A beautiful book of immense erudition and perception, this book has influenced my work deeply. It does things I did not think possible, and draws connections I did not think could be drawn. Yet, it is plainspoken, considerate, and unfailingly entertaining.

November 12, 2024 (permalink)

A fascinating study of Vienna between the wars and its immense contributions to modernism and to computing. Vienna was a huge capital city that governed what had become a small country. Austria had lost her empire and her markets, the economy had been shredded, and vast numbers of people from the former provinces converged on a city with insufficient housing, a place that had long seen itself as governed by schleppers. Yet, for a decade, it became the intellectual center of the world, before the Viennese threw it all away for the satisfactions of Fascism.

November 12, 2024 (permalink)

From 1912 to 1915, Venetia Stanley, then inn her 20s, carried on an intense, primarily epistolary, romance with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, who was considerably older. He called Venetia “dearest”; she called him “Prime”. He wrote to her several times a day, often including state secrets in the letters. Incredibly, his half of the correspondence survives. From these letter. Robert Harris has crafted a thriller which is often fascinating, if inevitably tinged with sadness.

November 11, 2024 (permalink)

A wonderful and thorough history of the intersecting philosophical and mathematical circles in Vienna from the early 1920s to their end in Austrian Fascism and the Anschluss. Sigmund offers sensitive and intelligent portrayals of the most notable participants (though he rather neglect John von Neumann) as well as those who, like the note-taking Dr. Rose Rand, were ill-treated in life and neglected afterward. This deserves special praise because, in this broad group biography, few of the characters are easy to identify with. Sigmund is equally at home with the ideas with which these circles wrestled, and if he occasionally despairs of explaining set theory to a general audience, his effort to explain Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem by way of Sudoko is both clever and effective.

November 11, 2024 (permalink)

Ruskin was an early Modernist critic and a great fan of Turner’s brilliant colors. Whistler was a late modernist, eager to explore fog and darkness. They did not like each other, and Ruskin eventually took the opportunity to deplore Whistler’s painting.

Whistler, who was having a terrible time getting people interested in his experimental painting, sued for libel. The result was a spectacular trial, which Murphy covers very well indeed. Whistler still couldn't sell his work; eventually, he did manage to make some big sales to Americans, and some of his critical work now hangs in the Harvard Art Museums.

November 9, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful and fascinating contemplation of two threads that run through nearly three thousand years of historical writing. Herodotus tries to tell us about the world; if he knows something interesting about a place he will tell you about it. Thucydides tries to tell us what happened in the great war in which he himself played a part; if something important happened when he was elsewhere, he works to find a source who knows about it. If it wasn’t important to the war, to hell with it. Thucydides became the patron of historians, Herodotus the patron of antiquarians; Momigliano, a historian, is gracious to antiquarians and fast to point out that, today, some of the most interesting and important historical writing is attuned to Herodotus while we may have had our fill of political and military chronicles.

November 9, 2024 (permalink)

A surprising treatment of Engelbart’s crucial and influential (though short-lived) effort to augment human intelligence. Engelbart’s group really got started in the mid-60s, and broke apart in the 70s. Bardini is exceptional in trying to understand the collapse as well as the glory days. A lot of evidence is drawn from a roman a clef, which is discomforting, but it is reinforced by the group’s copious electronic records.

A key lesson is that Engelbart was not alarmed by the prospect that this line of research might bring about the apocalypse of the singularity. Indeed, Engelbart welcomed that: if there were to be a singularity, why not face it with better intellectual tools? Bardini makes this fairly clear, where in several conversations he and I had at various conferences, Doug could not.

October 26, 2024 (permalink)

A short but fascinating book about the development and variety of scripts — of methods of writing. Thoughtful, unique, and printed with style and elegance.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning, and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough. Now drop two or three words in at once. Interference patterns form, reinforcing one another here and canceling each other there. To catch the meaning of the words is not to catch the ripples that they cause; it is to catch the interaction of those ripples. This is what it means to listen; this is what it means to read

October 25, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful book. Benjamin left his small town in northeast Spain sometime in the 1160s and went...everywhere. Rome, Constantinople, Israel, Baghdad, Cairo. Everywhere, he asks (and notes down) the same questions. “How many Jews live here? How badly are they oppressed? Who are the smartest and most interesting Jews?” And also, I fancy, “What’s for dinner?” He talks Talmud with anti-rabbinic Karaite Jews in Constantinople, and goes star-gazing with an astronomer in Tiberias.

In Damascus, he observers that “It seems to me that the Karaites are an acerbic bunch, very argumentative. Arguing may be their only pleasure…. Yet the Karaites are avid proponents of return to the land of our forefathers.”

October 25, 2024 (permalink)

For the new book, it seems I need to explore Byzantine note-taking and related practices, and this reminds me that I know nothing about Byzantium. Herrin is reputed to be the best and most accessible introduction, and it was quite enjoyable.

October 25, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful collection of surprisingly-engaging papers on reading in the ancient world. Lots of people could read, and they did read quite a bit. Interestingly, Book Historians continue to think that Romans mostly read out loud, while classicists are pretty sure that most reading was done in silence. The classicists have the better case.

We know more than you might think about ancient libraries — even if we look only at the two or three extant ruins that we know are libraries because the signage is still in place. (Ephesos, Timgad, and the villa dei papiri in Herculaneum.) For example, it seems that Romans preferred to read sitting down, but they didn’t put the scroll on a table or lectern. They did like to have a very low table nearby, presumably for their note pad and — who knows? — maybe a beverage.

I borrowed this volume to finish reading the paper on libraries. I packed it up to return the book, but on the train I started reading an essay on references to personal reading in Roman poetry, and that was so witty and intriguing that I renewed the book.

October 18, 2024 (permalink)

As I started the new book, I wanted to shore up my understanding of the ways books have been used in other times with a dip into The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. That convinced me that I really don’t understand Byzantium at all, and thence to Judith Herrin’s sympathetic Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Throughout, I keep learning that details in from this wonderful space opera are actually real: when cultural liaison Three Seagrass is driving with her newly-arrived ambassador through the Palace Quarters, she offers to recite (with improvisation) pertinent sections of a famous imperial poem on The Buildings. It turns out we have (parts of) an actual treatise on The Buildings by Procopius (c. 500–565), which a cultural attaché might quite plausibly recite to an ambassador from (say) Armenia or even Francia a few hundred years later.

I think I’m going to need to read the author’s dissertation chapter on such an ambassador, though where am I to find the time?

A delightful novel.

October 18, 2024 (permalink)

A peculiar and disturbing picture of the ways a childhood that was not ideal, albeit far from awful, can warp everyone’s life. Patchett’s writing is terrific, and Tom Hanks’s reading in the audiobook seems perfect — and Hanks is really well cast here. Still, I found the pacing to be sluggish and, often, neither I nor the characters seemed to have much to look forward to.

October 16, 2024 (permalink)

Oh, what fun! Houston carefully weighs the evidence for libraries and book collections in Ancient Rome. To be safe, he limits most of his study to a few places which we are absolutely certain were libraries. There are two building, one at Ephesus and the other at Timgad, where inscriptions still in place announce that this is The Library. There is one villa at Herculaneum in which hundreds of carbonized scrolls were found; we know that this was some sort of private library because we have (at least part of) the collection, most of which was found on the shelves of Room V but some of which was lying here and there about the house. We have two or three piles of papyrus from Oxyrhyncus in which a bunch of literary papyri seem to have been discarded together, and these seem to be the remains of libraries or private collections that were thrown out because they were no longer wanted, or perhaps because they had been copied to codex books and the scrolls were worn out. We have some pictures and sculptures of people reading and writing; Romans sat down to read, but while they liked to have a low table on hand for writing implements, candles and the like, they don’t seem to have used tables for either reading or writing. A really delightful book.

September 25, 2024 (permalink)

Linguistics were crucial to establishing a role for computing in the humanities. During World War II, a Czech refugee, linguist Roman Jakobson, ran across Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics while studying in a program for French-speaking refugee professors set up at the New School. In that program, he recruited Claude Lévi-Strauss for a seminar on computing and the structure of things. That seminar transformed French, and eventually European, academe.

For my purposes, Robins’s short history leans a little too heavily in to Greece and Rome and hurries through the Twentieth Century, partly because Robins supposes that students will already know the recent ideas. Saussure gets about three pages, and that’s not really enough for me to follow. Still, this volume did what I asked it to do.

September 25, 2024 (permalink)

Annabel, an Oxford undergraduate, has an essay to write about Shakespeare’s sonnets. This novel is about a long Sunday, narrated in lively detail, during which learns a lot about the sonnets, and about dark ladies and sexy young men, The Scholar and The Seducer. A terrific, and at times a very funny, book.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)

The Digital Humanities began in Vienna cafés — notably the Arkaden — where a group of student philosophers and mathematicians worked out, for the first time, the power and the limitations of the computer. They had no interest at all in making machines: they were interested in those limitations.

I’m not sure Pinsker knows this story: he is more interested in the literary debates that went on at the other tables. But they’re part of the story, too: those students (mostly guys, but also a couple of young women) met at cafés because that is where you argued about ideas. And they were used to arguing about ideas because they were university students, and because they were Jews.

Everyone knows about those Vienna cafés, but that cafés were Jewish spaces was news to me. That so many of these students were Jews would have been, I think, news to them: they weren't religious, they weren’t observant, and their parents’ Judaism was, for some at least, a quaint family detail, of no importance. The world was about to prove them wrong, but they didn’t know that, not yet.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)

A strong collection of fascinating research on how cafés actually worked. Sartre and Beauvoir worked at Flore, sitting side by side. This was how books got written. The café was also the place one met with students, argued with colleagues, conspired against rivals.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)

This strange, fascinating, and extraordinary book argues that the conventional story of the dawn of agriculture is wrong. People didn’t leap into agriculture, cities, and states: they appear to have tried it out, decided that they didn’t like it, and found ways to go back to “hobby farming” with a more egalitarian society.

This pattern was both widespread and persistent: the Eastern Woodlands societies that the Europeans encountered, Graeber and Wengrow argue, had been shaped out of revolutionary resistance to the agricultural despotism of Cahokia. Against Cahokia, the American — that is to say, people born in North America — emphasized three core freedoms: the freedom not to take orders, the freedom to move away if things were going sour, and the freedom to invent a new social order if you could convince some other people to adopt it. What’s more, they speculate that a Wendat/Huron diplomat, on a mission to the court of Louis XIV, may have been the origin of The Enlightenment.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)

In 1915, an editor suggested to magazine feature writer Emily Post that she determine if it was, in fact, possible to drive in comfort from Manhattan to San Francisco. This book, which is very good indeed, describes that journey. Post had money (though her famous books on etiquette were still some years in the future) and had no particular interest in roughing it. Yet, not only did it prove possible: it turned out to be fun.

I’ve just returned from a 4,600-mile jaunt to Key West and back. For almost the entire route, you can easily see three separate eras of road technology through your window. Often, they run side by side. There is the multilane Interstate that bypasses everything and cuts through mountains. That often runs near the old Main Highway that runs between major cities and has rock cuts to reduce steep grades. Not far from that highway, you’ll find the road of the Emily Post era, running from the Main Street of this town over the the Main Street of its neighbor.

At one point, near the archaeological site at Etowah, GA, we took Old Old Alabama Road until it merged with Old Alabama Road, and then took that to Interstate 75.

Post discovered that, in 1915, American hotels were surprisingly good, and American roads were, top be charitable, variable. Regulations were a problem, too: entire states imposed arbitrary and unreasonable speed limits. The big problem, though, was that her magnificent European car had eight inches of clearance while most American cars had ten: that meant ruts were a real hazard.

Starting out.

August 11, 2024 (permalink)

It’s 2008, and the Yiddish-speaking enclave of refugee Jews on the island of Sitka will soon revert to Alaska. Homicide detective Meyer Landsman is trying to solve one last murder case before everything falls apart, even if it’s just a dead junkie who lives in the same fleabag hotel as Landsman. Absolutely terrific: Chabon lays out a carnival of Yids in all their varieties.

Wonderful dialogue.

"Do you suppose. Detective Landsman, that my wife would ever attempt to subvert my authority with respect to this or any other matter?"

"I suppose everything, Rabbi Shpilman," Landsman says. "I don't mean anything by it."

July 14, 2024 (permalink)

In 722 BCE, Assyria defeated the northern kingdom of Israel. The southern Kingdom of Judah remained nominally independent until 587. In the wake of those defeats, and the universal dominance of great empires, newly unemployed scribes of both kingdoms sought for a way to remain relevant and to preserve an audience for the literature they treasured. The Bible is the fruit of their editorial work, a document of resistance, skepticism, and of the unending quest for knowledge.

June 7, 2024 (permalink)

This interesting but unlikable book on the decision to go to war in Vietnam was written by a US Army major in 1997. Later, the author disgraced himself by serving as Trump’s National Security Advisor; it is, alas, not hard to see the path McMaster had already paved, two decades before.

McMaster is at pains to show that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were sidelined in the course of this decision, and deeply critical of their willingness to accept being sidelined. Throughout the critical year, the Joint Chiefs were deeply divided by bureaucratic infighting and by inter-service competition. Oddly, though McMaster observes that JFK (and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara) did not, as a rule, have great respect for military expertise, he makes no effort at all to explore why they felt as they did. Kennedy and McNamara were smart, and liked to be seen as smart. They’d each had spectacular careers in World War II. A lot of contemporary literature — The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22, even The Naked and the Dead — explores reasons for this mistrust. It’s not a secret or an aberration.

Though the Joint Chiefs want to be consulted, their deliberations seldom or never considered Vietnam or the Vietnamese in any detail. McMaster’s failure to notice that is significant.

McMaster, in castigating LBJ for placing his domestic agenda ahead of winning the war, repeats the dereliction of which he indicts the Joint Chiefs. South Vietnam was doomed in 1963; it is seldom mourned. The Johnson agenda which McMaster would have sacrificed to prop it up included civil rights, voting rights, and Medicare: changes that transformed and improved the nation, even if they didn’t help Army beat Navy.

Is there a reasonable biography of Curtis LeMay? Email me.

May 24, 2024 (permalink)

This thriller, recommended by The NY Times Book Newsletter, centers on Crissy Dowling, a Las Vegas actress and Princess Diana impersonator. She is the princess of Las Vegas impersonators, many of whom feature prominently. Crissy is just a little bit bulimic, and perhaps just slightly too prone to indulge in pills. But she’s got a free suite in a Las Vegas casino, a free cabana, and her two shows nightly are booked well in advance. Then, both owners of her casino kill themselves. Crissy’s sister — who looks a lot like Crissy — moves to Las Vegas, trading a career in social work for a Vegas-based cryptocurrency startup. She has a new boyfriend and a newly-adopted daughter who is uncannily smart.

It’s a nifty setup, and Bohjalian keeps everything simmering. The tone is unsettling: much of this is funny and many of the characters picaresque, but Bohjalian takes the picaresque characters just seriously enough that this doesn’t become a romp.

May 5, 2024 (permalink)

A very fine time at sea, revisiting part of what really was the great historical fiction series of the century. Wonderful characters, tons of detail, a very fine sense of place (and that place is often afloat), and a deft avoidance of perfunctory scenes.

April 2, 2024 (permalink)

Zinnia Zompa is 13. She lives outside Providence with her sister Zenobia, who is a nuisance, and with her parents, who are perplexing. Her father runs a factory that makes plastic beads. He drives a Lincoln, but it has been stolen. Dad’s accountant was Mr. Marfeo, who was recently murdered in the back seat of a yellow Mercury. “What it means to be thirteen: you scoff at your brokenhearted mother, and death just feels like a change in the weather.” Dazzling, haunting, and finely wrought, this is a short novel of wondrous shadows just slightly out of reach.

March 28, 2024 (permalink)

Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which transformed food writing, was modeled on Down and Out In Paris. Stephanie Danler’s wonderful novel of working the front of the house, Sweetbitter, follows the plan of The Naked and The Dead. This account of waiting tables at Per Se is clearly Two Years Before The Mast: we were not made for this job and we never completely belong to this world, but having taken the job we are going to do our level best to make it work.

April 3, 2024 (permalink)

A fascinating group biography of the critical month in World War II, where the group is, basically, everyone. Englund describes details from the daily life of a fascinating range of people: a German junior officer stationed near Leningrad, an Italian junior officer adrift in the North African desert, an Australian prisoner of war, an Auschwitz inmate, a Jewish family in Shanghai, a Malaysian sailor whose freighter has been sunk and who is adrift in the South Pacific. A few of the group are famous, but weren’t famous then: Sophie Scholl, Albert Camus. Most remain obscure. No one had a good month.

March 25, 2024 (permalink)

Oh, this was fun! Mary Norris was the longtime comma queen of The New Yorker, the person responsible for ensuring that you and I agree and that people from Manchester can be Mancusians if they (and the writer) like. The English language is full of odd nooks and crannies, and Norris explores them with wit and humor.

March 12, 2024 (permalink)

After the Second World War, American foundations worked with the CIA to rebuild the intellectual world of Western Europe. Code explores the intersections between big ideas and big money; structuralism, in particular, received crucial boosts from American grants, and returned the favor by favoring a technocratic, rather than strictly social, solution to France’s postwar crisis. Geoghegan tends to posit that all robber barons were alike and that the foundations that lived after them are mere extensions of their interests, and so we learn little about the foundations and even less about the CIA programs they supported. The impact in France was crucial, and this volume documents that impact with precision and finesse.

March 11, 2024 (permalink)

Anne Louise Avery wrote:

Quinquagesima Sunday, 1934. It was a gentle, warm afternoon of pale blue skies with wool-torn clouds & a lovely breeze from the West. In the drawing room, Pine Marten was sketching a vase of catkins, Babcia and Wolf were writing letters, and Old Fox was reading his book. It was a proof copy by a friend of his from London, a Bradford man whom they all liked very much. It was a story of a journey through modern England, from Southampton to Newcastle, a book of great humanity and compassion.

Old Fox is not wrong. That book was this book. English Journey describes J. B. Priestly’s trek from Southampton to Durham and back to London in 1932. He has no time for Merry Olde England, but he has a knack for striking up conversation with interesting people, and finds that he has sympathy for nearly all of them. He likes castles and cathedrals as well as the next fellow, but heartily dislikes dirty, disused industrial sites.

And the right course of conduct, I reflected, was not, unless you happen to be a professional custodian, to go and brood and dream over these almost heart-breaking pieces of natural or architectural loveliness, doing it all at the expense of a lot of poor devils toiling in the muck, but to have an occasional peep at them, thus to steel your determination that sooner or later the rest of English life, even where the muck is now, shall have as good a quality as those things.

March 3, 2024 (permalink)

Get the book.

A fine debut novel by the author of True Biz. Ana Jurić of Zagreb was ten when she discovered she was Croatian, or rather that the cigarettes her uncle sent he down the street to buy for him are Croatian cigarettes, and that this provokes ridicule from the Serbian shopkeeper. That was the beginning of Ana’s war. Ten years later, she sneaks away from her Columbia University roommates to testify about her years as a child soldier. Sara Novic does a terrific job of showing the line between these two girls.

March 4, 2024 (permalink)

The 21-year-old British narrator falls in love with a wealthy American entrepreneur. Shortly after their wedding, Marcus tells her that he’s dying. “And that’s not all....” A superb launch point for a very fine, realistic thriller. (Reviews: NY Times ❧ Washington Post)

February 27, 2024 (permalink)

A superb introduction to the history of the notebook, from its medieval origins in Italy to its widespread modern use for art, literature, and learning, this volume invites comparison to Thomas Mallon’s wonderful study of diaries, A Book Of One’s Own. Allen is particularly strong on the close connection between notebooks and accounting, and the importance of accounting to the development of Europe: paper and ink turned out to be a superb defense against financial fraud because paper, unlike parchment, absorbs ink. Allen misses the laboratory notebook, unfortunately, but Jillian Hess covers that ground superbly in How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information. Though his dismissal of electronic tools is, I think, unjust, Allen’s volume is delightfully casual but taut and almost always insightful.

February 8, 2024 (permalink)

A fine summary of the first year of the war in Ukraine, written by a Ukrainian reporter. History’s second draft. This war is the most consequential event of our time.

February 17, 2024 (permalink)

Mick Herron’s department of inept intelligence officers has one very bad day. A desk jockey bumps into an old boyfriend. He’s out of prison at last. Not much later, she realizes that she is being followed — and that her old boyfriend must have fingered her. Then things go seriously wrong. Herron can write.

February 7, 2024 (permalink)

A terrific thriller, even better than Slow Horses. Slough House is the place where MI-5 sends fuckups who, for one reason or another, cannot simply be dismissed. They do dull clerical tasks, searching for intelligence in places where no intelligence is to be found. Still, it’s a job, and therefore better than being kicked out entirely. One of the guys who did get kicked to the curb, one day, comes out of a pub and sees a Russian hood he used to know in Berlin, walking down the street. He starts a one-man tail job, which turns out just as badly as you might expect. Very fine, indeed.

January 30, 2024 (permalink)

Emily Wilde is a young Cambridge don who studies dryadology — the ethnography of faeries. In fact, she’s the youngest fellow in history of her department. She’s off for a short trip to Iceland, or someplace quite like it, to discover some facts about the Silent Folk. She learns a lot.

This is a pleasant and a charming book. It doesn’t startle or soar: that would be unmannerly, maybe uncanny. Fawcett has an interesting knack of forgivable cheating — as do many of her faeries: Wilde is often saved by dei ex machina, which is then excused because everyone knows something about faeries that Fawcett has not actually established here. Once you get the hang of it, it hangs together: of course faeries can do that, because you know stories where faeries do it. Of course faeries love something and hate something else, because you’ve stories about that, too. Everything you have heard is mostly right, which (when you think about it) makes even the little folk terrific.

January 29, 2024 (permalink)

A strange, sprawling Iowa Writing Program novel about a group of Iowa graduate students. Some are poets, some writers, some dance. One dancer’s tendons gave out, and now he’s finishing an MBA to his own, and his friends’, consternation. The New Yorker loved it. The Times Literary Supplement loved it. I didn’t: reading this, I found myself recalling Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and recalling that some of the circle of friends in that story were likable, and in that story things happened.

Not much happens here. Perhaps that is the point. Everyone has sex with everyone, but no one has romance, perhaps because no one really expects this world to last. Art may be eternal, but eternity isn’t what it used to be.

January 16, 2024 (permalink)

The dynastic adventure of the battle between Clan Korval and the sinister Department Of The Interior reaches a pinnacle of excitement, as everyone heads first for an obscure, desolate wilderness world and then for the Liaden capital. An excellent Western in space.

January 21, 2024 (permalink)

An absolutely adorable novel, by the author of the wonderful Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop. Lois Clary is a young software engineer who has recently moved from Michigan to San Francisco, where she works at a growing robotics startup. Like most of her colleagues, she is completely dependent on takeout and mail-order meals, especially a nutritional Slurry® that makes normal food redundant. Lois thinks it’s dystopian but efficient. What Lois really enjoys is the Double Spicy combo from a neighborhood popup kitchen: spicy soup and spicy bread. When the mysterious proprietors have to decamp, one step ahead of Immigration, they leave Lois a crock of their Secret Sourdough Starter, and a CD of music to which the starter likes to listen.

January 2, 2024 (permalink)

When he first considered directing The Godfather, Coppola took a copy of the Mario Puzo novel and pasted each page onto a 8½×11 page. On nearly each sheet, he made copious notes about casting and directing the film. Between chapters, he added fascinating memoranda discussing ways he could establish period detail, atmosphere, and ways he could wreck the movie by doing that scene badly. Coppola’s notes are direct and insightful: for example, as soon as the undertaker Bonasera appears, Coppola reminds himself that this small part must be played by a superlative actor. A fascinating record, especially for people who study note-taking.

January 14, 2024 (permalink)