DaveWells.us

In most of the world today, com­mon salt (sodium chlo­ride) is taken for granted; salt shak­ers sit on every home’s din­ing table and restau­rants offer it for free, some­times in con­ve­nient single-serving pack­ets. But salt has not always been so inex­pen­sive or so plen­ti­ful. Humans, like all other mam­mals, need to con­sume salt to sur­vive. Fur­ther­more, until the inven­tion of can­ning in the 19^th cen­tury, salt­ing (or the related process of pick­ling) was the pri­mary method of pre­serv­ing meat, fish, and veg­eta­bles. The abil­ity to pro­duce large amounts of pre­served food has long been a pre­req­ui­site for stag­ing extended mil­i­tary cam­paigns as well as sea voy­ages of explo­ration or con­quest. Thus, the pro­duc­tion and con­trol of salt have done much to con­trol the course of human history.

Mark Kurlan­sky details the chang­ing rela­tion­ships between peo­ple and salt around the world and through­out recorded his­tory. He dis­cusses how salt fig­ures into var­i­ous mytholo­gies and rit­u­als. He talks about meth­ods of salt pro­duc­tion rang­ing from sim­ply scrap­ing crys­tals from desert sebkhas to refin­ing the mate­r­ial with sophis­ti­cated vac­uum evap­o­ra­tors. Par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing are the his­toric recipes he weaves into his nar­ra­tive, includ­ing a bevy of salty sauces: Roman garum, the Chi­nese ances­tor of soy sauce, Tunisian char­mula, and even Louisiana Tabasco. Kurlan­sky also devotes con­sid­er­able time to the salt-related events and poli­cies that have directly shaped his­tory: dis­cov­er­ies, taxes, and monop­o­lies. Along the way he points out how many of our place names — Salzburg, Halles, Gaul, innu­mer­able –wiches — and words — salad, salary, sol­dier, salami — have roots mean­ing “salt.”

This is the sec­ond of Kurlansky’s books that I’ve read, the first being Cod, which shares some sub­ject mat­ter with Salt. He does a very good job of extract­ing excit­ing nar­ra­tives from what at first glance might seem like mun­dane top­ics. He at times seems to ram­ble a bit from one thing to another, but always in a charm­ing — rather than dis­tract­ing — way. I rec­om­mend this book highly, along­side many of the other single-word-title mate­ri­als his­to­ries that I’ve read.

In Thun­der­struck, like in his ear­lier book Devil In the White City, Erik Lar­son fol­lows two men — one a vision­ary and the other a cold-blooded killer. In this case the hero is Guglielmo Mar­coni, the first man to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful method of wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The vil­lain is Har­vey Haw­ley Crip­pen, a some­time doc­tor and seller of patent med­i­cines who was to all out­ward appear­ances a kind, gen­tle, upstand­ing cit­i­zen. Lar­son fol­lows the lives of the two men from their births in the third quar­ter of the nine­teenth cen­tury until their paths (although not the men them­selves) met in a very pub­lic way in 1910.

Mar­coni became fas­ci­nated with mag­net­ism and elec­tric­ity at an early age. By his early twen­ties, he had become an obses­sive exper­i­menter, spend­ing days at a time in the lab­o­ra­tory he had put together in the attic of his par­ents’ villa. Mar­coni had a basic idea of what he wanted to do — trans­mit a mes­sage using invis­i­ble waves — and how to do it — he had read descrip­tions of ear­lier exper­i­ments by Hein­rich Hertz and Oliver Lodge — but he worked almost entirely by trial and error. It was this approach, that of a prac­ti­cian rather than a the­o­rist, that would later make Mar­coni the sub­ject of other sci­en­tists’ deri­sion. Marconi’s method of work­ing would also prove costly for his wire­less teleg­ra­phy com­pany, as he built ever larger and more com­plex instal­la­tions on the coasts of Eng­land, Canada, and the United States, try­ing to per­fect wire­less trans-Atlantic com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­out hav­ing a firm grasp on the under­ly­ing laws of physics.

Har­vey Crip­pen, trained in home­o­pathic med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, worked in a vari­ety of med­ical pro­fes­sions. He had a pri­vate med­ical prac­tice in San Diego and was employed as an optometrist in St. Louis, but spent the bulk of his career work­ing for var­i­ous patent med­i­cine com­pa­nies in Philadel­phia, New York, and Lon­don. Crip­pen worked hard to sup­port his wife, Cora, whose exotic tastes in clothes, fur­ni­ture, and jew­el­ery, along with the pur­suit of her unre­al­is­tic ambi­tions of becom­ing a famous singer, proved very expen­sive. The Crip­pens pre­sented the front of a happy cou­ple, but mis­trust, betrayal, and Cora’s con­trol­ling nature lurked beneath the surface.

Lar­son does a won­der­ful job of set­ting the scene for his two sto­ries. Edwar­dian Lon­don is the chief set­ting, as both Mar­coni and Crip­pen spend fair amounts of time there. But the other side of the Atlantic — and indeed the ocean itself — also serve impor­tant roles, as ships and radio waves travel back and forth. My com­plaint about Larson’s pre­vi­ous books has been that his use of dia­log and descrip­tions of indi­vid­u­als’ thought and feel­ings strains his­tor­i­cal cred­i­bil­ity. Lar­son does a much bet­ter job in Thun­der­struck, using less dia­log and more explic­itly cit­ing his sources within the text itself.

I found the two sto­ries fas­ci­nat­ing — espe­cially that of Mar­coni — but through much of the book I felt that the con­nec­tion between the men is ten­u­ous at best. By the end Lar­son makes a pretty good argu­ment for com­bin­ing the two, but I’m not sure that I’m con­vinced. Still, he knows how to tell a good story, and Thun­der­struck makes for a com­pelling read.

Long cloth ties are today found through­out the world around men’s necks (and some­times those of women as well). Other types of neck­wear are of course worn for cer­tain occa­sions (bow ties with tuxe­dos) or in cer­tain regions (string or bolo ties in the Amer­i­can South­west), but none matches the long tie in its ubiquity.

But, if you ask most any tie-wearing man (includ­ing me) how many dif­fer­ent tie knots they use, the answer will be “one.” Usu­ally that one knot is the four-in-hand, and a fair num­ber of peo­ple are aware of the exis­tence of another knot or two: the Wind­sor or half-Windsor, although these are­ich less com­monly used.

Surely, though, there are more than three ways to tie a tie. Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, two Cam­bridge the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists, decided, appar­ently on a whim, to devote their con­sid­er­able tal­ents to dis­cov­er­ing all the pos­si­ble (an prac­ti­cal) tie knots. Once they real­ized that tie knots are “equiv­a­lent to per­sis­tant ran­dom walks on a tri­an­gu­lar lat­tice” (an obser­va­tion that Is evi­dently a rather sim­ple leap for a pair of physi­cists), it was a sim­ple mat­ter to math­e­mat­i­cally derive 85 dif­fer­ent ways to tie a tie.

Fink and Mao begin their book with a short his­tory of men’s neck­wear. The ear­li­est exam­ples of knot­ted neck cloths they cite are those adorn­ing the 7500 ter­ra­cotta sol­diers found in the tomb of China’s first emperor. Other early exam­ples come from Rome in the sec­ond cen­tury A.D., but dec­o­ra­tive men’s neck cloths seem not to have really caught on until the sev­en­teenth cen­tury. From that point until the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury (when long ties became de rigeur) a suc­ces­sion of neck cloth styles devel­oped in Europe: cra­vats, stocks, bow ties, Ascots, etc.

A sec­ond intro­duc­tory chap­ter is devoted to knots and knot the­ory. The authors pro­vide a basic overview of the tech­ni­cal aspects of knots and knot tying and of his­tor­i­cal attempts to ennu­mer­ate and cat­e­go­rize knots. They then explain in detail their own the­ory of tie knots. They lay out both the tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions of tie knots (the tie must pass around the neck, and all knots must be ter­mi­nated such that the two ends hang down­wards) as well as the aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tions (size, shape, sym­me­try, and balance).

The third chap­ter forms the meat of the book. In it, Fink and Mao ennu­mer­ate their 85 knots, orga­nized by the num­ber of moves it takes to com­plete each one. Each knot is accom­pa­nied by a step-by-step tying dia­gram and notes about how it relates to other knots, when appro­pri­ate. The thir­teen knits that the authors deem most aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing are dis­cussed at greater length, and are illus­trated with pho­tographs of well-known men sport­ing them. Among this sub­set of knots are, of course, the famil­iar four-in-hand, Wind­sor, and half-Windsor.

The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie is a delight­fully whim­si­cal lit­tle book, quin­tes­sen­tially British in it’s sub­ject mat­ter, tone, and humor. The authors man­age to explain what turns out to be a sur­pris­ingly com­plex prob­lem in a way that’s pretty easy to under­stand. For those read­ers who desire a more pre­cise expla­na­tion, Fink and Mao sup­ply am appen­dix chock full of for­mu­las and deriv­a­tives. The book con­tains plenty of pho­tographs, illus­tra­tions, and dia­grams, which are quite help­ful in under­stand­ing the his­tory, knot the­ory, and all the knot variations.

This book is less than ten years old, but it us already out of print and used copies go for fifty dol­lars or more. I got my hands on a copy via Inter­li­brary Loan. But, if you’d just like a quick overview and a list of all 85 knots with direc­tions, Thomas Fink pro­vides them on his web site.

In this book, Bar­bara Freese traces the entire his­tory of coal, reach­ing all the way back to the lep­i­do­den­dron forests of the Car­bonif­er­ous period. These forests pro­vided most of the organic mate­r­ial that turned into coal over hun­dreds of mil­lions of years. She reminds us that the energy we pro­duce through the burn­ing of coal (and other fos­sil fuels) ulti­mately came from the sun: the car­bon came from plants, like lep­i­do­den­dron, that grew by har­vest­ing solar energy through the process of photosynthesis.

But, as the book’s sub­ti­tle makes clear, this is pri­mar­ily a his­tory of humans and coal. Freese begins this his­tory with the Roman inva­sion of Britain in 43 A.D. Romans, find­ing exposed coal deposits through­out their new ter­ri­tory, dis­cov­ered that the mate­r­ial was eas­ily carved. They made jew­el­ery and other dec­o­ra­tions out of it. Some burned it for fuel, but it would take another thou­sand years for that prac­tice to become widespread.

From this point on, Freese chron­i­cles a num­ber of love-hate rela­tion­ships with coal. Among other things, coal can be burned for heat, to smelt iron, to power steam engines, and to gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity. But doing so pro­duces acrid black smoke and neces­si­tates the often very dan­ger­ous task of min­ing the fos­sil fuel. Freese’s account of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion in Britain pro­vides a good exam­ple of both the desir­able and unde­sir­able prod­ucts of coal power: more and bet­ter iron, steam power, mech­a­nized fac­to­ries, loco­mo­tives; black­ened skies, mine explo­sions, slum­mish fac­tory towns, child fac­tory labor.

In addi­tion to a great deal about coal in Britain, Freese also cov­ers the his­tory of the fuel in the United States. With this she brings the story up to date, detail­ing how coal has shaped our country’s energy infra­struc­ture and nar­rat­ing a tour of a coal-fired power plant in Min­nesota. Freese offers her own exper­tise in the area of Amer­i­can energy pol­icy and leg­is­la­tion: she worked for a num­ber of years as an envi­ron­men­tal attor­ney for the State of Minnesota.

The penul­ti­mate chap­ter is devoted to coal use in China, the his­tory of which has many par­al­lels to that of Britain. Here, Freese betrays a Euro-centric world­view: China is rel­e­gated to the back of the book even though Chi­nese peo­ple began using coal for smelt­ing iron as early as 1100 A.D, and have been burn­ing it for fuel since around 4000 B.C. Still, she pro­vides an inter­est­ing overview of China’s his­tory with coal and the country’s cur­rent strug­gle to bal­ance the grow­ing energy needs that accom­pany mod­ern­iza­tion with inter­na­tional pres­sure to reduce air pollution.

All in all, this is a fas­ci­nat­ing book. Freese does a good job of con­nect­ing the his­tor­i­cal dots: she shows just ho inte­gral coal has been to the devel­op­ment of the indus­tri­al­ized world, some­times com­ing into play in unex­pected ways. This is another won­der­ful entry into the recent cat­e­gory of single-word-title mate­ri­als histories.

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.

I’ve read books about ety­mol­ogy and the his­tory of lan­guage, but this is the first I’ve read that com­bines these with the his­tory of ety­mol­ogy itself. Liber­man traces the var­i­ous meth­ods used to explain word ori­gins, from the folk ety­molo­gies embraced in the ear­li­est efforts to the com­plex rules of pho­netic change used by mod­ern schol­ars. He pro­vides copi­ous exam­ples along the way, which demon­strate both sim­ple deriva­tions and com­plex multi-language evo­lu­tions. One thing Liber­man stresses is that ety­mol­o­gists often deal in prob­a­bil­i­ties; it is rare that a clear and unbro­ken record of devel­op­ment exists for any par­tic­u­lar word. Schol­ars fre­quently have to make guesses — albeit highly edu­cated ones.

Liberman’s writ­ing style is humor­ous and gen­er­ally delight­ful. Digres­sions are com­mon, but he always comes back to his point in the end. One par­tic­u­larly endear­ing fea­ture of the book are the old style chap­ter head­ings that include num­ber, descrip­tion, title, and list of con­tents (there’s prob­a­bly a term for this spe­cific style, but it’s unknown to me). For example:

Word Ori­gins con­tains a huge amount of infor­ma­tion that is often densely packed. For this rea­son, it’s prob­a­bly best con­sumed a chap­ter at a time. It is very fas­ci­nat­ing though, at least for word lovers(/nerds) like me.

Mod­ern pianos are tuned such that every note is the same dis­tance away from its neigh­bors. This sys­tem of even tun­ing is called equal tem­pera­ment, and allows the piano to be played equally well (the pianist’s skills aside) in any musi­cal key. As log­i­cal as such a sys­tem may seem, it was long con­sid­ered unde­sir­able, and didn’t gain wide­spread accep­tance until the end of the eigh­teenth cen­tury. Prior to that time, some­times heated debates were con­ducted about the proper way to tune key­board instruments.

Much of the early debate rested on whether musi­cal inter­vals were deter­mined by laws of nature (which to many meant God) or by human pref­er­ence. The pure inter­vals set down by the Greek poly­math Pythago­ras depend on sim­ple ratios. The nature of the ratios, how­ever, is such that they can’t all be sat­is­fied simul­ta­ne­ously on a fixed-pitch instru­ment such as a piano or harp­si­chord. Thus, some inter­vals must be adjusted or tem­pered. Many dif­fer­ent sys­tems of tem­pera­ment were devel­oped and espoused by well-known musi­cians like Fres­cobaldi, Zarlino, Rameau, and Bach, as well as sci­en­tists and philoso­phers like New­ton, Descartes, and Rousseau.
I’ve been aware of dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ments for some time, with­out hav­ing a good knowl­edge of the related his­tory and the­ory. Play­ing a non-fixed-pitch instru­ment, I only deal with equal tem­pera­ment when I play with a key­boardist. This book helped me under­stand why cer­tain inter­vals were con­sid­ered to be too dis­so­nant in early music (because they were actu­ally quite dis­so­nant in some or all of the con­tem­po­rary tun­ings) and some other things glossed over in my music the­ory and his­tory classes.

Tem­pera­ment is writ­ten with a gen­eral audi­ence in mind, and does not require exten­sive musi­cal knowl­edge from the reader. Being a reader with fairly exten­sive musi­cal knowl­edge, I occa­sion­ally found this annoy­ing. But, Isacoff includes (in the sec­ond edi­tion, any­way) appen­dices with more thor­ough and tech­ni­cal expla­na­tions for those who are inter­ested. He also devotes some space to respond­ing to crit­i­cisms of the first edi­tion — an inter­est­ing fea­ture that I’ve never come across before. Tem­pera­ment is a fas­ci­nat­ing and very read­able book, and its wealth of his­tor­i­cal and sci­en­tific con­text leads me to rec­om­mend it to read­ers with an inter­est in those fields, as well as to read­ers who are inter­ested in music.

Cod is one of a num­ber of fairly recent books that I call ‘mate­ri­als his­to­ries’ (there’s prob­a­bly a bet­ter term out there some­where). Often with single-word titles that unam­bigu­ously name their sub­ject mat­ter — e.g. Cod, Salt, Tea — these books reveal the often sur­pris­ing his­tor­i­cal roles played by a par­tic­u­lar mate­r­ial (or in this case, an animal).

Mark Kurlan­sky has split his book into three parts. The first — and longest — is really the mate­ri­als his­tory por­tion of the book. Kurlan­sky describes how dried or salted cod — a very durable, high pro­tein food — played an impor­tant part in long sea voy­ages by Vikings and Basque fish­er­men, among oth­ers. He also relates the role that plen­ti­ful cod had in attract­ing fish­er­man, mer­chants, and other set­tlers in the sev­en­teenth cen­tury to what is now New Eng­land and the south­east­ern coast of Canada.

The sec­ond part of Cod deals with more recent his­tory. Over the last 100 to 150 years, great strides have been made in fish­ing tech­nol­ogy. Unfor­tu­nately, this has enabled dra­matic over­fish­ing, result­ing in the com­mer­cial extinc­tion of cod and some other species of fish.

The third main sec­tion of the book chron­i­cles recent efforts to reg­u­late com­mer­cial fish­ing, most of which came too late to do much good. In this sec­tion (along with the pro­logue), Kurlan­sky also tells how the short­age of cod has dras­ti­cally affected fish­ing com­mu­ni­ties like that of Petty Har­bour in Newfoundland.

An appen­dix con­tains cod recipes span­ning six cen­turies and a num­ber of cul­tures. Each recipe is accom­pa­nied by a bit of expla­na­tion or his­tor­i­cal context.

Cod is a very inter­est­ing and well-written book. Kurlan­sky does an excel­lent job of weav­ing together the dis­parate top­ics related to this sin­gu­larly (and sur­pris­ingly) impor­tant fish. His com­bi­na­tion on his­tor­i­cal research and human­is­tic jour­nal­ism makes for an engross­ing tale. I’m eager to read Salt, another of Kurlansky’s mate­ri­als histories.