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William King Thomas was, by all appear­ances, an upstand­ing, charis­matic, and suc­cess­ful Amer­i­can ex patriot liv­ing in Ger­many in the 1870s. But under­neath his affa­ble exte­rior, the man was a vicious crim­i­nal who thought noth­ing of mur­der­ing inno­cent men, women, and chil­dren for per­sonal gain.

His true nature came to light in Decem­ber 1875, when a bomb he’d con­structed exploded while being loaded onto the ocean liner Mosel. The explo­sion killed eighty-one peo­ple and seri­ously dam­aged the Mosel, its tug, and and the dock. After wit­ness­ing the bomb’s det­o­na­tion, Thomas, who was on board the ship but unharmed, attempted sui­cide. He suc­ceeded only in maim­ing him­self, and was thus eas­ily appre­hended. He lived for a num­ber of days before suc­cumb­ing to his wounds, but he refused to con­fess or show remorse.

Thomas’s actual plan for the Mosel and the depth of his deprav­ity were only revealed in the inves­ti­ga­tions fol­low­ing his death. The dyna­mite in his cargo was rigged with a sophis­ti­cated tim­ing device, set in motion before the con­tainer was sealed. Thomas boarded the Mosel in Bre­mer­haven, Ger­many with his cargo, intend­ing to dis­em­bark (sans cargo) in Southamp­ton, Eng­land. The steam liner would then set out for New York. The time bomb would det­o­nate dur­ing the trans-Atlantic cross­ing, sink­ing the ship, likely killing most of the pas­sen­gers and crew, and allow­ing Thomas to col­lect the insur­ance he’d fraud­u­lently taken out on his cargo.

The Bre­mer­haven police quickly hit a wall in their inves­ti­ga­tion of Thomas’s past and the pos­si­bil­ity that he’d had accom­plices. So, the famed Pinker­ton Detec­tive Agency was put on the case. Robert Pinker­ton and his men peeled back the lay­ers of lies shroud­ing Thomas’s past, and dis­cov­ered that the seem­ingly upstand­ing cit­i­zen had a long his­tory of fraud and vio­lence. As it turned out, William King Thomas was but one alias assumed by the crim­i­nal, whose real name was Alexan­der Keith.

Keith, a Nova Scot­ian, was one of a hard­core group of Con­fed­er­ate sym­pa­thiz­ers who out­fit­ted ships in Canada to run Union block­ades dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civil War. Beyond sim­ply sup­ply­ing the Con­fed­er­acy with goods, Keith acted as a secret agent, and was involved in a num­ber of assas­si­na­tion and ter­ror­ist plots against the Union. While aid­ing the CSA, Keith never passed up an oppor­tu­nity to swin­dle his coun­try­men and asso­ciates. This qual­ity — ruth­less bar­baric oppor­tunism — pushed Keith through­out his life to com­mit ever more heinous crimes to increase his per­sonal wealth. Dur­ing his life, the man killed count­less peo­ple, destroyed a great deal of prop­erty, and ruined many lives.

Ann Larabee does a good job por­tray­ing Alexan­der Keith and the long crim­i­nal career that cul­mi­nated in him being given the nick­name “The Dyna­mite Fiend.” She pro­vides ample his­tor­i­cal con­text, show­ing how this some­what obscure Cana­dian became deeply involved in the Amer­i­can Civil War. The book is well writ­ten and pro­vides inter­est­ing insight into one of the first acts of ter­ror­ism to tar­get an inter­na­tional trans­porta­tion system.

The Devil in the White City fol­lows two par­al­lel sto­ries in nineteenth-century Chicago. The first is that of the World’s Columbian Expo­si­tion, held at Chicago’s Jack­son Park in 1893. The fair, which cel­e­brated the quadri­cen­ten­nial of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, was awarded to the city by act of Con­gress in Feb­ru­ary 1890. This left barely three years for plan­ning, con­struc­tion, and the many other tasks nec­es­sary for putting on a world’s fair.

Two of the city’s top archi­tects, Daniel Burn­ham and John Root, were brought in to over­see the design and con­struc­tion of the fair’s build­ings. Fred­er­ick Law Olm­sted, the famed designer of New York City’s Cen­tral Park, was hired to design the land­scape of the fair­grounds. Thou­sands of work­ers toiled to con­vert the swampy grounds of Jack­son Park into a beau­ti­fully land­scaped mini-city of regal neo­clas­si­cal build­ings. Numer­ous set­backs plagued con­struc­tion, and the fast-approaching open­ing of the fair neces­si­tated some cut­backs. Despite the her­culean efforts of the fair’s design­ers and builders, not every­thing was com­plete by open­ing day. By its end, how­ever, the expo­si­tion was quite a suc­cess, cap­tur­ing the atten­tion of the entire world, and hav­ing a pro­found effect on Amer­i­can indus­try and culture.

The story that Erik Lar­son fol­lows along­side that of the Columbian Expo­si­tion is that of Her­man Mud­gett. Mud­gett, who is bet­ter known by the alias H.H. Holmes, was one of America’s first ser­ial killers. Lar­son fol­lows Holmes’s crim­i­nal career. While Holmes’s actions were pri­mar­ily dri­ven by fraud and con artistry, he became increas­ingly bold in his schemes, even­tu­ally mak­ing mur­der one of his stan­dard tools. Holmes lived in Chicago dur­ing the prepa­ra­tions for the World’s Fair, and embarked on a con­struc­tion project of his own.

Like many other Chicagoans, he hoped to cap­i­tal­ize on the huge influx of peo­ple that the fair would cre­ate. To this end, he built a hotel. Holmes’s estab­lish­ment, how­ever, pos­sessed some unique fea­tures: secret doors and pas­sage­ways, false doors and stair­cases, hid­den gas valves in the bed­rooms, and a large sound­proof room heated by a fur­nace hot enough to incin­er­ate human bod­ies. Holmes man­aged to avoid scrutiny for a num­ber of years, but even­tu­ally the many dis­ap­pear­ances from his hotel were noticed. Holmes was caught, but the full extent of his crimes remains unknown.

The jux­ta­po­si­tion of these top­ics is fas­ci­nat­ing — an exhi­bi­tion of the best the United States had to offer ver­sus and exam­ple of its worst; the noble White City ver­sus Holmes’s twisted board­ing­house of death. Lar­son writes in a nar­ra­tive style which although highly read­able is highly sus­pect. He assigns the peo­ple about whom he writes spe­cific thought, emo­tions, and actions that can’t pos­si­bly be any­thing other than con­jec­ture. This makes for an inter­est­ing nar­ra­tive, but blurs the line between fact and fic­tion and erodes some of Larson’s cred­i­bil­ity. Despite this short­com­ing, The Devil in the White City is an engross­ing book, and I highly enjoyed it.

Vivaldi’s Venice pro­vides some­thing that I feel has been some­what lack­ing from my musi­cal edu­ca­tion: his­tor­i­cal con­text. Patrick Bar­bier pro­vides a thor­ough look at the city of Venice dur­ing Vivaldi’s time, draw­ing heav­ily on accounts writ­ten by vis­i­tors to the city from var­i­ous other places in Europe. He details the com­plex social sit­u­a­tion in the city. Nobles and com­mon­ers did not nor­mally mix. How­ever, dur­ing the many annual fes­ti­vals, every­one wore masks in pub­lic. At these times (which took up a large part of the year, anony­mous mix­ing of classes was free to occur.

Also dis­cussed are the city’s pre­car­i­ous pol­i­tics. The state employed secret police to spy on the pop­u­lace — nobles in par­tic­u­lar. For­eign­ers were allowed in the city, but most peo­ple refrained from asso­ci­at­ing with them for fear of run­ning afoul of the gov­ern­ment. Car­ni­val masks pro­vided a way around this sit­u­a­tion, as well. Doges, the heads of state, usu­ally only reigned for a short while and were often the vic­tims of foul play. The sys­tem used for elect­ing a new doge was extremely byzan­tine, involv­ing mul­ti­ple rounds of vot­ing by var­i­ous groups of nobles.

More ger­mane to a study of Vivaldi are Barbier’s descrip­tions of musi­cal life in Venice. If con­tem­po­rary accounts are to be believed, music per­vaded every aspect of soci­ety, and any­one — from dock worker to doge — was liable to break into song at any moment. With such a large pub­lic inter­est, the city was able to main­tain a huge array of musi­cal orga­ni­za­tions. Some of the most cel­e­brated ensem­bles were those of the four ospedali — orphan­ages — of the city. Vivaldi spent a large por­tion of his career teach­ing at the Pietá, one of these ospedali. Bar­bier dis­cusses the Pietá and its sis­ter orga­ni­za­tions in detail, which offers insights into the sorts of musi­cal resources Vivaldi had at his disposal.

Vivaldi’s Venice is well-written — very infor­ma­tive with­out being dry. Bar­bier writes mainly about the social, polit­i­cal, and musi­cal his­tory of Venice, but he includes enough Vivaldi biog­ra­phy to make the mate­r­ial rel­e­vant to a study of the com­poser. The book offers a look at Vivaldi’s place in the big pic­ture of Venet­ian soci­ety — the sort of thing I wish I knew more about regard­ing other composers.

Oboist/journalist Blair Tin­dall has two sep­a­rate agen­das within this book: embar­rass­ing peo­ple by nam­ing names in her sor­did auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and bemoan­ing the cur­rent state of clas­si­cal music in the United States. Except for the fact that nearly every­one who fig­ures in her life story is a clas­si­cal musi­cian, the two sub­jects really have noth­ing to do with each other. I get the sense that Tin­dall is some­how try­ing to use her story as an exam­ple of what is wrong with the clas­si­cal music world, but she never really makes a strong argu­ment as such. She comes off as an aber­ra­tion rather than a typification.

Tindall’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal mate­r­ial con­sists largely of rev­el­ing in her promis­cu­ity and drug use, and is very short on per­sonal growth. She gets most of her oboe jobs by sleep­ing with some­one, and loses them when rela­tion­ships end. Although she seems bit­ter about this cycle, she never really tries to break it, and takes every oppor­tu­nity to name the men involved. Tin­dall tries to cast her­self as the vic­tim of a cor­rupt and exploita­tive sys­tem. How­ever, she destroys this argu­ment before she even makes it; in the begin­ning of the book, she details her seduc­tion of one of her high school teach­ers. The reader gets the impres­sion that Tin­dall would have tried to sleep her way to the top of any profession.

The dis­cus­sions of the his­tory and cur­rent sta­tus of clas­si­cal music in Amer­ica are inter­est­ing, but are marred by Tindall’s clumsy tran­si­tions between them and her own story. In fact, her tran­si­tions through­out the book are awk­ward or nonex­is­tent — I often found myself reread­ing para­graphs or pages in an effort to fig­ure out who, what, or when she’s talk­ing about. The over­all poor qual­ity of her writ­ing leads one to won­der if her old method of win­ning jobs has car­ried over into her new career as a journalist.

The bulk of this book is a seamy tale of sex and drugs that just hap­pens to be set in the world of clas­si­cal music. Sim­i­lar sto­ries could be told by peo­ple in other pro­fes­sions. Tindall’s con­dem­na­tions of the pro­fes­sion fall flat, either due to lack of sup­port or sim­ply from asso­ci­a­tion with the rest of her mate­r­ial. By her own admis­sion, Blair Tin­dall is a mediocre oboist. It’s read­ily appar­ent that she’s a mediocre writer, as well.

Although little-known today, fourteenth-century author Sir John Man­dev­ille was once widely read and revered in Europe. His out­put con­sists of a sin­gle unti­tled work, which is gen­er­ally known as The Trav­els. This book is an account of thirty-four years of jour­ney­ing across Europe and Asia — mainly the Mid­dle and Far East. By the time of Mandeville’s death in the 1360s, his writ­ings had been trans­lated into every major Euro­pean lan­guage. Mandeville’s writ­ing influ­enced explor­ers, such as Colum­bus and Releigh, as well as other authors, such as Shake­speare, Mil­ton, and Keats.

The account is divided into two parts. The first recounts his trav­els in the Mid­dle East, includ­ing stays in Con­stan­tino­ple and Jerusalem. The sec­ond half con­cerns China and the Indian sub­con­ti­nent. This lat­ter por­tion is full of fan­tas­tic sto­ries of cyclo­peans, giants, and human/animal cross-breeds. It was these tales that destroyed Mandeville’s cred­i­bil­ity as the Far East became bet­ter known to Europe. But what about the first half of The Trav­els, which doesn’t con­tain such fan­ci­ful sto­ries? Should it also be dis­missed as fic­tion? This is the ques­tion that Giles Mil­ton sets out to answer.

Mil­ton trav­els to the places described by Man­dev­ille to check the knight’s details. He also con­sults accounts of other trav­el­ers who vis­ited these locales around the same time as Man­dev­ille. Time after time, the details of Mandeville’s ear­lier trav­els are cor­rob­o­rated. Mil­ton exam­ines mul­ti­ple man­u­script copies of The Trav­els, and in doing so dis­cov­ers that many of the less cred­i­ble pas­sages (in the first half) were added to the text by scribes.

Thus con­vinced that the first half of The Trav­els is at least mostly true, Mil­ton pon­ders why Man­dev­ille would have paired a real pil­grim­age to the Holy Land with a fan­tas­tic tale of myth­i­cal beasts and sav­ages. Mil­ton con­cludes that the book is an elab­o­rate alle­gor­i­cal attack on West­ern cul­ture and Chris­tian­ity. Sir John enu­mer­ates all the sins and short­com­ings of “good Chris­tians” in the first half of his book, then turns around and describes the pagan peo­ples in the sec­ond half as pious and hum­ble. He makes spe­cific com­par­isons between Chris­t­ian rit­u­als and those of other reli­gions such as Islam and Hin­duism, with Chris­tian­ity always com­ing out on the bot­tom. What Man­dev­ille has done, argues Mil­ton, is forced his Euro­pean read­ers to view them­selves through the eyes of out­siders, in the hopes that this will engen­der tol­er­ance and understanding.

This is a very fas­ci­nat­ing book. Mil­ton attacks his topic from all angles, vis­it­ing the places men­tioned in The Trav­els, check­ing other con­tem­po­rary accounts, pur­su­ing the vague details of Mandeville’s biog­ra­phy, and exam­in­ing scrip­to­r­ial prac­tice and the alter­ations made to The Trav­els through the years. He does a very good job of pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal con­text through­out the book. Before pick­ing up The Rid­dle and the Knight, I’d never heard of Sir John Man­dev­ille. Now, I’m inspired to pick up a copy of The Trav­els and read this largely neglected work myself.

Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich cre­ated — then acci­den­tally vol­un­teered for — the jour­nal­is­tic endeavor at the heart of this book: to deliver a hands-on account of life as a low-wage worker in the United States. Her inspi­ra­tion was late ‘90s wel­fare reform, and con­flicts between the accom­pa­ny­ing rhetoric and wage/cost of liv­ing statistics.

For her exper­i­ment, she chose three cities: Key West, Florida; Port­land, Maine; and Min­neapo­lis, Min­nesota. She gave her­self one month in each city to find hous­ing and employ­ment. If she man­aged to make enough money to feed her­self and pay the sec­ond month’s rent, then she would con­sider that phase of the project a suc­cess. When job-hunting, she for­bid her­self to fall back on any of her edu­ca­tion or job skills; she pre­sented her­self as an unskilled divorceé look­ing to reen­ter the workforce.

Ehren­re­ich dis­cov­ered first-hand some of the finan­cial prob­lems faced by low-wage work­ers. For exam­ple: while some­one work­ing full-time for $6–7 an hour may be able to afford the rent on a cheap apart­ment, it’s very hard to save up the secu­rity deposit required by nearly all land­lords. Res­i­den­tial motels, a com­mon hous­ing alter­na­tive, are far more costly in the long run, and almost guar­an­tee that ten­ants will be unable to save enough to cover the ini­tial costs of an apart­ment. Ehrehre­ich also uncov­ered hid­den costs in feed­ing her­self. While it is cer­tainly cheap­est to buy food at the gro­cery store and pre­pare it at home, this assumes the avail­abil­ity of cook­ing and refrig­er­a­tion appa­ra­tus — lux­u­ries not afforded by many res­i­den­tial motels and low-rent apart­ments. Thus, she often had to resort to more expen­sive — and far less healthy — fast food, fur­ther drain­ing her finances. On top of these eco­nomic con­sid­er­a­tions, Ehren­re­ich relates the men­tal and phys­i­cal effects of work­ing long hours in menial and often phys­i­cally demand­ing jobs. A num­ber of her co-workers expe­ri­enced work-related health prob­lems, but have no ben­e­fits and can­not afford health insurance.

Ehren­re­ich does an excel­lent job of illu­mi­nat­ing the plight of the “work­ing poor” in our soci­ety. In addi­tion to her first-hand expe­ri­ences, she offers a cogent eval­u­a­tion of spe­cific prob­lems, their causes, and pos­si­ble solu­tions. This book is a good, albeit trou­bling, read, and I rec­om­mend it.

The years lead­ing up to the year 1000 A.D. were very tumul­tuous ones, espe­cially for the Chris­t­ian world. The tenth cen­tury saw rapid suc­ces­sions of kings, emper­ors, and popes. Twenty-eight popes and anti-popes reigned between 900 and 999 — a good indi­ca­tion of the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the period. The last pope of the cen­tury was Sylvester II, who ascended to the papacy in 999.

Sylvester, who for most of his life was known as Ger­bert d’Aurillac, was a very inter­est­ing man who dif­fered greatly from his pre­de­ces­sors. Ger­bert was one of the most highly edu­cated Chris­t­ian men of his time, sur­pass­ing his peers by learn­ing advanced sci­ence from teach­ers in the Mus­lim world. He was a friend of Emperor Otto I and tutor and men­tor to Emper­ors Otto II and Otto III. In a time when the clergy was rife with nepo­tism and simony, Ger­bert rose from the lowly rank of oblate (a child given to a monastery). When he even­tu­ally gained power, he used it to fight cor­rup­tion within the church.

Richard Erdoes uses the life of Ger­bert d’Aurillac as the core of this book about Europe and west­ern Asia at the turn of the last mil­len­nium. He pro­vides a good overview of life in the tenth and eleventh cen­turies in dif­fer­ent regions and at var­i­ous class lev­els. The polit­i­cal and reli­gious his­tory he includes is quite inter­est­ing as well, although he tends to intro­duce new names at a dizzy­ing pace. I often found myself re-reading pas­sages to fig­ure out exactly who he was talk­ing about at any given time.

My one major com­plaint about this book is its absolutely hor­ren­dous copy edit­ing. This book has more typo­graph­i­cal errors than any other pub­lished mate­r­ial I have ever read. There’s even a mis­spelling in one of the chap­ter titles! How­ever, if you can get past this highly annoy­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic, then you’ll find 1000 A.D. to be quite an inter­est­ing book.

Henry Pet­roski has writ­ten a num­ber of books about the tech­ni­cal and related social his­to­ries of objects that we tend to take for granted. This, his ear­li­est entry into that par­tic­u­lar sub-genre, traces the his­tory of one of the (seem­ingly) sim­plest and most com­mon­place objects imaginable.

Pet­roski begins in ancient times, describ­ing var­i­ous early attempts to replace ink (along with a pen, brush, or sty­lus) with some­thing more portable and less messy. These included wax tablets, spe­cially treated paper, and — the ances­tor of the mod­ern pen­cil — shaped pieces of lead called plumbums (the Latin word for lead). Noth­ing approach­ing a mod­ern pen­cil was cre­ated until after the dis­cov­ery of graphite some­time in the 16^th cen­tury — pen­cils have never actu­ally con­tained lead. The ear­li­est pen­cils were very crude, con­sist­ing of a chunk of graphite wedged into a small stick-like holder. Mod­ern pen­cils are far more com­plex than they appear, involv­ing very spe­cific types and mix­tures of graphite, clay, wax, glue, wood, var­nish, metal, and rub­ber. Pet­roski traces the 400-year evo­lu­tion of the pen­cil, from crude hand-made spe­cialty item to precision-crafted, mass-produced sta­ple of daily life.

He does a very good job with this mate­r­ial, but he tries to do too much else with the book. He relates the devel­op­ment of the pen­cil to the devel­op­ment of engi­neer­ing as a spe­cial­ized field. The anal­ogy is good, but he belabors the point. He also men­tions bridges every time he makes a com­par­i­son to engi­neer­ing. I found that lit­tle habit to be incred­i­bly annoy­ing. This book would have been much bet­ter if Pet­roski had just stuck to his main sub­ject, and saved the bulk of the dis­cus­sions of engi­neer­ing and bridges for other books. I believe that he has since writ­ten books on those very top­ics — per­haps they should have come first.

In short, this book is quite inter­est­ing — although not as much so as The Book on the Book­shelf — but it is a lit­tle too unfo­cused for my taste.

The map to which the title refers is an 1815 map cre­ated by William Smith. This map, which Smith title “A Delin­eation of The Strata of Eng­land and Wales with part of Scot­land; exhibit­ing the Col­lieries and Mines; the Marshes and Fen Lands orig­i­nally Over­flowed by the Sea; and the Vari­eties of Soil accord­ing to the Vari­a­tions in the Sub Strata; illus­trated by the Most Descrip­tive Names,” was the first real geo­logic map ever cre­ated. Smith, whose work pre­dates that of Charles Lyell (who is often called the Father of Geol­ogy), was one of the first to real­ize that lay­ers of rock are laid down in a par­tic­u­lar sequence. Bar­ring major geo­logic activ­ity, this order remains con­stant across a region. Smith also real­ized that strata of sim­i­lar com­po­si­tions can be dif­fer­en­ti­ated by their respec­tive fos­sil contents.

Smith’s work becomes all the more remark­able when one real­izes that he col­lected all the sur­vey data for his very detailed map by him­self over a period of 22 years. In a time when most sci­ence was con­ducted by the nobil­ity, gen­try, and clergy, Smith (the son of a black­smith) had dif­fi­culty gain­ing the respect and recog­ni­tion that he deserved. He often had trou­ble with money, and was thrown into debtor’s prison after his map and a num­ber of other works had been pub­lished. It wasn’t until late in his life that Smith began to be rec­og­nized for his achieve­ments and respected as a scientist.

This is the third of Simon Winchester’s books that I’ve read. He writes about very inter­est­ing and often little-known top­ics, and I quite enjoy his writ­ing style. At a few points in this book, he seems to be talk­ing down to the reader, but that is cer­tainly not the over­all tone. One thing I par­tic­u­larly like about Win­ches­ter is his pen­chant for includ­ing tan­gen­tial foot­notes. Through these, the reader learn a fair amount of inter­est­ing back­ground infor­ma­tion about some of the lesser involved peo­ple, places, and events that appear in the narrative.

Defoe sets up A Jour­nal of the Plague Year as a truth­ful first-person account of Lon­don in the years 1664 and 1665, when the city was rav­aged by the bubonic plague. How­ever, Defoe was only a small child dur­ing the plague year, and he wrote this work of fic­tion in 1722. It seems likely how­ever, that Defoe used fac­tual sources in his writ­ing — he makes exten­sive use of sta­tis­tics from weekly bills of mor­tal­ity, the real ver­sions of which would likely have been avail­able to him. I imag­ine that many of the anec­dotes he includes were based on things he heard or read about else­where. I can’t be cer­tain, but the whole thing has the air of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion — real events and facts wrapped in a made-up first-person narrative.

In any case, Defoe’s nar­ra­tive is quite inter­est­ing, and addresses many facets of life dur­ing the epi­demic. He dis­cusses the plague itself — the­o­ries of its ori­gin, trans­mis­sion, and diag­no­sis along with a plethora of attempts to treat it and pre­vent it from spread­ing. He details offi­cial pol­icy regard­ing the sick and the dead, and how the meth­ods for their han­dling changed as the epi­demic grew. Defoe also dis­cusses the socioe­co­nomic effects of the plague — on national and inter­na­tional trade, appren­tice­ships and par­tic­u­lar occu­pa­tions, and how the long-term effects of the dis­ease were dif­fer­ent for the var­i­ous classes.

Defoe presents a vast amount of inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion — which may or may not be based on truth — but his writ­ing style is hor­ri­ble. He writes in a very ram­bling, some­what dis­or­ga­nized man­ner. He often repeats him­self. Para­graph breaks are the largest divi­sions of text — there are no chap­ters or other delin­eated sec­tions. In short, this is a fas­ci­nat­ing book that requires a very deter­mined reader.

Ger­ald Dur­rell is best known as a nat­u­ral­ist. His Ama­teur Nat­u­ral­ist has been on my book­shelf for years. In this book, he cre­ates a delight­ful mix of nat­u­ral­ism and mem­oir. At the age of ten, Ger­ald moves with his mother and three older sib­lings from Eng­land to the Greek island of Corfu. Already fas­ci­nated with nature, lit­tle Gerry spends every free moment explor­ing his new sur­round­ings and study­ing the local flora and fauna. He quickly amasses an exten­sive menagerie, which he keeps in and around the family’s villa. Inci­dents involv­ing these pets serve to fur­ther enliven the Durrell’s already bizarrely funny fam­ily life. Ger­ald also recalls his mother’s attempts to find a suit­able tutor for him, to give him a “proper edu­ca­tion.” The book is quite funny; Dur­rell writes with a sharp wit. He man­ages to inte­grate obser­va­tions of nature, his fam­ily, Greek cul­ture, and child­hood in a sin­gle charm­ing narrative.

The world of hard­core Atlantic wreck div­ing is far removed from that of stereo­typ­i­cal warm-water swim-with-the-dolphins SCUBA div­ing. Its prac­ti­tion­ers are highly expe­ri­enced, well pre­pared indi­vid­u­als (mostly men) who like to get their thrills by div­ing deep into cold, murky water. At the depth at which most of the inter­est­ing ship­wrecks lie, only a small por­tion of a dive can be spent actu­ally explor­ing the ships; most of the time under­wa­ter must be spent mak­ing decom­pres­sion stops dur­ing the ascent.

While the loca­tions of many wrecks are pub­lic knowl­edge, divers and char­ter boat cap­tains often know some prime spots that they keep secret from each other. The loca­tions of inter­est­ing newly-discovered wrecks are par­tic­u­larly closely guarded. Bill Nagel and John Chat­ter­ton got their hands on just such a site in 1991. The coor­di­nates came from a fish­er­man who knew only that there was a wreck there (sunken ships attract sea life) and that it was made of steel (his lines some­times emerged from the water bear­ing flakes of rust).

Nagle and Chat­ter­ton assem­bled a group of divers to inves­ti­gate the site, fully expect­ing it to be some­thing mun­dane, like a pipe barge. Chat­ter­ton, who was the first to dive the wreck, dis­cov­ered that they had found some­thing far more intrigu­ing — a Ger­man U-boat. Never hav­ing heard about any undis­cov­ered U-boats sunk off the New Jer­sey coast, the divers set out to iden­tify the wreck — and keep it a secret.

Dive after dive, they failed to retrieve any arti­facts with iden­ti­fy­ing marks. In between trips to the site, Chat­ter­ton began research­ing U-boats, hop­ing to learn the loca­tions of iden­ti­fy­ing plaques. He also tried to deter­mine the sub’s iden­tity by search­ing US Navy and Ger­man U-Bootwaffe records. Soon another diver, Richie Kohler, joined both the under­wa­ter and his­tor­i­cal hunts.

It took many dives, trips to libraries, let­ters, and phone calls to learn the iden­tity of the mys­tery sub. The drive to find its name took a heavy toll on those involved. Three divers died on the wreck, Bill Nagel drank him­self to death, and Kohler’s and Chatterton’s mar­riages fell apart dur­ing the quest.

Robert Kur­son does a good job of explain­ing the mechan­ics and phys­i­ol­ogy of div­ing, as well as the dan­gers inher­ent in deep div­ing, cold-water div­ing, and wreck div­ing. Hav­ing not been involved in the story at all, he is able to tell it objec­tively, draw­ing on inter­views with the var­i­ous par­tic­i­pants. His writ­ing style is clear and easy to read.
While the story of div­ing on the sub and search­ing for phys­i­cal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is inter­est­ing, I found the sto­ries uncov­ered by research to be quite fas­ci­nat­ing as well. Chat­ter­ton and Kohler found many pos­si­ble iden­ti­ties for their mys­tery U-boat, as well as many pos­si­ble causes for its sink­ing, before finally con­firm­ing its iden­tity and dis­cov­er­ing the most prob­a­ble cause of its demise.

This col­lec­tion of non-fiction com­prises an odd melange of mem­oir, jour­nal­ism, social com­men­tary, lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, and intro­spec­tion. Palah­niuk writes about such diverse top­ics as Greco-Roman wrestling, book publisher’s con­ven­tions, vol­un­teer­ing at a hos­pice, Amer­i­can cas­tle builders, and the mur­der of his father. The uni­fy­ing ele­ment for much of the mate­r­ial is Palahniuk’s dark and cyn­i­cal view of soci­ety. The book does con­tain some gen­er­ally upbeat pieces, but his cyn­i­cism often creeps into these as well. Humor per­me­ates the writ­ing, although one needs a some­what dark sense of humor to fully appre­ci­ate some of it.

Stranger Than Fic­tion is not for the eas­ily offended or dis­gusted, but it’s a very inter­est­ing read. The pieces are short and var­ied enough to keep the reader’s inter­est, even if one piece here or there fails to please. My only prior expe­ri­ence with Palahniuk’s writ­ing was with the movie Fight Club. After read­ing a bit of his non-fiction, I’m inspired to pick up one or two of his novels.

Jake Halpern has a fas­ci­na­tion with peo­ple who live in bizarre, hos­tile, and/or just plain dan­ger­ous places. In this book, he vis­its five such places: a flood-ravaged town in North Car­olina, an almost entirely indoor town in Alaska, a sub­di­vi­sion in Hawaii that is sur­rounded by active lava fields, a ranch in a forest-fire-prone canyon in Cal­i­for­nia, and a bar­rier island in Louisiana that is fre­quently hit by hur­ri­canes. In each place, Halpern gets to know one res­i­dent (or the only res­i­dent, both in the flooded town and the lava-ringed sub­di­vi­sion), learns how they came to live in such inhos­pitable con­di­tions, and why they stay there. The cir­cum­stances dif­fer — some have deep fam­ily ties to a place, oth­ers came to a place specif­i­cally to get away from such ties elsewhere.

All the peo­ple Halpern meets have some­thing in com­mon, how­ever. Their homes are their homes, and they won’t leave for any­thing, come hell or (lit­er­ally) high water. The lives they live are not easy ones, often hav­ing to pro­tect their homes from the wrath of nature. Read­ing about these peo­ple, their lives, moti­va­tions, and strug­gles, makes it very clear that it takes a spe­cial (read: at least a lit­tle crazy) per­son to make a home in any of these places.

It’s hard to tell exactly what inspired Michael Segell to write this book. He was not a sax player before begin­ning work on it; per­haps it grew out of lis­ten­ing to some of the great jazzers.

In any case, Segell’s book tells the story of the sax­o­phone through a com­bi­na­tion of writ­ten his­tory, oral his­tory, and his own expe­ri­ences as a nax novi­tiate. He cov­ers the tech­ni­cal aspects of the instru­ment — its inven­tion and sub­se­quent mod­i­fi­ca­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion. Segell also writes about the role of the sax­o­phone in var­i­ous types of music and in soci­ety in gen­eral. Some of the most inter­est­ing read­ing is about the peo­ple involved with the sax — from inven­tor Adolphe Sax to jazz giants like John Coltrane and Char­lie Parker to teach­ers and clas­si­cal sax­o­phone advo­cates like Mar­cel Mule and Sig­urd Rascher.

Segell has inter­viewed a plethora of peo­ple: leg­ends, peo­ple who played with or learned from them, and pro­fes­sion­als and ama­teurs who have stud­ied them in depth. The wis­dom, insights, and sto­ries gleaned from these inter­views are the real meat of the book.

While the book is very inter­est­ing and quite enjoy­able, I must take issue with Segell on one point: his lack of expe­ri­ence with orches­tral instru­ments is appar­ent from the pedestal on which he places the sax­o­phone. He dis­par­ages other wood­wind instru­ments for defi­cien­cies in tone, color, and ver­sa­til­ity that do not exist. He makes a big deal out of the spec­tral com­plex­ity of the saxophone’s sound and the dif­fi­culty in syn­the­siz­ing it or sam­pling its var­i­ous reg­is­ters. All of this is true for the bas­soon as well, but I believe to a greater degree — some­thing he fails to mention.

Books are some­thing that we often take for granted. Sin­gle titles are often printed by the hun­dreds of thou­sands, if not by the mil­lions. We can choose from thou­sands of titles at our local mega­book­stores, and most vol­umes unob­tain­able there can be tracked down and pur­chased online. The col­lec­tions of large pub­lic and uni­ver­sity libraries num­ber in the mil­lions, and per­sonal libraries boast­ing hun­dreds or thou­sands of tomes are not uncommon.

In his his­tory of books and the meth­ods that have been used to orga­nize and store them, Henry Pet­roski takes us back to a time when an out­stand­ing library would be one with a col­lec­tion num­ber­ing in the tens. A col­lec­tion such as this could be — and often was — stored in a sin­gle locked chest. Each vol­ume rep­re­sented the painstak­ing work of a sin­gle scribe, and only a hand­ful of copies might exist of a sin­gle title.

Hun­dreds of years of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment con­nect this one-off method of repro­duc­tion to today’s mas­sive print runs. This, how­ever, is merely a sub­plot in Petroski’s tale. He con­cen­trates not on the books them­selves, but on the evo­lu­tion of pub­lic and pri­vate libraries and the fur­ni­ture used to store books. As print­ing tech­nol­ogy advanced, more books became avail­able, lead­ing to larger col­lec­tions of books, which required increas­ingly effi­cient meth­ods of hous­ing and orga­ni­za­tion. Pet­roski reveals how the shelv­ing meth­ods we take for granted today (books shelved ver­ti­cally, spines out, on hor­i­zon­tal shelves in colum­nar cases, which are arranged end-to-end in stacks) came to be standard.

There is an amaz­ing amount of inter­est­ing his­tory behind some­thing that seems so obvi­ous today. Pet­roski does a won­der­ful job of fer­ret­ing out lit­tle bits of his­tory and trivia. At times, he becomes overly roman­tic, lament­ing the fact that some old prac­tices have fallen out of use. He also uses a bit more anec­do­tal evi­dence from him­self and his friends than I would have liked. Alto­gether, though, this is a very fas­ci­nat­ing and well-written his­tory of every­day objects.

In this book, Terry Gross has col­lected a num­ber of inter­views from her long-running NPR show, Fresh Air. The sub­jects in the book have been lim­ited to writ­ers, artists, musi­cians, and actors, which suits my tastes pretty well. The inter­views them­selves have been edited, with some being very short, and some con­sist­ing of parts of mul­ti­ple orig­i­nal inter­views with the same person.

For each inter­view, Gross tells why she likes it, and why she chose it for this col­lec­tion. Not all are what one might call “good inter­views.” At least one — an inter­view with Gene Sim­mons of KISS — has been included specif­i­cally because it was not a “good inter­view.” It is all the more reveal­ing because of that fact.

In all her inter­views, Terry Gross doesn’t shy away from tough ques­tions. How inter­vie­wees take this can be as inter­est­ing as what they actu­ally say. Although some­thing is def­i­nitely lost in not hear­ing the sub­jects’ tones of voice and inflec­tions, an amaz­ing amount of tone is con­veyed through the text alone. It helps if the reader is famil­iar with each inter­vie­wee and can imag­ine them speak­ing their answers.

The inter­views in this col­lec­tion offer a wealth insight — into the inter­vie­wees’ crafts as well as into cul­ture, love, fam­ily, and the world at large. This book is a very good read. Thanks, Sean!

There are some names leg­endary enough to tran­scend the nor­mal cir­cles of appre­ci­a­tion or exper­tise: Ein­stein, Dar­win, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Picasso, Beethoven, etc. Stradi­vari is another of these names. The rep­u­ta­tion of the Cre­monese master’s stringed instru­ments is known far and wide, no doubt assisted by the records they have set at auc­tion over the last century.

Like any famous work of art, a Strad has a prove­nance that includes a num­ber of own­ers. How­ever, unlike a paint­ing or sculp­ture, a vio­lin is a func­tional work of art. The impor­tant part of its prove­nance is its list of for­mer play­ers (who may or may not have also been the own­ers). For the best and most cel­e­brated instru­ments, these lists read like a roll call of 300 years of vir­tu­osi. The rela­tion­ship between player and instru­ment is often influ­enced by the instrument’s pre­vi­ous play­ers. Play­ers often feel as though the instru­ment doesn’t really belong to them; it has too much his­tory to be claimed. Ivry Gitlis speaks to this in The Art of Vio­lin:

“I have a vio­lin that was born in 1713. It was alive long before me, and I hope it lives long after me. I don’t con­sider it as my vio­lin. Rather, I am per­haps its vio­lin­ist; I am pass­ing through its life.

Faber traces the his­to­ries of five of Stradivari’s instru­ments, from what was hap­pen­ing in the luthier’s life when they were made up to the present day. He pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the evo­lu­tion of the vio­lin and of its role in music. The book also chron­i­cles the way in which Stradivari’s instru­ments pro­gressed from good per­for­mance tools to multi-million dol­lar col­lec­tors items, not all of which can be heard pub­licly today. The most inter­est­ing con­tent, how­ever, is about play­ers and their instru­ments — the strug­gle to find the per­fect vio­lin to suit a cer­tain play­ing style. Or per­haps more accu­rately for a Stradi­var­ius — the strug­gle to find the per­fect player for a cer­tain violin.