Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962, 2002
Shah of Shahs Ryszard Kapuściński 1992
Waco: David Koresh, The Branch Davidians and the Legacy of Rage. Jeff Guinn. 2023
The Noise of Time. Julian Barnes. 2017.
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Adam Hochschild
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Jeff Goodell 2023
The Electric War: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Light the World. Mike Winchell. 2019
The Ghost Light. R. H. Thomson 2024
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Carlos M. N. Eire. 2016
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Nathan Thrall. 2023
The Name of the Rose. Umberto Eco. 1985
Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962, 2002
It seemed, initially ,ridiculous to be writing yet another review of Rachel Carson’s foundational work Silent Spring, 61 years after its first publication. Oh yes, the wars still rage over Carson and her agenda, although, one would have thought, her supporters were convincingly victorious, and there was little more to say. But in the Guardian this morning was the headline: “People exposed to weedkiller chemical have cancer biomarkers in urine – study” and the war rages on, this time over glyphosate and how (in addition to wiping out the bee population) it was becoming clearer and clearer that it is altering human DNA – particularly in farmers; among its strongest advocates.
When I was a young teenager, we used to visit my father’s hometown of Leamington and several summers I was left there for a few weeks to work on some farms owned by my father’s friends. I helped pick tomatoes, corn, tobacco and peaches and I was lousy at all of it. It is hard work and that’s why its invariably done by out of the country workers, mostly Mexicans now. Canadians just can’t take it. One of my most vivid memories of that time (just about Rachel Carson time) was seeing my father’s childhood friend, Bob Tyhurst, emerge from his greenhouse after applying the chemical weedkiller. He was completely covered in the hazmat gear of the time, including hood and mask but it was hard to see that because he was slathered over, head to foot, with white foam; an alien form until he peeled it all off to greet us. Two years later he was dead at 48 from cancer.
Carson’s message is not difficult to follow. We were – and are – behaving in a greedy, stupid and self-destructive way and we are taking down our biological environment with us. But she puts it much better than I can (and remember, this is 1962 – how far we have come):
“The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world- the very nature of its life.
. . .
Chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells.
. . .
To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream.
. . .
They should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides”.
. . .
This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed – and then a deadlier one than that.
. . .
How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?
Silent Spring 6-8
How could we do this? How could we be so naïve as to believe the chemical companies whose only goal is wealth and to whom any argument against their products is considered, however true, to be a lie because it reduces their profits. Which is what this was and is all about: profits. And while Rachel Carson was dying of cancer they did everything (and still do 60 years later) to destroy her standing and reputation – including saying that everyone who has died of malaria since DDT was banned, was a death caused by Carson. That’s not as low as all the deaths and suffering (human and animal) that they caused, but its pretty nasty. And all this took place in an age of innocence before leaded gasoline and the assaults on the ozone layer and the climate were known entities. But that age of innocence was rapidly ending with Carson’s own charge that “for the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” 15
Carson’s villains were not confined to DDT. She lists, among others, Chlordane, Heptachlor, Dieldrin, Aldrin, Endrin, Malathion, Parathion, Pentachlorophenol – a Medea’s Robe of silent killers cheerfully churned out for popular tasks like clearing the brush (and flowers and living creatures) from New England roadsides until the Tourist Bureaus began to complain about the grey and brown roadsides. And in addition to all the deaths to insects and plants and animals and humans (none of whom ever saw it coming) Carson is able to ask the over-riding, humane question that would never be asked in a boardroom: “By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?” 100
Now that I can put the rant aside, a few words about the book as a book. Silent Spring holds up extremely well and reminds us that Rachel Carson had that wonderful gift of a science writer: ease of communication. Like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and a few others, she can communicate scientific concepts to a general audience with ease and grace and humour. The points she has to make are in no way dated and her examples are clear because they come from an era when the truth could be spoken without inuendo, newspeak or political correctness. She is clear and direct and we are informed and, at times, forced to wince at how foolish we humans can be. But the con job that she reveals is being repeated over and over and her reminders are very, very timely today. So give her the chance to speak to you.
Shah of Shahs Ryszard Kapuściński 1992
Shah of Shahs is available in re-print today and is aptly in demand again as it sheds tremendous light on the current revolution (we hope) in Iran. The mullahs overthrew a wretched and witless military dictator who had proclaimed himself the Shah of Shahs and the bringer of “a second America” to the ancient land of Persia. They were able to do this because the shah and his thought police, the Savak, had driven the educated class to leave the country and everyone one else to terror and distraction. They were also able to do it because of the unique nature of the Shiite majority in the country. Unfortunately, they fell prey to the exact conditions that Kapuściński describes in this book (see below). And now they are facing the same kind of resistance that brought them to power.
Ryszard Kapuściński was born in1932 in Pinsk, which is now in Belarus but was then in Poland. When this area was taken by the Red Army in 1940 as part of Stalin’s secret deal with Hitler, his family moved to the Warsaw area where he grew up. In 1950 he graduated and began to work at a newspaper while attending Warsaw University (Department of Polish Studies and then History) and married Alicja Mielczarek. He graduated in1955 and began an extraordinary career as a journalist traveling the developing world (mostly), reporting on wars, coups and revolutions and writing about his travels.
During four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa, he befriended Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, and Patrice Lumumba. He witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions, was jailed 40 times and was sentenced to death four times. He wrote about oppressed and marginalized people around the world and was famous for never asking a question at a press conference.
He was fluent in Polish, English, Russian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. He was visiting professor in Bangalore, Bonn, Cape Town, Caracas, Columbia University, Harvard University, London, Madrid, Mexico and Vancouver. At home, he covered the rise of Solidarity and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.
His books have been translated into nineteen languages. He died in2007.
In 1979 Kapuściński went to Iran to witness the Iranian Revolution. His book Shah of Shahs deals with this: the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. He wrote about the abject stupidity of the Shah of Shahs and the insatiable ferocity of his secret police: the Savak. What he wrote about and the way that he wrote it, is remarkable in that it was a two-edged sword. Every word was true about the subject at hand and every word was also universally applicable – in other words, a sword aimed at his employers back home in Warsaw (and Moscow). This is true of most of what Kapuściński wrote and because he chose to critique oppressors that were hated by his own masters, he did not even have to lie. And the masters in Warsaw and Moscow were obviously oblivious to what was, implicitly, directed at them. As Moliere had seen, centuries ago, dictators are blind to their own faults.
And so, he could write brilliantly and accurately about the western greed for oil that would soon become the Soviet greed (and later Putin’s greed) as well:
Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. To discover and possess the source of oil is to feel as if, after wandering long underground, you have suddenly stumbled upon royal tr1easure. Not only do you become rich, but you are also visited by the mystical conviction that some higher power has looked upon you with the eye of grace and magnanimously elevated you above others, electing you its favorite. Many photographs preserve the moment when the first oil spurts from the well: people jumping for joy, falling into each other’s arms, weeping. Oil creates the illusion of a completely charged life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts. People from poor countries go around thinking: God, if only we had oil. The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident, through a kiss of fortune and not by sweat, anguish, hard work. In this sense oil is a fairy tale and, like every fairy tale, a bit of a lie. Oil fills us with such arrogance that we begin believing we can easily overcome such unyielding obstacles as time. With oil the last Shah used to say, I will create a second America in a generation! He never created it. Oil, though powerful, has its defects. It does not replace thinking or wisdom. 34-35
He could also write about the realities of living in a police state with a ferocious political army and not be chastised for describing, in fairly accurate ways, the KGB and its Polish equivalent:
The most common instrument discovered in Savak quarters was an electrically heated metal table called “the frying pan”, on which the victim was tied down by his hands and feet. Many died on these tables. Often, the accused was already raving by the time he entered the torture chamber --few people could bear the screams they heard while they waited, and the smell of burning flesh. But technological progress could not displace medieval methods in this nightmare world. In Isfahan, people were thrown into huge bags full of cats crazed with hunger, or among poisonous snakes. 51-2
He could also speculate on what a nation would be like once it had rid itself of a long-ruling and ruthless dictatorship disguised as the rule of the proletariat, the godly or the monarch.
A dictatorship that destroys the intelligentsia and culture leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding, from the comers and cracks of that farmed-out field, but often those who have proven themselves strongest, not always those who will create new values but rather those whose thick skin and internal resilience have ensured their survival. In such circumstances history begins to turn in a tragic, vicious circle from which it can sometimes take a whole epoch to break free. 58
These are profound and haunting insights. They make very clear what has happened in the Soviet bloc, Iran, indeed, many post-colonial countries around the world, since their “liberation.”. The best example is Russia. The targeting of the intelligentsia under Stalin led to the grey, amoral world of Brezhnev and the similar targeting of the last 40 years of the Soviet empire left the supine world of Putin that is such a canker on our present era. It helps to account for the difficulties in rising up in Iran as well as the lack of opposition in Russia to the war on Ukraine.
Waco: David Koresh, The Branch Davidians and the Legacy of Rage. Jeff Guinn. 2023
This is a very informative book on the incidents at Waco Texas in 1992. It covers the origins of the “Branch Davidians,” right back to its curious origins and the rise (if such a word is appropriate here without irony) of their prophet David Koresh and, in excruciating detail, the bungling that led to the two disastrous and bloody raids that resulted in so many unnecessary deaths. It says very little about the much larger Seventh Day Adventist sect that spawn the “Davidians” except that they have their sabbath on Saturday. You get the impression he just does not want to go there.
There is nothing particularly new here to anyone familiar to the dismal tale that led (in the opinion of the author) to so many other terrorist avengers (Timothy McVeigh among them) and the militias of the present day. If you are curious about what happened, Guinn lays it out clearly and dispassionately and he makes it clear that the government agencies (A.T.F. and F.B.I.) screwed up royally.
One thing that did stand out to me, and its an attitude that runs disturbingly through the book so I will have to paraphrase it. He says that the government agencies messed up because they refused to listen to Biblical scholars who pointed out to them that David Koresh was not some crazy leader of a lunatic cult but rather a prophet who believed himself to be the Lamb of God come to lead his people in resistance to the forces of Babylon(Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire Arms) and by violently opposing them to bring about the end of all the Universe as foretold in the Book of Revelation and that all of his followers – with their multiple children (many fathered by Koresh on their own wives) – stood resolutely by him.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me very much like a crazy leader and a lunatic cult. Needless to say, the confrontation was just as bloody as wished for and the Universe did not end. That Guinn should make this kind of distinction says more about the general state of religion in the United States than anything else in the book – and is more scary in its normalization of the bizarre than the errors of the FBI.
The Noise of Time. Julian Barnes. 2017.
The standard with Julian Barnes’ novels is consistently high, but just in the past seven or eight years I have been getting the sensation from him that he has been tossing off a few novels just to scratch some persistent itches. This one is about the life and career of Dmitri Shostakovich and there are some real problems with the book in general.
While Barnes captures the impact of the Stalinist terror on the composer – the description of Shostakovich waiting all night, fully dressed with packed suitcase in hand at the door to the elevator on his apartment floor, waiting to be taken away for interrogation is brilliant (and accurate) –Barnes returns again and again to the fear that Shostakovich experienced throughout his life, of being questioned and then disappeared; as so commonly happened at the time. However, after awhile, the trope begins to weary the reader as it leads nowhere except to its own re-iteration.
In the other hand, Barnes has virtually nothing to say about the one thing that mattered most to his subject – the music. There are multiple references to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and to its constant suppression because Stalin didn’t like it, but very little to the actual content of the music. Unlike, say, Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus, Barnes seems unable to even make a meagre attempt at showing how the terrifying situation and political tyranny of the composer’s life expressed itself in his music. How Shostakovich was able to show brilliance and at the same time escape total censure and the complete suppression of his work.
One small example. In a passing reference to the first Cello Concerto – one of his greatest works – Barnes, speaking through Shostakovich, mentions en passant that even the cellist Rostropovich (for whom it was written) had not noticed the quoting of the song Suliko (a favorite of Stalin’s) in the Concerto. However true this may be – and Shostakovich was an inveterate quoter – this is as close as Barnes gets to actually discussing the music. And this is in reference to a piece, the first movement of which the most extraordinary expression of political terror ever written, using many of Shostakovich’s standard tropes: note repetition, triads and so on.
There is not the slightest examination or discussion of any of Shostakovich’s Symphonies which are still incessantly quarreled over by musicologists today regarding, among other things, their political significance.
For me this is a great fault in what is otherwise a very good novel. Given the significance of the composer’s stature – some people consider him to be the greatest composer of the 20th century – it is s fault that cannot be overlooked.
So it would seem that Barnes has written well about the noise of time but not well about the music of time.
I have not added any books to this list lately for a host of reasons. First, I have been very busy building a boat called an Angus Expedition (see photo).
Second, I spent some time in Istanbul and Egypt and I like to plan and research adventures and that takes time. Third, I have been reading a few rather obscure, out of print books and I hesitate to review books that people will have a hard time getting. Honourable mention, however, goes to Anna of all the Russias, by Elaine Feinstein. It is the biography of Anna Akhmatova, who is probably one of the three or four greatest Russian poets of all time. The book is a challenge as it assumes a good general knowledge of the social and artistic history of the Soviet Union in the 1920’s through the 1940’s –which is not general knowledge at all, since this was the time of Stalin and all things Russian were kept secret. While Pasternak (Dr. Zhivago) was merely repressed and had to forgo his Nobel Prize, Akhmatova nearly starved to death, Maria Tsvetaeva was driven to suicide and Osip Mandelstam was tortured, enslaved and then executed. So much for the poetic world of Soviet Russia. It is a fascinating and horrible era, somewhat illuminated by a few of the books that I have reviewed last year and this. – and probably more to come.
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Adam Hochschild
One of the most astonishing things about human history is the indisputable fact that we do things without the slightest inkling of the consequences of them. The film Oppenheimer has restarted the debate over the first use(s) of atomic weapons which were initially looked on as a really excellent way to end the war with Japan (and punish them for their evil ways)and was only later perceived as MAD, or the end of the human race. This is, admittedly, an extreme case but it is by no means an isolated one. Take for example the case of the automobile. It could, legitimately be argued that this is another case where what seemed a benign solution to transportation difficulties became an alternative method, through climate change, of extinguishing the human race, but that is not where I am going with this. When John Dunlop tried to find a way to make his son’s bicycle give a gentler ride and discovered that rubber was the answer and then Charles Goodyear discovered a chemical process that made rubber malleable and yet tough so that he could use it as automobiles tires and Charles Macintosh could make raincoats out of it, rubber became a valuable product. And a valuable product is an extremely dangerous thing. But I must digress for a while.
The Leopold in the title of the book was the King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, just at the time that the race for African colonies was taking place, the race that was to play a major role in precipitating the first World War. Belgium was a relatively new nation and (just like Greece)they had decided that a proper European state had to have a King so they imported a German one. But they had no interest in giving him any particular powers: hence the title King of the Belgians instead of the King of Belgium. They also, unlike the major European powers, had no interest in acquiring any colonies in Africa. But Leopold did. You see, Leopold wanted to be rich and for him a colony was simply a wealthy sponge to be squeezed.
This was the time of the “great explorers” of Africa –meaning the white explorers. The most famous of these was Henry Morton Stanley. He was famous because he was a shameless self-promotor, a prodigious liar, a newspaperman and an absolutely brutal boss over his black porters. He was successful because he went into the jungle with an enormous army of people carrying colossal amounts of supplies and a lot of ammunition. There is no way of knowing how many people he killed in the course of his explorations – including his own employees. Then he would emerge and write a couple of best selling, two volume books and off he would go again. He was the man who found the missionary Dr. Livingstone (“I presume”) who probably didn’t even know that he was lost. Stanley was the first white man to cross Africa at the centre from east to west, through the Congo. And that really got Leopold’s attention.
No one else was interested in the Congo, even though it had an amazing built-in transportation system: the river Congo. But it was very hard to access through the thick jungle and up miles of falls. Only there was ivory there and that was a very valuable commodity: piano keys, false teeth and much more. Leopold thought the Congo wasa gold mine (later it actually turned out to BE a gold mine) and he wanted it, for his own. So, he took it.
How he did it is absolutely amazing – he was a very crafty bugger. But it is a complicated story so you will just have to read the book. In short, he fooled everyone into thinking he was a kind, magnanimous humanitarian who wanted to bring the people of the Congo to the light of civilization and god and abolish the terrible Arab slave trade. In this way he got the Congo all for himself – a giant, valuable one-man colony! And then, using his own, private military police force he began to squeeze.
He used slave labour. He used the kidnapping of family members, he had villages burned, he massacred. Not he himself, of course, he himself never even went to the Congo. He lived in Europe on yachts and in castles and villas and on estates on the Riviera – all paid for by the wealth that he was ripping out of his Colony. He sent a series of officers to command his extortive forces and these were men of entirely limited morality. One of them decorated his own garden with heads on stakes. Leopold hired “men of fortune” from around the world to help with his colony. One of them was a riverboat captain (later novelist) named Joseph Conrad. If you have read “Heart of Darkness” (or even just seen “Apocalypse Now”) you might begin to get a sense of what it was like. Conrad couldn’t take it. He had to quit. His judgement on Leopold’s colony was “The Horror. The Horror.”
And so then came the rubber boom. And rubber was plentiful in the Congo but arduous to collect. Much more slave labour was needed but now it was being met with resistance. The men of the Congo objected to being worked to death, to having their wives and daughters raped, to starving because they could not farm until they fulfilled their rubber quota: so, they fought back. And the boats that landed ivory and rubber on the docks of Belgium were loaded up for the return trip with guns and troops and ammunition. And the world began to suspect what was going on at last. Or rather, the world in the person of E.D. Morel. Morel was an employee of the shipping firm that Leopold used and he knew what was on-loaded and what was off-loaded. And he put two and two together and came up with the right answer.
Other people joined the fight against Leopold private slave plantation of the Congo. A black American journalist named George Washington Williams, a black Presbyterian missionary in the Congo named William H. Shepherd, a British statesman, Sir Roger Casement and even Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle joined the fight. But it was Morel, with his access to the press that put the pressure on. There was a modern slave state in the Congo belonging to one man. And it was more than that. Because Leopold was so cheap, he insisted that expensive bullets be accounted for; meaning that he wanted proof that they were used to shoot people. Therefore, a severed hand had to be produced from the corpse. Since it was often easier to chop off hands and keep the bullets, that became standard practice in the Congo. And the horror increased.
Hoschchild relates how, in the end, slowly, grudgingly it came to a halt, ably assisted by Leopold’s death. Even after the colony was turned over to the people of Belgium the truth in detail was kept hidden. Even after the Congo became a free country and its first president was murdered by the CIA and some Belgian mercenaries the truth remained hidden. Finally, it was released and the staggering fact that somewhere between 8 and 10 million people had been murdered in Leopold’s Congo slave state remains a little known fact even today. This one of the reasons why King Leopold’s Ghost has not gone out of print since 1998.
The other reason is that because of the blindness of the world, because of America’s support for President Mobuto Sese Seko (who stole over 5 billion from his own people), who was placed in charge by the West after Lumumba’s assassination and because the Congo today continues to be robbed by foreign multinationals who do not wish the truth known. But that truth is known and makes King Leopold’s Ghost a truly awesome piece of reading. And you might want to try The Poisonwood Bible at the same time. Kingsolver loved this book and sets her novel in the Congo.
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Jeff Goodell 2023
This book has all of the best intentions of its ilk. It wishes to clearly lay out all of the ways that the Climate Catastrophe will dispose of humans through global warming and it succeeds in doing that. But it faces (not always terribly well) all of the problems that the large number of books face on our diminishing chances with our rapidly deteriorating planet. Firstly, how many different ways can the obvious be stated: we are rapidly, recklessly destroying our own (and a vast number of other species’) habitat on this blue ball? The planet will survive –perhaps in a state resembling that of Venus – but we and our associated victims will probably not. Secondly, how can these facts be described in a detailed and accurate fashion without sending all the readers to search for chemical relief or a means of shortening their lives. Thirdly, how long can this process be strung out in order to create a full-length book?
Quite a number of different ways have been attempted. In Requiem for a Species,, Clive Hamilton opted for a chapter-by-chapter bluntness. The book was sledgehammer acute and effective, but it was written in 2015 and few listened then and few are listening now. The talk these days is all about mitigation: let’s keep burning the fossil fuels but turn up the air conditioning, build dikes and pay off (partially) the poorer countries. Little has been learned.
The strategy that Jeff Goodell has chosen is that of anecdotage. The central (and accurate) message is delivered in the Prologue:
This heat we are pumping into the sky is the prime mover of the climate crisis. The climate impacts you hear about most often, from sea-level rise to drought to wildfires, are all second-order effects of a hotter planet. The first-order effect is heat. It is the engine of planetary chaos, the invisible force that melts the ice sheets that will flood coastal cities around the world. It dries out the soil and sucks the moisture out of trees until they are ready to ignite. It revs up the bugs that eat the crops and thaws the permafrost that contains bacteria from the last ice age. When the next pandemic hits, the chances are good it will be caused by a pathogen that leapt from an animal that was seeking out a cooler place to live. 13
After that, the author choses to illustrates the various aspects of the truth with stories about individuals that illustrate the main points. A couple dies while hiking in 107-degree Fahrenheit desert. The author encounters a hungry polar bear in the Arctic and also crashes through melting ice and gets wet. And so on. Fairly soon into the book, you realize that while the situation being described is quite real, it could all have been handled more effectively in a concise and well documented essay. And that’s a shame. Because it makes you feel that someone is cashing in on catastrophe and even that might have been a bit more acceptable if the stories had been a little more interesting. Sailing through the Drake Passage might be a harrowing experience but nothing actually happens in the Chapter.
Still there are some stark facts to remember from this book:
1. Consider this: it means that a company like ExxonMobil, which, by some measures, is responsible for about 3 percent of historic global CO 2 emissions, could be sued for 3 percent of the deaths or property destruction and economic losses from every climate-driven flood and heat wave-past, present, and future. To say that there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake doesn’t begin to describe it. 121
2. It’s likely to be at least ten thousand years before anyone sees a reef again. 156
3. But the biggest impact on human health and well-being may be the emergence of new pathogens from animals. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we are forcing creatures to live by the cardinal rule of the climate crisis: adapt or die. For many animals, that means migrating to more hospitable environments. In one recent study that tracked the movement of four thousand species over the past few decades, as many as 70 percent had moved, almost all of them seeking cooler lands and waters. In Alaska, hunters are discovering parasites from a thousand miles away in south East Canada alive under the skin of wild birds. “A wild exodus has begun,” writes Sonia Shah in The Next Great Migration. “It is happening on every continent and in every ocean. 202
So, these facts, and more, are all presented in Heat. I just wish it had been done in a more interesting way.
The Electric War: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Light the World. Mike Winchell. 2019
This is a straightforward, blow by blow, account of the competition between Thomas Alva Edison and Nicola Tesla/George Westinghouse as to who would dominate the field of industrial electrification that transformed first the United States and then the rest of the world at the end of the 19th century. The prize was the enormous market of selling electrical power (and the means to produce it}to large industry and the general public; as in powering your home. It is a complex and confusing story in that neither Edison nor Westinghouse personally won as both were forced out of their companies by banks and predacious investors and Tesla ended up dying in poverty. Capitalism – especially the rampant breed of the late gilded age, back with us once again – eats her own, even the talented and successful.
Although the struggle was carried out at the level of court room fights over patents, industrial espionage and pure entrepreneurial “business”, the real fight was over technology. Was the future of electrification (and there was no question that electrification was the future) to be in the form of Direct Current DC (Edison) or Alternating Current AC (Tesla/Westinghouse). At the time, both systems used distribution by wire and that gave AC it’s great advantage. The further DC traveled the less effective it was which was much less true of AC. Which made DC more expensive as more generators had to be built. The problem with AC was that it was harder for the layman to understand the concept (Phases? Coils?) and so it had more to prove in the realm of safe usage. Winchell actually spends very little time on the science of electricity – he prefers to show pictures of the machinery instead.
Edison, of course, is the most well known and beloved inventor in American history. The Wizard of Menlo Park, the Man Who invented the Future (well at least the lightbulb, motion pictures and the gramophone), Edison is less well know as a vicious monopolist (lightbulbs and bamboo filaments) and a tenacious fighter for what he wanted – even at the cost of having animals electrocuted. While he didn’t electrocute the elephant whose death can still be viewed on YouTube (recorded with an Edison invention) he did, using various surrogates, engage in a very nasty public campaign to discredit the use the ”dangerous” alternating current by employing it to publicly execute a fair number of dogs and by successfully lobbying for its use in the execution of criminals. The first ever execution by electric chair of William Kemmler (graphically described in the book) left almost all of the witnesses – including the warden – shaking and vomiting. It was the basis for the climactic scene in Stephen King’s The Green Mile. All this was done to show the public the dangers of AC and thus promote DC.
Westinghouse refused to dignify this campaign with a response. He simply went ahead with his engineering plans and won the contract for the Chicago World’s Fair and the first power plant at Niagara Falls. When Edison refused to sell George any lightbulbs(he had the patent) George designed his own. And so, George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla (who actually invented Alternating Current – not to mention the radio, sorry Marconi) won the electric war.
Now lots of other interesting things are covered here, including – in bits and pieces – Tesla’s bizarre life, including his giving up millions to save the career and the company of George Westinghouse. But what is left out is in some ways even more interesting. As Edison’s reputation grew Tesla slipped from public view until he was all but forgotten. At the same time AC became the dominant electrical system – relegating DC to cheap batteries sold by pink rabbits This probably played a major role in the demise of electric cars which were looking quite promising at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tesla only began his comeback of reputation with, of all things, a video game called “Fallout”, which featured his inventions in a post apocalyptic world. And now with the arrival of the absolute need for the electrification of transportation, using the battery – using Edison’s DC system – has become all important. How the tables have turned. And it is certainly an irony that the most famous electric car going is called the Tesla – running on Edison.
The Ghost Light. R. H. Thomson 2024
R. H. is unquestionable own of my favourite actors and his career is spectacular, not the least because he refused unlike so many others, to sell out and move to the States for the big money – and he certainly had the offers. So, I greatly anticipated reading this book, which is being largely touted as a telling of his family’s history in WW1 (and a bit in WW2). True, he lost 5 great uncles to the first war and the fight had a great impact on other (male and female)family members but that’s not really what this book is about, in the end. The book is much more about:
1. How we look at wars and
2. How we can prevent wars by changing the way that we look at them.
In the course of doing that he details the fascinating history of his enormous multinational project called The World Remembers, which is an attempt, largely successful so far, to name all the soldiers who gave their lives in WW1 on any side, including some countries that might surprise you.
I invite you to reach out and enjoy this wonderful book.
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Carlos M. N. Eire. 2016
This is an absolutely enormous book of 757 pages (not counting notes, bibliography and index) which takes, initially, as its subject the Reformation: the split of the world of Christendom in the 15thcentury and in the doing of that it is spectacularly successful. It illustrates abundantly (and with abundant illustrations) that the Protestant Reformation was not just the work of Martin Luther but rather the labour of many great and flawed theologians – from Zwingli to Calvin to Knox to Melanchthon.
But somewhere short of halfway through the book the reason for the plural in Reformations is further clarified as the book focuses on the Counter-Reformation within the Catholic church, the creation of new orders (like the Jesuits) and then the history of the ministries sent out to convert the new world. At this point the book begins to stretch out and, though remaining accurate in its account, it seems to become an apologia for the religious aspects of world colonialism.
Reformations (multiple) yes, reformation of the church(“body of Christ” in the book) yes, but conversion of the world – I think we are straying from the topic. The peoples of India, Japan, China, the Philippines and North America (to mention a few) needed no “Reformation”. It unbalances the book and leads to the conclusion that the reformation served mostly to wake up the true Church and set it on its proper path of world-wide conversion. So, I loved the book at first but struggled to finish it.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Nathan Thrall. 2023
The timing of this book is spectacularly propitious. If, instead of immediately and mindlessly choosing a side on X or Facebook you are a thoughtful person you will be looking for a book to clarify what is going on with Israel and the Palestinians right now. And how do you choose? By the nationality of the author? By the words of the title? Read this book, written about a bus crash in Palestine long before the current disaster began and you will begin to see a bit of what is going on there and refrain from foolishly (that is without historical knowledge) taking sides.
Thrall is the former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, where he covered Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel's relations with its neighbors from 2010 to 2020. He describes an actual bus crash in which a number of Palestinian kids were killed and, or badly burnt and the reactions of parents, first responders, authority figures, doctors, and relatives. And it is riveting. And factual. And when you get to the end you will have a much clearer idea of what is going on with Israeli/Palestinian relations.
At this precise moment in time when charges of “anti-ism” are being mindlessly slung around – from X to Congress to wealthy alumni (who perhaps wish to purchase their correctness) – I will go no further with the politics. As David Hume wrote: “there is no such thing as a rational belief”.
But I will draw your attention to pages 30 and 136 in the hardcover edition.
And don’t skip the epilogue
The Name of the Rose. Umberto Eco. 1985
This is my third time through and it never loses its power. The first time it was the power of the mystery – who could be the killer of monks in a medieval monastery and why. With more twists and turns and a bigger cast of interesting characters than Agatha Christie (and much better writing) it is one of the best of the mystery genre.
The second time through it was the imagery. The carvings of the church doors, the imagery of the carnival dream/vision that was, in many ways, drawn from Medieval theatre (as much of the art of the time was). The picture of Jorge consuming the poisoned knowledge, and the final conflagration. And on and on. And, I confess that, having seen the film I could not see Brother William except as Sean Connery (his best movie).
This time it was the extraordinary contrasts that Eco risks: the hidden wealth of the monastery against the abject poverty around it that brilliantly illuminates the theological struggle within the Franciscan movement and the Church of the time. The juxtaposition of wisdom with extraordinary stupidity, where spiritual enlightenment treads side by side (sometimes inside the same person) with abject ignorance. The brutal ignorance of Salvatore, the committed saint-like savagery of the killer, the Poirot-like brilliance of William and his castigation of his own ignorance.
Seemingly always left off of “best lists” of historical novels, what elevates The Name of the Rose above all is Eco’s ability to render an entire world in another time, from Fra Dolcini to the making of blood pudding to the absolutely ruthlessness of the inquisitor Bernard Gui, to the astonishing learning displayed by the monks of the scriptorium and especially by Brother William. Please keep in mind that many of the lesser characters of the novel (Dolcino, Gui, the Pope, the Emperor, William of Occam) were real and important people.
Eco wrote other good novels but none reached the level of artistry of The Name of the Rose. While there are and were other great writers of historical fiction, Eco should NEVER be left off the list.
This list is updated on a randomly irregular basis so please check back.
