.

The basic idea is this: dogs are geniuses in one specific area of cognition. The book carefully and precisely documents that genius, and discusses how it came about and what it means, both for dogs and for humans. Brian Hare is a cognition expert, and has made an exhaustive study of this topic, which resulted in this book; because it was exhaustive, he studied not only dogs, but also foxes, wolves, dingoes, and New Guinea Singing Dogs, along with as many different breeds of dog as he could, all in order to test the parameters of dogs’ genius.

The genius of dogs is this: dogs are better than any other species — better than dolphins, better than chimpanzees or other primates, and MUCH better than cats (Had to get that dig in there — but seriously, if you want to win every future argument about which are smarter, dogs or cats, this is the book for you) — at understanding humans. They can grasp more words, more gestures, more specifically taught abilities, than any other creature. Most interesting and most impressive is this aspect, which Hare goes into in depth, complete with cute anime-style illustrations: dogs don’t just understand what we tell them, they understand our intent. Dogs can learn to obey any gesture, from a spoken command to a pointed finger to a nod of the head or a turn of the body, so long as that gesture conveys the human’s intention. That is, if you want a dog to look underneath a box for a treat, you don’t even have to say it: you can point, or nod, or turn your body towards the thing you want the dog to do, and the dog will do it. This is actually quite remarkable, as it shows a level of empathy between species that would seem impossible for any but humans — and not even most of us.

Reading about the science and the stories of dog genius was interesting and touching for me as a dog lover. I will say that the book’s writing is not genius: Hare is a scientist trying to write a popular science book (with the help of his wife, Vanessa Woods), and he doesn’t do a great job of it. The book seems self-serving at times, with Hare giving himself credit for discovering the remarkable intelligence of dogs; he’s actually being tongue in cheek, but it doesn’t come through, and you want to roll your eyes a few times. But the man knows his science, and he loves his dogs; and that’s all you can really ask for from a book, don’t you think?

Rich Book, Poor World

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Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell

I was happy with this find: first because I came across it in a lovely bookstore, the kind of shop I want to own someday, a little storefront with ten-foot-high shelves, with only enough space between for one person to pass, and yet a bright and sunny atmosphere, warm and welcoming — the proprietor had read both books I bought, and praised them both, so I felt both accompanied and intelligent; second because it is an old copy, with genuine cover art (The image above) and a 35-cent price printed at the top (Yeah, that’s right — mine was even cheaper than this image!), and a sweet, soft smell to the pages; third because everything I read by George Orwell makes me admire the man more, and fills me with the desire both to read and to write.

It was an excellent read. Orwell has a journalist’s eye and a journalist’s pen; the prose is clear and straightforward, the detail precise and thorough and fascinating. He creates characters among his acquaintances mostly through simple description of their appearance and actions and words; within the first ten pages you meet one of the more appalling people Orwell knew in Paris, and you know why, based merely on the drunken speech Orwell relates from the man. He makes himself a character, as well, though he creates his own character similarly, through speech and action and description; there is never any explanation given for how he ended up in Paris, so close to destitute, but he quickly joins the ranks of the poorest, being forced to sell his clothing in order to buy food, and spending days at a time starving before he finds employment again.

Orwell also creates a graphic picture of the two great cities at the time, in the 1930’s, between the World Wars when the greatest threat to Western society was socialism; there is a constant theme of intolerance running through his interactions with authorities, and though he is frequently harassed for his poverty and the corresponding assumption of lawlessness, he comments that it would be much worse were he suspected of being a Socialist — which, of course, he was, though not a politically active one at the time. He tells of the slums of Paris and the workhouses of London, and creates an expose of Paris restaurants and hotels worthy of Upton Sinclair.

There are some moments I would change: Orwell reveals his own prejudices, against some races and nationalities and particularly against Jews; there is a presumption that the reader knows French, which I do not; and in this edition, at least, the curse words were blanked out — which wasn’t a problem when Orwell wrote things like “Shut yer ______ mouth and get on with yer bath!” because even if I don’t know what he meant (almost certainly “damn”), I can fill it in with my own imagination and be no worse off for it. But then there was a passage when Orwell was expounding on why curse words become curse words, and how they lose their original meaning as soon as they reach common use; and it read like “But ________ is no worse than _______, which was once used less often than _________.” Which was obnoxious.

It was also quite disgusting at times, and quite sad; but then, so is the subject. It’s a short and largely simple read, and Orwell’s insights, offered at the end, are sharp and precise, and leave one with some very interesting thoughts.

Highly recommended.

Unpopular Essays

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Unpopular Essays
by Bertrand Russell

I need a new copy of this book; mine is old, and the glue in the spine has failed, allowing the first thirty or so pages to fall out.

I need a new copy because even though I have read this, I want to keep it. I want to read it again.

Partly that is because I want to learn a bit more philosophy; I didn’t understand the essays “Philosophy and Politics,” “Philosophy for Laymen,” or “Philosophy’s Ulterior Motives” as well as I would have liked. I followed the logic and the writing, of course, as I think that Lord Russell was possibly the clearest thinker and the clearest writer in the history of English and the history of philosophy; but the references to the large ideas of Kant and Nietzsche and particularly the Greeks, were new to me, and thus no chord was struck.

Mainly it is because I did understand everything Russell was saying in the less-referential pieces. Particularly “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed” and “What It Means to Be a Teacher.” The last resonated with me especially because I am a teacher, and I strive to be one that Lord Russell would have approved. I want my students to think: to weigh evidence, to question assumptions, to come to their own conclusions, and then justify their decisions logically. It’s difficult. They don’t want to. I myself am much less than perfect as a model of the ideals. If I could, I would have them read Bertrand Russell. (Come to think of it, I’ll have them do just that. I am a high school literature teacher, after all. But which essay?) Whether they ever do or not, I plan to read all of his works that I can get my hands on; and I will read this one again. If for no other reason, then because of this, from the introduction: “A word as to the title. In the Preface to my Human Knowledge I said that I was writing not only for professional philosophers, and that ‘philosophy proper deals with matters of interest to the general educated public.’ Reviewers took me to task, saying they found parts of my book difficult, and implying that my words were such as to mislead purchasers. I do not wish to expose myself again to this charge; I will therefore confess that there are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling. On this ground I do not claim that the essays are popular; and if not popular, then ‘unpopular.'”