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 19th 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 The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan sets out to trace the origins of three meals, each the product of a different food chain. These food chains — the industrial, the pastoral, and the personal, as he calls them — basically represent in reverse order the various human relationships with food. In doing this, he hopes to shed light on what he terms America’s “national eating disorder:” we lack national food traditions, and are often so far removed from our food’s origins that we have to rely on food companies and nutritionists to tell us what to eat. For Pollan, this disorder reached its height with the Atkins diet craze, that fad that sought to suck the soul (bread, pasta, even fruit!) out of American meals and replace it with large quantities of meat.

In America’s industrial food chain, everything seems to revolve around corn. Government subsidies encourage farms to produce far more Zea mays than the American people can eat. It falls to food scientists to figure out what to do with the surplus (and successful corn-based products only lead to a demand for more corn). Today, corn is processed by so-called “wet mills” into dozens of diverse substances: vitamins, corn oil, adhesives, stabilizers, acids, ethanol, emulsifiers, and sweeteners (including the sneakily ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup). These various “fractions” of corn are the building blocks of the processed foods industry.

Besides providing the raw materials for such Frankenfoods as Cool Whip and Cheez Whiz, corn fuels the industrial production of beef. A far cry from the pastoral stereotype of cows lazily munching grass in an open field, the purpose of industrial feedlots is to cram cows full of cheap calories (largely from corn), fattening them up as quickly as possible. Cows on a corn diet must also be medicated, as their digestive systems have evolved to process grass, not corn (antibiotics are also necessary to deal with the cramped and squalid living conditions on a feedlot).

The first meal that Pollan and his family eat comes from McDonald’s, and they consume it — appropriately — in their car. The meal’s constituent parts are known (corn products are used to cook the fries, thicken the shake, sweeten the soda, construct the chicken nuggets, feed the chickens and cows, and partially fuel the car), but their origins are totally obscured by the industrial food chain. Pollan asks the question “Where does [this food] come from?” and provides the only viable answer: “It comes from McDonald’s.”

Pollan approaches the pastoral food chain with the intention of once again tracing the origins of a single meal. But he soon realizes that “organic” food runs the gamut from that produced by industrial farms that carefully adhere to government standards to that frown on very small farms that follow more traditional methods. Thus, he splits his time in this section of the book between the “supermarket pastoral” (think Whole Foods) and the “beyond organic” (think Amish farm stand).

Behind the flowery descriptions of produce and meat at Whole Foods, Pollan discovers huge factory farms that resemble those he visited in pursuit of industrial food. The only difference, in most cases, is that small changes have been made to fit government definitions of “organic,” “free range,” or “all natural.” He finds that often what’s being sold is a nice story, not necessarily more sustainable or more friendly food.

At the other end of the spectrum lie much smaller operations, like Polyface Farm in Virginia, that adhere to the spirit of the organic movement rather than to the letter of organic law. Polyface is in many ways a traditional family farm, raising cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and a variety of produce on about a hundred acres of open land. But Joel Salatin, the farm’s owner, practices a very complex form of rotational grazing that keeps the pasture healthy and vibrat, produces an astounding quantity of meat, and requires but a single outside input: chicken food — no fertilizers, no antibiotics, no pariciticides. Paradoxically, Salatin’s farm is not certified “organic,” although it certainly is among the most sustainable and truly pastoral farms anywhere.

The final food chain that Pollan follows is certainly the shortest and in many ways the oldest of the three. The task he sets for himself is to personally hunt, gather, or grow all the ingredients for a four-course meal for ten people (the last action, “grow,” keeps his food chain from being totally primal). He also intends to serve representatives of the three edible kingdoms: animal, plant, and fungus. To do this, city-raised Pollan must first learn to hunt and butcher game as well as to find mushrooms and distinguish the delicious from the deadly. Luckily, he befriends a Sicilian expat who introduces him to the floral, faunal, and fungal riches of the forests of Northern California. Pollan basically achieves his goal, although he ends up using for his diner party a couple of store-bought ingredients and a few things provided by friends. But in the process of assembling the meal he accomplishes a more abstract aim: being cognizant of everything that went into his dinner.

Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma (more than a year ago, actually) was for me an eye-opening experience. It made me start really reading food labels and trying to eliminate artificial additives from my diet. I went on a crusade against high-fructose corn syrup, eliminating it from my apartment entirely — not for health reasons, but in moral opposition to the policies and processes that have made highly processed HFCS cheaper than natural cane sugar in the U.S. I changed my grocery shopping habits, and reading this book influenced, at least indirectly, Veronica’s and my decision to join a CSA farm this summer.

Aside from being very interesting and informative, Pollan’s writing is clear and his style is enjoyable. My only complaint about the book relates to his discussions of evolution early in the text. He writes of corn’s “act of evolutionary faith,” plants “hav[ing] always known… one of the surest paths to evolutionary success,” and recasts agriculture as “a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on the part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests.” Evolution doesn’t work that way; there is no planning, and there are no evolutionary goals as such, beyond the propagation of genetic material. That quibble aside, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great thought-provoking book, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

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.

The many varied forms of sound recording and playback technologies, beginning with Edison’s invention of the phonograph in the 1870s, have undoubtedly changed the ways in which we listen to and disseminate music. Mark Katz argues that beyond this, recording has in many ways altered music itself: it has changed performers’ approach to playing music, composers’ approach to writing music, and has has even spawned completely new musical genres. In Capturing Sound, Katz provides a number of case studies, each exploring one of these “phonograph effecs,” as he calls them. His discussions encompass a variety of musics, ranging from classical and jazz to hip-hop and techno.

Katz begins by outlining what he sees as the seven most important characteristics of sound recording technology (e.g. tangibility, repeatability, and manipulability). It is these traits, singly and in combination, that give rise to the various phonograph effects Katz addresses in the remainder of the book. He then proceeds to give a short history of not of early recording technology, but of the various ways in which early recording and (especially) playback equipment found its way into American culture.

The first real phonograph effect Katz tackles is the dissemination and rapidly growing popularity of jazz in the 1910s and 1920s. Jazz was really the first genre to benefit during its formative years from the portability and repeatability of sound recordings. Katz provides a pretty good summary of this phenomenon, but I’m not sure he really adds anything to what previous writers have done. With his next topic, though, Katz enters what seems to be new ground.

Violinists, on the whole, increased their use of vibrato around the beginning of the twentieth century. This fact seems to be widely recognized, but little time has been devoted to determining the impetus for the change. Katz, as you might guess, makes a case for recording technology being responsible: violinists discovered that using more vibrato could compensate for some of the limitations of early acoustic recordings. The recordings they produced were then emulated by aspiring players, leading to a stylistic shift. This seems a good place to mention the CD that accompanies the book. It contains thirteen musical examples, of which five serve to illustrate the change in vibrato aesthetic. It’s quite helpful to have these; prose descriptions of sound are often insufficient.

Katz next discusses the relatively short-lived idea of Grammophonmusik — music in which the phonograph was used as a tool for composition. This might be done by altering existing recordings, or by actually attempting to engrave sound forms by hand onto a blank phonograph disc. The genre was mostly speculative, but a few examples created by Paul Hindemith survive.

The remaining chapters of Capturing Sound deal with popular music, and mainly with electronic and/or digital sound technologies. Katz gives a short history of DJing and turntablism, and then outlines his own fieldwork in the study of DJ battles or competitions. He devotes a chapter to the “art and politics” of sampling, looking at examples drawn from hip-hop, pop, rock, techno, and art music. Katz’s last chapter explores how MP3s (and other digital audio files) and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are changing the experiences of listening to, discovering, and consuming music. While these various subjects have been treated elsewhere, they have generally not been done so with a scholarly approach.

Overall, I enjoyed Capturing Sound. Katz’s topics are interesting, and his writing style is clear and engaging. I found the book as a whole to be a little uneven, though. Some chapters (like those about violin vibrato and DJ battles) involve a great deal of Katz’s own original research, while others (such as those about Grammophonmusik and the rise of jazz) do not. Katz acknowledges that his various topics are “connected perhaps by nothing save recording.” Thus it is perhaps better to approach Capturing Sound as a collection of essays rather than as a cohesive book. I hope, as does Katz, that his writing will inspire others to produce work in a similar vein — I imagine there’s a lot more to be said about technology’s influence on music.

In this book, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin elucidates the various neurobiological processes involved in listening to music. He details the ways in which the human brain accomplishes tasks, such as meter extraction, that seem straightforward (especially to trained musicians) but in actuality demand very sophisticated neural processing. He also demonstrates how adept our brains are, even those of people with no musical training, at doing things like memorizing pitches and tempos, identifying wrong notes, and hearing and predicting musical forms.

Although some of this is certainly a product of the structure and function of the brain, Levitin also attributes much of it to experience. He makes a convincing argument that because of the ubiquity of music, most people qualify as expert listeners, whether or not they can discuss music in a technical manner. Levitin spends much of his time on these processes of listening, but he also addresses the ways the brain is involved in the performance of music, neurobiological foundations of musical taste, and various ideas about how and why humans evolved to be innately musical.

Levitin is now a scientist at McGill University, but he began his career as a rock musician and record producer. Perhaps because of this breadth of experience, he does a pretty good job of writing for a wide audience — he discusses many complex concepts, but always explains them in relatively simple terms. This isn’t to say his writing is simplistic; I found the chapter on musical fundamentals fairly interesting, even though it’s stuff in which I am well versed.

Throughout the book, Levitin provides a good balance between scientific studies and anecdotal evidence, while also including a good bit of historical and scientific context. I’d recommend This Is Your Brain on Music to musicians and music lovers alike. It provides a fascinating look at what’s going on inside our heads when we play or listen to music.

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.

In this book, Penny Von Eschen chronicles the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship of jazz musicians as cultural emissaries between 1956 and 1978. These programs were initiated by President Eisenhower as a follow-up to a four-year government-sponsored tour of Porgy and Bess that had met with great success in Europe, South America, and the Middle East. The selection of Gershwin’s opera for official cultural export was no accident — the focus on African-American characters and performers was calculated to combat Soviet critiques of American racial policy. The same impetus lay behind the idea to send jazz musicians — especially racially integrated groups — abroad.

In addition to Porgy and Bess, Louis Armstrong’s 1955 commercial tour of Europe attracted the Eisenhower administration’s interest. Armstrong’s reception in Switzerland led a New York Times correspondent to dub him America’s “most effective ambassador,” and ask why the U.S. government wasn’t exporting jazz along with its other democratic propaganda. Later that year, Armstrong became the first jazz musician approved for a State Department-sponsored tour. He refused, however, to represent an administration that at the time did not support desegregation.

Dizzy Gillespie led a 22-piece band on the first State Department-sponsored jazz tour in 1956. The group — assembled for the tour and much larger than would have been financially solvent in the U.S. at the time — performed in the Middle East, Pakistan, and Brazil. From the beginning, there were clashes between the desires of the government and those of the musicians. Gillespie resisted attempts to control his portrayal of the United States, especially in regard to its racial policies; the band was racially integrated, but he refused to promote the idea that this was an accurate representation of the country. The composition of the band was, in fact, hidden as much as possible from American conservatives — further evidence that the government wished to portray race relations as better than they actually were. The musicians were also dismayed by the makeup of their audiences. Rather than playing for the general populace, as they’d thought, they often played for only the elite members of society. Thus, the musicians used every opportunity to stage informal jam sessions with local musicians, playing for local audiences.

These ideological conflicts pervaded the State Department tours. The issues of race and representation became more and more critical as the Civil Rights Movement expanded in the 1960s, and with the rise of the Black Power Movement. Most black musicians on the tours recognized that they were being used to project an idealistic view of American, and followed Gillespie’s lead in advancing their own racial agendas. Similarly most musicians, regardless of racial background, took it upon themselves to make connections with local musicians and jazz fans wherever they played. Much to the chagrin of their U.S. government handlers, late-night jam sessions often led to missed official functions the following day.

The tours covered large portions of the world, initially focusing on the Eastern Europe, the Middle East, southeast Asia, and Central and South America. In 1962 — after years of petitioning the Soviet government — Benny Goodman became the first jazz bandleader to be admitted to the USSR. His music was by this time seen as old fashioned in the U.S. (and by die-hard fans behind the Iron Curtain), but appealed to the Soviet government. The band’s emphasis on intricate arrangements was seen as relatively non-threatening compared to more modern styles that focused on soloistic expression. Goodman’s ability to perform classical repertoire added to his appeal.
The Goodman orchestra’s tour of the USSR marked the entry of jazz into existing cultural exchange programs between the superpowers. Von Eschen argues that tours to other areas of the world were in many cases linked either directly or indirectly to covert or overt U.S. actions in those locales. She identifies Duke Ellington’s 1963 tour of the Middle East as part of efforts to stabilize the region following a CIA-sponsored coup in Iraq. Similarly, State Department-sponsored tours of Southeast Asia increased as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict escalated. Although the musicians weren’t always aware of the U.S. actions they were apparently meant to distract from, many made it very clear that they saw themselves as representatives of jazz and American (or African-American) culture, rather than of the government and its often questionable policies.

By the mid-1960s, the State Department tours began to expand to include an array of African-American musical genres, such as gospel and R&B. This expansion was part of a “cultural blitz” of Africa that began in 1966. Ironically, this focus on predominantly black forms artists (in contrast to integrated jazz bands) diluted the previous directive to represent race as irrelevant. This period also saw the first real critical attacks on the cultural programs for coopting black music — jazz in particular — for use as a Cold War weapon.

After years of organizing tours themselves, the State Department started a relationship with impresario George Wein in the early 1970s. Wein, with his company Festival Productions, was the organizer of the Newport Jazz Festival and numerous international tours by Festival artists. This relationship proved beneficial to everyone involved. The State Department gained a concert organizer highly experienced in organizing tours and dealing with musicians. Musicians who might have otherwise been deemed too controversial for government sponsorship were able to perform under the umbrella of Newport. Audiences were treated to a larger variety of performers, often with multiple stars on each billing.

The 1970s also marked a shift in the stated purposes of the tours. Initially, the goal had been to present high-minded modernist American music with an emphasis on racial equality. Now, however, the focus shifted to pure entertainment. The bulk of the performing groups (especially in the expanded offerings of gospel, R&B, and soul music) were all black, thus presenting a very different picture of race in American culture. Also, contrary to the earlier practice of staging concerts for the local elite, a greater emphasis was now placed on performing for the general populace, and collaborations with other musicians — even stars like Nigeria’s Fela Kuti — were encouraged.

Clark Terry and his Jolly Giants made the last State Department-sponsored jazz tour in 1978. After this, the responsibility for cultural export was shifted to the United States Information Agency, and the relationship with George Wein was severed. Von Eschen attributes the decision to end the tours to easing of international tensions, drastic changes in the American political realm, and –perhaps most importantly — to the fact that jazz and other African-American and African diasporic musical genres were by this point commercially viable in much of the world. Thus, there was no longer a need for the government to actively sponsor and export these forms of American musical culture.

Von Eschen is a historian, thus it is natural that she takes a historical approach to her topic. She provides a wealth of social and political context, which helps to explain the general conditions surrounding the events in question, as well as some more specific causalities. She spends very little time discussing music itself, focusing mainly on the musicians’ interactions with audiences and government officials. What musical discussion she does engage in is generally related to audience reception of particular groups.

The book is somewhat scattered in its organization — it is not quite chronological and not quite geographic, but some combination of the two. Von Eschen has a tendency to go off on tangents, weaving around the topic she sets up for discussion. These two characteristics serve to muddle the timeline somewhat — it is often difficult to determine exactly when or in what order the events she discusses occurred, and some of her information seems contradictory. This is a bit of a problem if one is actively trying to extract information. But, if one is simply reading the book for pleasure — which I would highly recommend — these traits actually make for an enjoyable experience.

In his prelude, Duffin mentions a recent book about the history of equal temperament. The book to which he refers is Stuart Isacoff’s Temperament (reviewed here), although Duffin only identifies it in his endnotes. He takes issue with Isacoff’s treatment of the subject, saying that Isacoff “concluded that Rameau discovered equal temperament (ET) in 1737, and basically we all lived happily ever after.” Duffin sees this as more or less the party line amongst present-day musicians; he relates an anecdote about the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi as an example of this.

As one might guess from the book’s title, Duffin does not agree with the view of equal temperament as the be-all and end-all, the Holy Grail of tuning systems. He criticizes authors like Isacoff and Murray Barbour (whose 1951 book Tuning and Temperament is the standard scholarly study of the issue) for approaching the history of tuning with an extreme bias towards equal temperament. Duffin asks how Barbour, who admitted that he had never heard anything other than equal temperament, could possibly dismiss all other tuning systems as inferior and unusable.

Thus, Duffin sets out to write a balanced history of tuning systems, one that does not take the supremacy of equal temperament as a given. In doing this, he goes beyond the standard historical writings. He examines instrumental methods, the writings of lesser-known musicians, and even musical passages (such as in the cello part of Haydn’s String Quartet op. 77, no. 2, where the composer specifies at one point that an E-flat and an adjacent D-sharp should be played as the same note, indicating that he probably didn’t expect this elsewhere). Duffin also delves into more recent history, examining the practices of nineteenth-century piano tuners and analyzing early sound recordings made by prominent artists such as violinist Joseph Joachim.

Duffin brings all these disparate sources together to argue not only that the current predominance of equal temperament developed later and more sporadically than is generally accepted, but also that prior to about 1917, so-called “equal” temperaments were often not so equal at all.

Duffin writes convincingly on his topic, and does so with passion and a sharp wit. His intended audience is more scholarly — or at least more musically trained — than that of Stuart Isacoff, but his prose is still delightfully readable. There are quite a few sidebars throughout the books, mostly devoted to short biographies of persons mentioned in the text. It’s nice not to have to refer to Grove or Baker’s to get some background information on some of the more obscure personages, but these sidebars often interrupt the text in awkward places. There are also a handful of cartoons scattered through the text. These sort of set the tone of the book, but even the best are only smirk– or groan-worthy. I’d recommend that anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject of temperament read both Isacoff’s and Duffin’s books in order to get two very different perspectives on the matter.