DaveWells.us

At the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, sci­en­tific weather fore­cast­ing was in its infancy. The U.S. Weather Bureau, then about twenty years old, did not have the ben­e­fit of large-scale obser­va­tion tools like satel­lites or Doppler radar. Instead, the Bureau’s fore­cast­ers — a hand­ful of men in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. — relied on weather data col­lected by observers sta­tioned through­out the coun­try. This sys­tem allowed large storms to be tracked over land, but could not track those over the open ocean. This inabil­ity, cou­pled with a very poor under­stand­ing of hur­ri­canes and the Bureau’s insti­tu­tional arro­gance, led to com­plete unpre­pared­ness for one of this country’s worst weather-related disasters.

Dur­ing the first week of Sep­tem­ber, 1900, a trop­i­cal storm passed just north of Cuba, drench­ing the island in rain. The Weather Bureau’s observers, in place on the island since the end of the Spanish-American War, pre­dicted that the storm would move north, even­tu­ally pass­ing over Florida and back into the Atlantic, with­out ever gain­ing much strength. In this, they dif­fered from more expe­ri­enced native Cuban mete­o­rol­o­gists, who guessed that the storm would con­tinue along its north­west­erly course and become much more intense. The Bureau worked to silence the pre­dic­tions of the Cubans, believ­ing that their own guesses were far more accurate.

Isaac Cline, direc­tor of the Weather Bureau’s Galve­ston sta­tion, began to note pecu­liar­i­ties of wind and water on the sev­enth of Sep­tem­ber. But, he was lulled into a false sense of secu­rity by reports from the Bureau’s main office. He knew a storm was com­ing, but assumed it would be a minor one, and no cause for seri­ous alarm. The city’s res­i­dents, with no rea­son to do oth­er­wise, ini­tially paid lit­tle atten­tion to the approach­ing storm. When water began to rise over most of the island of Galve­ston, peo­ple started to worry. When high winds caused a down­town cafe to col­lapse, killing five men, peo­ple became truly afraid.

As the water con­tin­ued to rise and more and more build­ings suc­cumbed to the wind and waves, the city’s res­i­dents tried to find the high­est, most sta­ble struc­tures in which to take refuge. Some were forced to move from place to place as build­ing after build­ing became unsta­ble. Even some of the most solidly built homes and busi­nesses even­tu­ally col­lapsed under the hurricane’s onslaught, killing or injur­ing those inside. A quarter-mile long sec­tion of street­car tres­tle, backed by tons of other debris, razed a path across the island, pro­pelled by the storm surge.
When the first out­siders reached Galve­ston after the storm had passed, they were greeted with hor­ri­ble sights — and smells. Thou­sands were dead, so many that sur­vivors began sim­ply burn­ing corpses where they lay. The process of clean­ing up was a long one; it took nearly a decade to rebuild the city (with stronger hur­ri­cane protection).

Erik Lar­son tells the story of the Galve­ston hur­ri­cane largely through the eyes of Isaac Cline, the city’s chief mete­o­rol­o­gist. He com­pares Cline’s own mem­oirs with offi­cial records and accounts writ­ten by other sur­vivors of the storm; these don’t always agree. Most pre-storm Galveston-related doc­u­ments — includ­ing all of Cline’s papers — were destroyed by the hur­ri­cane. But, Lar­son does an admirable job of piec­ing together details from what did survive.

Some­times though, in the pur­suit of a com­pelling nar­ra­tive, he pro­vides a dubi­ous level of detail regard­ing people’s thoughts, words, or actions. I had the same com­plaint about Larson’s The Devil in the White City, a book about the 1893 World’s Columbian Expo­si­tion in Chicago and the ser­ial killer known as Dr. H. H. Holmes. Lar­son makes up for this (in my eyes, at least) with a wealth of more ver­i­fi­able infor­ma­tion. He pro­vides accounts of peo­ple out­side Galve­ston who expe­ri­enced the storm and those of vol­un­teers who helped to clean up the city, along with a great deal of weather-related his­tor­i­cal context.

This book was pub­lished before Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina dev­as­tated New Orleans, and I read it before Hur­ri­cane Ike defeated Galveston’s extra defenses and wreaked havoc on the city again. It per­haps should have served as a reminder of the awe­some power of the weather and the dan­ger of the com­pla­cency of many some coastal communities.

The case of Jack the Rip­per is one of the world’s most endur­ing unsolved mys­ter­ies. Dur­ing the 120 years or so since the killer claimed his first vic­tim, there has been almost con­stant spec­u­la­tion as to his iden­tity. Doc­tors and sur­geons have always made pop­u­lar sus­pects, as some of the vic­tims are thought to have been dis­sected or dis­mem­bered with some skill. Other the­o­ries have sug­gested Eng­lish nobles. petty theives, “insane” per­sons, and even Joseph (not John) Mer­rick — the Ele­phant Man — as the killer.

In this 2002 book, Patri­cia Corn­well details her inves­ti­ga­tions of and con­clu­sions about the case. She has, for the first time, brought mod­ern foren­sic tech­niques to bear on the case. Lit­tle phys­i­cal evi­dence remains, but she sub­jects what there is (let­ters, mostly) to DNA, mito­chon­dr­ial DNA, paper, water­mark, ink, and hand­writ­ing analy­sis. She uses the result­ing evi­dence to link Wal­ter Sick­ert, a British painter of Ger­man extrac­tion, to the crimes. With this evi­den­tial con­nec­tion estab­lished, Corn­well uses a great deal of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to bol­ster her case.
Among many other things, Sick­ert often painted and drew very dark and men­ac­ing pieces, and Corn­well sees par­al­lels between some of these and the Ripper;s vic­tims or crimes. She cites the fact that Sick­ert, a for­mer actor, was a mas­ter of dis­guise, and that he would often dis­ap­pear for days into one of a num­ber of secret stu­dios he kept in the seed­ier sec­tions of London.

Corn­well also argues against some basic sup­po­si­tions of the Rip­per case. At the time of the mur­ders, hun­dreds of let­ters were sent to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police, claim­ing to be from the killer. Most of these have long been con­sid­ered to be fakes. Corn­well posits instead that the vari­a­tions in hand­writ­ing among the let­ters would have been easy for a skilled artist like Sick­ert to fake, and that sim­i­lar­i­ties in writ­ing style and paper types mean that a large num­ber of the let­ters are actu­ally from the killer. She also dis­agrees with the idea that the Rip­per appeared, killed a hand­ful of women, and then dis­ap­peared again. She iden­ti­fies one mur­der that took place prior to the acknowl­edged Rip­per killings and a num­ber that occurred after them as the work of the same per­son — Wal­ter Sickert.

Por­trait of a Killer is com­pelling, but as Corn­well her­self admits, most of her evi­dence is cir­cum­stan­tial. It appears — at least from the orga­ni­za­tion of the book — that she set out to answer the ques­tion “Was Wal­ter Sick­ert Jack the Rip­per?” rather than the ques­tion “Who was Jack the Rip­per?” As such, it comes off as more of an inves­ti­ga­tion of Sick­ert than of the Rip­per. The evi­dence, as Corn­well presents it, shows that the artist could have been the killer — not that he was, and not that any of the other sus­pects weren’t.

Much of what has been writ­ten about the fast food indus­try in recent years has focused on how unhealth­ful the food is and the industry’s pre­sumed link to the rise of obe­sity in this coun­try. While Eric Schlosser touches on this, his exam­i­na­tion of fast food goes far deeper. Schlosser details the his­tory of the indus­try, trac­ing it to its ori­gins in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He sees the con­cept of fast food as purely a prod­uct of post-WWII Amer­i­can cul­ture: squeaky-clean restau­rants using assem­bly line or auto­mated prepa­ra­tion meth­ods, pro­vid­ing almost instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion to the rapidly-growing pop­u­la­tion of car owners.

Schlosser goes on to show how inti­mately the fast food indus­try has been con­nected to var­i­ous eco­nomic, social, and indus­trial devel­op­ments over the last sixty years. The prac­tice of busi­ness fran­chis­ing — in which a com­pany licenses its name, busi­ness plan, and pro­ce­dures to indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neurs, thus cre­at­ing uni­for­mity of prod­ucts and demand­ing uni­for­mity of sup­plies — is an inven­tion of the fast food indus­try. He also links fast food to such things as the rise of mono­cul­ture, the indus­tri­al­iza­tion of meat pro­cess­ing, the low national min­i­mum wage, and the increased use of processed and arti­fi­cial ingre­di­ents and flavorings.

Although Schlosser spends most of his time exam­in­ing what he (and I) see as detri­men­tal effects of the fast food indus­try, he does find a sil­ver lin­ing. He dis­cusses some good things the indus­try has accom­plished, and sin­gles out some com­pa­nies (such as In-N-Out Burger, one of my favorites) that buck indus­try trends. This book is a fas­ci­nat­ing read, but I wouldn’t rec­om­mend it if you plan to con­tinue eat­ing fast food with any regularity.

Anthony Bour­dain pulls no punches in this mem­oir of his life­time in the restau­rant indus­try. He sets out to describe what the peo­ple who toil behind swing­ing kitchen doors are really like, explic­itly point­ing out the dif­fer­ences between them and squeaky-clean TV chefs — or at least their on-screen per­sonas. Bour­dain details his rise through the culi­nary world, from a teenaged dish­washer in a coastal Mass­a­chu­setts tourist town to the Culi­nary Insti­tute of America-trained Exec­u­tive Chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York. His ascent was far from smooth — inex­pe­ri­ence, drug addic­tion, crazy emplo­erys and employ­ees, and run-ins with orga­nized crime all took their toll. But for Bour­dain, cook­ing — really food — is an all-consuming pas­sion, and he seems able to bounce back from anything.

Beyond being a gritty mem­oir, Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial offers a great deal of insight into how pro­fes­sional kitchens and restau­rants in gen­eral func­tion. Bour­dain explains on which days of the weeks var­i­ous food items are gen­er­ally fresh­est, which dishes typ­i­cally have the high­est mark-ups, what menu items to avoid, and what sorts of spe­cial requests tend to piss cooks off. He also offers advice on kitchen tools, gar­nish­ing meth­ods, and ingre­di­ent selec­tion for the ama­teur cook hop­ing to emu­late fancy restau­rant techniques.

Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial is a very inter­est­ing read, if one can get past Bourdain’s blus­tery tone, salty lan­guage, and some­times unsa­vory doings. He is a good writer, despite these things, and his intel­li­gence and whit often shine through, mak­ing this a book that’s hard to set down.

In Stiff, Mary Roach explores what hap­pens after death. Unlike most oth­ers who address this topic, she does not con­cern her­self with ques­tions of heaven, hell, rein­car­na­tion, or any­thing else to do with souls or life forces; Roach is inter­ested solely in the var­i­ous things that hap­pen to our bod­ies post-mortem. She, of course, explores the more or less “usual” activ­i­ties in which corpses are involved: embalm­ing, bur­ial, cre­ma­tion, decom­po­si­tion, etc. She also inves­ti­gates rel­a­tively new environmentally-friendly mor­tu­ar­ial options like tis­sue diges­tion and com­post­ing. But, the bulk (and most inter­est­ing parts) of the book are dis­cus­sions of less con­ven­tional treat­ments of or uses for cadavers.

The med­ical pro­fes­sion has need for a rel­a­tively steady stream of cadav­ers for the pur­poses of test­ing pro­ce­dures and edu­cat­ing stu­dents. Today, these needs are met through anatom­i­cal gifts and unclaimed bod­ies from morgues. These sources have not always been avail­able, how­ever. In the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies, bod­ies were often obtained through unscrupu­lous means. Doc­tors and med­ical schools often turned a blind eye to the activ­i­ties of their sup­pli­ers, which typ­i­cally included grave rob­bing and — on at least one well-publicized occa­sion — murder.

Beyond sim­ple anatomy lessons, doc­tors and sci­en­tists have had a vari­ety of uses for cadav­ers, how­ever they were obtained. Some are sub­jected to impact test­ing to deter­mine the proper tol­er­ances for crash-test dum­mies. Oth­ers are used to test the effec­tive­ness of body armor. A grow­ing num­ber of cadav­ers are used for var­i­ous types of sur­gi­cal train­ing and prac­tice — includ­ing cos­metic surgery. In the past, they have been used for an array of more bizarre and ethically-questionable exper­i­ments, rang­ing from attempts at rean­i­ma­tion to recre­ations of Jesus’s crucifixion.

Roach man­ages to strike a very del­i­cate bal­ance between gal­lows wit and respect for the bod­ies about which she writes. In this, she mir­rors many of the peo­ple she inter­views — peo­ple who work with cadav­ers every day. Thus, Stiff is often laugh-out-loud funny while also being highly inter­est­ing and infor­ma­tive. Inves­ti­ga­tion of the med­ical and sci­en­tific uses for cadav­ers obvi­ously made a last­ing impres­sion on Roach: she devotes the final chap­ter to thoughts about what she wants done with her own body when she dies.

In this col­lec­tion of essays, Anne Fadi­man cre­ates vignettes of a life full of — indeed, insep­a­ra­ble from — books. Her love affair with books began before she could even read: she eschewed build­ing blocks, pre­fer­ring instead to real­ize her archi­tec­tural imag­in­ings with stacks of her father’s books.

Fadi­man divides her time between dis­cus­sions of books them­selves and of the act of read­ing them. In addi­tion to her early expe­ri­ence with books as struc­tural mate­r­ial, she writes about the joy of sec­ond­hand book­stores, “mar­ry­ing” her library with that of her hus­band, her infant son’s bib­lio­phagic ten­den­cies, dif­fer­ing opin­ions on the proper way to treat one’s books, her family’s pen­chant for proof­read­ing every bit of printed text they encounter, and a bevy of other book-related topics.

Fadiman’s writ­ing is charm­ing and delight­fully witty, while at the same time man­ag­ing to be quite infor­ma­tive. Ex Lib­ris is a great read for any­one who reads late into the night, obsesses over how to arrange books on book­shelves, or is pow­er­less to resist the allure of a used-book store.

As an anthro­pol­ogy stu­dent at Har­vard in the mid-1970s, Wade Davis quickly tired of read­ing ethno­graphic stud­ies; he longed to do field­work him­self. He decided, more or less on a whim, to go to the Ama­zon — fol­low­ing the exam­ple of a like-minded friend who’d moved into an Eskimo set­tle­ment a month after decid­ing to leave Cam­bridge for the field. The first step in Davis’s jour­ney was a visit to Har­vard professor/botanist/explorer Richard Evans Schutes for advice and South Amer­i­can connections.

While the trip to the Ama­zon would turn out to be a rel­a­tively minor episode in Davis’s career, his acquain­tance with Schutes would prove to be much more use­ful. Schutes sent Davis on a num­ber of eth­nob­otan­i­cal assign­ments, cul­mi­nat­ing in the one that is the focus of this book: the search for the fabled Hait­ian zombi poi­son and its recipe.
Davis’s search for the poi­son takes him all over Haiti — from a psy­chi­atric insti­tute in Port-au-Prince to noc­tur­nal cer­e­monies in the secret meet­ing places of voudoun (more famil­iarly writ­ten as “voodoo”) soci­eties, from a derelict mermaid-themed night­club to a sacred water­fall in the moun­tains at the island’s cen­ter. With the help of local col­lab­o­ra­tors, he gains entry into many areas and spheres of Hait­ian soci­ety nor­mally closed to out­siders. Every step in Davis’s long quest brings him closer to not only the secret of zombi poi­son, but to an under­stand­ing of the com­plex social and his­tor­i­cal con­texts that gave rise to the voudoun reli­gion and the prac­tice and process of zombification.

Davis pep­pers his account with dis­cus­sions of Hait­ian his­tory, voudoun soci­ety and beliefs, and the his­tor­i­cal and eth­nob­otan­i­cal aspects of the var­i­ous pos­si­ble ingre­di­ents of the zombi poi­son. He man­ages to do this in such a way that the diver­sions never dis­tract from his main nar­ra­tive. Rather, they serve to pro­vide con­text and gen­er­ally enrich his tale. The Ser­pent and the Rain­bow reads almost like an adven­ture story (which is is, to some degree), but also man­ages to be very educational.

I picked this book up used at Elliott Bay Book Com­pany in Seat­tle, but it retains the orig­i­nal price tag on its back cover. Nor­mally I peel stick­ers off my books, but this one was worth keep­ing: it’s from a place called “Rev. Zombie’s House of Voodoo.”

P.S. — I’m a bit behind on my book reviews — I actu­ally fin­ished read­ing this book in August. I’ll try to catch up a bit, espe­cially dur­ing my spring break, which is next week. I’m 16 books behind at the moment though, so it may take awhile.

The Tour de France is prob­a­bly the most gru­el­ing phys­i­cal tra­vail that any­one actu­ally chooses to under­take. The annual race lasts three weeks, and cov­ers about 2,250 miles. And those aren’t easy miles (well, kilo­me­ters, really), either. The exact route changes every year, but rid­ers always face mul­ti­ple for­mi­da­ble Alpine and Pyre­nean climbs. Just fin­ish­ing the race is con­sid­ered a major accom­plish­ment, and each year a num­ber of highly-trained, über-fit cyclists drop out part-way through.

Amaz­ingly, author Tim Moore is well aware of these facts when he decides, almost on a whim, to ride the Tour’s route (not in the race itself) on his own. Moore makes this deci­sion not after years of train­ing, nor even fol­low­ing years of avid recre­ational cycling. No, Moore chooses to tackle the route of the Tour after years of watch­ing the race on TV and a cycling career that has con­sisted mainly of drunken rides home from the pub.

Nev­er­the­less, he begins mak­ing prepa­ra­tions for the ride of his life, read­ing up on the tour and its rid­ers, and start­ing a (very) mod­est exer­cise reg­i­men. Moore doesn’t even really think about buy­ing a road bike until less than two weeks from his date of depar­ture. Know­ing just enough about bikes to know that he is woe­fully unqual­i­fied to make such a pur­chase on his own, he con­sults an expert. Moore finally orders his gear, and it arrives — three days before he set out.

Moore arrives in France with his newly acquired gear, but with­out a pre­cise route. He has a small overview map clipped from a cycling mag­a­zine, but the pre­cise route of that year’s Tour has not yet been revealed. So, he makes rough guesses based on where the tour has gone before and how far he feels he can ride each day. As one might expect, Moore’s body and soul take a beat­ing over the course of his ride. But, by the end, he’s come a long way towards becom­ing one of the hard­ened hill-climbing machines who inspired him in the first place.

While much of the ride is ago­niz­ing for Moore, but he recounts his expe­ri­ences with comedic flair, and an eye for absur­dity (both his own and that he encoun­ters). The book is a won­der­ful mix of Moore’s per­sonal quest, an account of trav­el­ing through the French coun­try­side, and his­tory of the Tour de France. It comes off like some­thing Dou­glas Adams might have writ­ten, had he decided to do some­thing for which he was com­pletely unqualified.