PD Smith

I’ve just noticed that William Grimes at the New York Times has reviewed Dooms­day Men. I’ve cer­tain­ly had bet­ter reviews but, hey, it’s the New York Times and it’s great to be in there…!

You can read it here.

It’s that time of year again: there’s a chill in the air, the sun bare­ly shows its face, and the leaves are just gold­en mem­o­ries long since car­ried away by the wind. A great time, in fact, to recall some of the out­stand­ing non-fic­tion books that have land­ed on my desk this year.

It’s been a vin­tage year for biogra­phies. Wal­ter Isaacson’s Ein­stein: His Life and Uni­verse is a mas­ter­ly and very read­able sur­vey of the great physicist’s life and work. Of course, Ein­stein is hard­ly a neglect­ed sub­ject in pub­lish­ing. But Isaac­son had priv­i­leged access to over 3,000 pages of fam­i­ly cor­re­spon­dence which were kept under lock and key until 2006, in accor­dance with the will of Einstein’s step-daugh­ter Mar­got. As a result Isaacson’s sym­pa­thet­ic biog­ra­phy of “science’s pre-emi­nent poster boy” can jus­ti­fi­ably claim to be more com­pre­hen­sive than any before.

As well as reveal­ing more details of Einstein’s many affairs, the cor­re­spon­dence casts new light on his rela­tion­ship with his men­tal­ly-ill younger son, Eduard. Ein­stein found it immense­ly dif­fi­cult com­ing to terms with Eduard’s con­di­tion, but Isaac­son detects “a painful sweet­ness in his let­ters to his trou­bled son”. At one point, Ein­stein touch­ing­ly advis­es Eduard: “Life is like rid­ing a bicy­cle. To keep your bal­ance you must keep mov­ing”.

Anoth­er immense­ly enjoy­able biog­ra­phy was Mar­tin Goodman’s Suf­fer and Sur­vive: Gas Attacks, Min­ers’ Canaries, Space­suits and the Bends — The Extreme Life of Dr J. S. Hal­dane. In his life­long quest to under­stand the secrets of res­pi­ra­tion, pio­neer­ing phys­i­ol­o­gist and ser­i­al self-exper­i­menter John Scott Hal­dane (1860–1936) became a con­nois­seur of rare gas­es, an author­i­ty on their detec­tion and effects.

He had a pro­found sense of pub­lic ser­vice and believed pas­sion­ate­ly that the world could be made a bet­ter place through the appli­ance of sci­ence. From min­ers dying of car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing and sol­diers being gassed like rats in the trench­es of World War I, to moun­taineers and avi­a­tors cop­ing with high alti­tudes, Hal­dane showed that sci­ence could bring light into the dark­ness. Good­man has a novelist’s eye for evoca­tive detail that less­er writ­ers might miss and the result­ing biog­ra­phy is as com­pelling as a his­tor­i­cal nov­el.

Andrew Robin­son deserves an award for even attempt­ing a biog­ra­phy of Thomas Young (1773–1829). He has been described as hav­ing “a wider range of cre­ative learn­ing than any oth­er Eng­lish­man in his­to­ry”. From med­i­cine (“Young’s rule” is a method of adjust­ing adult dos­es for chil­dren) and Egyp­tol­ogy (he helped deci­pher the Roset­ta Stone), to physics, in which he chal­lenged Newton’s author­i­ty by propos­ing a wave the­o­ry of light, the ver­sa­til­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty of Young’s mind is sim­ply breath­tak­ing. Appro­pri­ate­ly named The Last Man Who Knew Every­thing, Robinson’s account of Young’s achieve­ments is an immense­ly impres­sive work, although you can’t help feel­ing that to real­ly do jus­tice to this extra­or­di­nary poly­math you would need to write an ency­clo­pe­dia.

In phys­i­ol­o­gy too, Young made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to our under­stand­ing of the mech­a­nisms of the eye, explain­ing how it focus­es, defin­ing astig­ma­tism, and propos­ing the three-colour the­o­ry of how the reti­na detects the sen­sa­tion of colour. This year there have been sev­er­al mem­o­rable books on vision and how we per­ceive colours, espe­cial­ly the blue of the sky. Peter Pesic’s Sky in a Bot­tle (2005; pub­lished in paper­back this year) and Götz Hoeppe’s Why the Sky is Blue: Dis­cov­er­ing the Col­or of Life, both explore the fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry of how we have tried to explain and indeed repli­cate the blue­ness of the sky. It’s a ques­tion that has per­plexed philoso­phers, sci­en­tists and chil­dren alike since the begin­ning of his­to­ry.

For Pesic, answer­ing this ques­tion leads us to probe “the secrets of mat­ter and light, the scope of the uni­verse in space and time, the des­tiny of the earth, and deep human feel­ings.” Leonar­do da Vin­ci was one of the first to try to cap­ture an “arti­fi­cial sky” in a bot­tle, prob­a­bly a sat­u­rat­ed solu­tion of cop­per sul­phate and ammo­nia. Both books are excel­lent, although each has dif­fer­ent strengths: Hoeppe jour­neys deeply into the sci­ence and Pesic, as ever, has a fine­ly attuned ear for the way sci­ence res­onates in oth­er dis­cours­es, such as lit­er­a­ture.

Two oth­er stud­ies of vision out this year that deserve to be men­tioned are The Eye: A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, by Simon Ings, and Van­i­ties of the Eye: Vision in Ear­ly Mod­ern Euro­pean Cul­ture, by Stu­art Clark. The for­mer is a won­der­ful­ly expan­sive book on just about every­thing you ever want­ed to know about the eye and its work­ings; the lat­ter is a dense­ly argued but won­der­ful­ly sub­tle explo­ration of how, dur­ing the 15th to the 17th cen­turies, peo­ple devel­oped a com­plex under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ship between what was seen and what was known.

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al events of 2007 was undoubt­ed­ly The Simp­sons Movie. The con­tri­bu­tion of Homer Jay Simp­son (aka the “Wiz­ard of Ever­green Ter­race”) to sci­ence is often sad­ly over­looked. Physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing is a great fan of the TV show and has appeared twice. He knows a good sci­en­tif­ic idea when he sees one and Homer’s the­o­ry that the uni­verse is shaped like a donut made an imme­di­ate impres­sion: “intriguing….I may have to steal it.” This as well as many oth­er weird and won­der­ful sci­en­tif­ic moments in the series – such as what process­es could pro­duce Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish and do toi­lets in the north­ern and south­ern hemi­spheres real­ly swirl in oppo­site direc­tions (as Lisa claims in “Bart vs Aus­tralia”) – are explained in What’s Sci­ence Ever Done for Us? What The Simp­sons can teach us about Physics, Robots, Life, and the Uni­verse, by Paul Halpern. A delight­ful book; as Mr Burns might say: “Exx-cel­lent!”

Some won­der­ful clas­sics were reis­sued this year. Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind (1941) is, says her biog­ra­ph­er Lin­da Lear, “her most suc­cess­ful book”. It is indeed beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten: exquis­ite­ly craft­ed and metic­u­lous­ly observed – a per­fect union of the poet­ic and the sci­en­tif­ic. Carson’s book is a time­less evo­ca­tion of life beneath the waves and at the water’s edge. Anoth­er remark­able study of the ocean is Sev­en-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresh­olds, by James Hamil­ton-Pater­son, which first appeared in 1992. He empha­sis­es the oth­er­ness of the sea, the sense that the true sig­nif­i­cance of the water that cov­ers sev­en-tenths of the Earth’s sur­face is beyond the reach of sci­ence or even lit­er­a­ture. He sug­gests its sig­nif­i­cance is both ele­men­tal (“the salt which is in sea­wa­ter is in our blood and tears and sweat”) and ances­tral: the thought of its oth­er­ness “makes us ache, sea crea­tures that we once were, as for a coun­try we have lost on the far side of a fron­tier we can bare­ly even dis­cern”.

Step­ping onto dry land for a moment, Dirt: The Ecsta­t­ic Skin of the Earth (first pub­lished in 1995) by William Bryant Logan) is a glo­ri­ous cel­e­bra­tion of dirt – not soil or earth, but dirt: “It takes dirt to grow an oak from an acorn. It takes the rot and the shit that is the root mean­ing of ‘dirt’ – drit­ten means ‘shit’ in Old Norse.” If you want to know what makes your gar­den grow (or not as the case may be) then this is the book for you. From the for­ma­tion of the Earth’s sur­face some four and a half bil­lion years ago as the plan­et began to cool, to the prin­ci­ples of com­post­ing (includ­ing a great recipe for scal­lop vis­cera com­post), Logan writes with an almost mys­ti­cal inten­si­ty about the sci­ence and the meta­physics of soil. Although these three clas­sic books are very dif­fer­ent in style, each offers the read­er a mas­ter­class in writ­ing. Non-fic­tion doesn’t get any bet­ter than this.

In Britain we tend to take the sta­bil­i­ty of the ground some­what for grant­ed. It came as some­thing of a shock, there­fore, to learn that even though we don’t live on a geo­log­i­cal fault, there have in fact been 500 trem­blors record­ed in our green and pleas­ant land since the 10th cen­tu­ry. In 1580 what became known as the “Lon­don earth­quake” dam­aged St Paul’s cathe­dral and caused tsunamis that sank over 100 ships. Shake­speare even referred to this quake in Romeo and Juli­et: “’Tis since the earth­quake now eleven years”. This and many oth­er fas­ci­nat­ing links between cul­ture and the shift­ing sands on which we live can be found in Earth­quakes in Human His­to­ry: The Far-Reach­ing Effects of Seis­mic Dis­rup­tions, by Jelle Zeilin­ga de Boer and Don­ald Theodore Sanders, out this year in paper­back.

While I’m on mat­ters geo­log­i­cal, I must men­tion Super­con­ti­nent: Ten Bil­lion Years in the Life of Our Plan­et, by Ted Nield. In what is one of the best pop­u­lar­iza­tions of geol­o­gy since Richard Fortey’s Earth, Nield tells the sto­ry of “the great­est cycle of nature”, the process by which super­con­ti­nents form and break up over a peri­od last­ing between 500 and 750 mil­lion years. The timescales involved are mind-bog­gling, but Nield man­ages to bring “this slow­est of all unfold­ing dra­mas” vivid­ly alive, giv­ing us a won­der­ful sense of the ancient yet pow­er­ful forces at work under­neath us. Super­con­ti­nent real­ly will change the way you look at plan­et Earth.

The Asian Tsuna­mi three years ago, on 26 Decem­ber 2004, was caused by a mas­sive earth­quake with a force equiv­a­lent to almost a giga­ton of explo­sive – ten times big­ger than the largest hydro­gen bomb ever built. It killed almost 300,000 peo­ple. We ignore the ground beneath our feet at our per­il, for as poet Hugh Mac­Di­armid has said:

“What hap­pens to us
Is irrel­e­vant to the world’s geol­o­gy
But what hap­pens to the world’s geol­o­gy
Is not irrel­e­vant to us.”

As I write this, the news reports are dom­i­nat­ed by the UN cli­mate change con­fer­ence at Bali. This year the cli­mate cri­sis was scarce­ly out of the head­lines. Two mem­o­rable books pub­lished in paper­back in 2007 high­light­ed the dam­age we are doing to the envi­ron­ment – The Cre­ation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, by E O Wil­son, and Field Notes from a Cat­a­stro­phe: A Front­line Report on Cli­mate Change, by Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert. With­out being sen­sa­tion­al­ist, Wil­son and Kol­bert speak pow­er­ful­ly about what is undoubt­ed­ly one of the most impor­tant sub­jects today.

I’m sure I’ve left out some books that deserve to be men­tioned. Feel free to put the record straight by leav­ing your own rec­om­men­da­tions! If you want to read more about these books or oth­ers from 2007, they’re all here.

Hap­py Christ­mas to all of you and here’s to a New Year packed with equal­ly great books!

[also post­ed on TNB]

I’ve been read­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing study of microbes — Dead­ly Com­pan­ions by Dorothy H. Craw­ford, just pub­lished by OUP. Her book shows how bac­te­ria, virus­es and oth­er micro­scop­ic organ­isms have proven them­selves to be mas­ters of evo­lu­tion, deft­ly exploit­ing any oppor­tu­ni­ty cre­at­ed by our chang­ing lifestyles.

Our bod­ies are teem­ing with microbes ‑ 10¹⁴ to be exact; that’s about a kilo­gram in weight. Aston­ish­ing­ly, they out­num­ber our own body cells by 10 to 1. Accord­ing to Craw­ford: “We rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the plan­et emerge from the safe envi­ron­ment of our moth­er’s womb pris­tine, untouched by the infec­tious microbes, but with­in hours our bod­ies are colonised by swarms of them, all intent on liv­ing off this new food source.”

But, hap­pi­ly, they’re not all bad: at least 400 of them help our bod­ies ward off oth­er, dead­ly microbes. Of the mil­lion or so microbes known to sci­ence, only 1,415 cause human dis­eases. Of course, they don’t mean to harm us; our dis­eases are just side-effects of their life-cycles. But ever since Homo sapi­ens evolved, we have been locked in mor­tal com­bat with microbes, our dead­ly com­pan­ions. In fact, Craw­ford argues they have shaped our his­to­ry as a species.

You can read my review of Craw­ford’s excel­lent book in today’s Guardian Review. In the same issue I’ve also reviewed The Portable Athe­ist: Essen­tial Read­ings for the Non­be­liev­er, a won­der­ful anthol­o­gy select­ed by Christo­pher Hitchens, and Bad Med­i­cine: Doc­tors Doing Harm since Hip­pocrates, by David Woot­ton, a con­tro­ver­sial view of the his­to­ry of med­i­cine. Both ide­al Christ­mas stock­ing-fillers! You can read my reviews of these here.

Next week Dooms­day Men is released in the Unit­ed States, but it is still being reviewed here in the UK, six months after it was pub­lished. I’ve just seen a review which appeared in the Church Times on 23 Novem­ber by the Revd Dr Gavin Ashen­den, who is a chap­lain and lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sus­sex.  I’m glad to say he enjoyed the book! Unfor­tu­nate­ly the review is not avail­able online (unless you are a sub­scriber) but here are some excerpts:

“Nuclear weapons, alche­my, aspi­ra­tions of the sci­en­tif­ic eth­i­cal good becom­ing ‘night­mares’ of total destruc­tion, sci­en­tif­ic prophe­cies — this is the sto­ry of the nuclear bomb. The nar­ra­tive is grip­ping and moral­ly astute. […] The sci­ence is told with a Bill Bryson­ish kind of panache. But, at times, it becomes a cross between Bryson and Umber­to Eco. There is a sub-nar­ra­tive of eso­teric knowl­edge and mys­te­ri­ous, aston­ish­ing­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions from HG Wells. Learned, acces­si­ble, and draw­ing occa­sion­al­ly on the styl­is­tic skills of the nov­el­ist, this makes for a very good read.”

Ashen­den clear­ly enjoyed the anec­dotes about Leo Szi­lard, one of the found­ing fathers of the atom­ic age and a cen­tral fig­ure in the book:

“The nar­ra­tive con­tains won­der­ful details. Leo Szi­lard spent his morn­ings ‘think­ing’ in the pub­lic bath of the Strand Palace Hotel. At noon he would be eject­ed by the maid. There, he con­ceived of the rela­tion­ship between ura­ni­um and the req­ui­site nuclear chain reac­tion. When he took his dis­cov­ery to Ernest Ruther­ford in 1934, he was thrown out of his office. Szi­lard was enor­mous­ly grate­ful ret­ro­spec­tive­ly. Had his dis­cov­ery entered the pub­lic sci­en­tif­ic domain ear­li­er than it did, Hitler would have got his hands on the bomb some time before 1945.”

The Strand Palace Hotel is in fact just across the road from the offices of my UK pub­lish­er, Pen­guin. Now there’s a coin­ci­dence for you!

I’ve just reviewed two excel­lent Cold War his­to­ries for the Guardian: Red Moon Ris­ing: Sput­nik and the Rival­ries that Ignit­ed the Space Age, by Matthew Brzezin­s­ki, and Iron Cur­tain: From Stage to Cold War, by Patrick Wright.

Here’s the first para­graph:

“On Feb­ru­ary 27 1956, Khrushchev and mem­bers of the Supreme Sovi­et Pre­sid­i­um (as the Polit­buro was then known) left Moscow in a con­voy of offi­cial lim­ou­sines bound for NII-88, the USS­R’s top-secret rock­et research lab­o­ra­to­ry. They were on their way to meet a man whose work was so secret his name had been erased from all records. Offi­cial­ly referred to as the chief design­er, the man in charge of the Sovi­et mis­sile pro­gramme would only be named after his death: Sergei Korolev.”

They are very dif­fer­ent books: Red Moon Ris­ing is pop­u­lar in style, with a com­pelling nar­ra­tive. Iron Cur­tain is a rich­ly researched and high­ly orig­i­nal his­to­ry that reveals the ori­gins of that key Cold War metaphor — the Iron Cur­tain. Both are well worth read­ing and I rec­om­mend them.

You can read the rest of the review on the Guardian’s site, here.