jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

Really beautiful from beginning to end. And in this case, beginning is the narrator's memories of a himself as a somewhat pretentious British schoolboy ("we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic") finishing what we would call high school and heading off to college. The period is the late nineteen-sixties, although the narrator reminds us that "most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies."

And the end is the narrator in his sixties, divorced and feeling distant from his adult daughter who is now focused on her own children. An odd inheritance sets off the recollections of his late childhood that make up the first half of this slim novel, and propel the second half forward as he seeks to understand events from decades earlier.

There isn't much middle -- and the book does not need it -- only these bookends of a life.

I won't spoil the ending, except to say that a certain amount is revealed that in retrospect makes sense of everything else. In a way you are disappointed because, like life, you did not think it really needed to be wrapped up in a bow and all explained. And it was not necessary to keep one's interest in the book. But, you have to admit, it does make a certain amount of sense.

A stunningly powerful and original work unlike anything I have ever read before. It alternates between straight printed text, like any conventional book and full double-page, wordless images. And it moves seamlessly between the two: a given chapter might begin with text but then continue the story with images (e.g., the text describes the character walking halfway across the station and then pictures show him walking across the other half). What makes this so effective is that it forces you to focus on both -- you can't rely on the images to illustrate the text or the text to expalain the images, both are seperate. And unlike a graphic novel where you can end up paying more attention to the words without fully appreciating the pictures, here all of the pictures cover the full two pages and demand your focus and attention.

This original medium is ideally suited to the setting and story, an orphan boy at the beginning of the 20th Century who lives in a hidden room in a Paris train station and tends the clocks. He is also busily trying to repair and automaton his dead father retrieved from the wreckage of a museum. His run in with the owner of a mechanical toy store begins a series of adventures and revelations about imagination, creativity and the birth of the cinema.

At 550 pages, it is praising the book to say that the it feels epic in scope but that it actually covers a small space, time and limited number of characters and incidents. But these are expanded out with minute the minute and careful attention, especially through the many pages of the book that are drawing.

Disappointing given the reviews and the Booker shortlisting. A well-executed but conventional nautical tale that, per the book description, combined Dickens and Melville. A London-born street urchin runs into a tiger on a street, gets connected with the owner of an exotic menagerie business, and then sets off on a sea voyage to track down what appears to be a komodo dragon. The bulk of the book is occupied by the sea voyage with all of the conventional renditions of a young, inexperienced an at sea, whale hunting, stopping at islands, and ultimately a shipwreck. Some of the scenes are unusually powerful (one in particular that I don't want to spoil) but none of them are particularly unique. And the characters are not especially interesting either, except maybe the few main characters.

I cannot believe that I had not read this before. I had been carrying around my father's copy for twenty-five years but only just read it. It is a fascinating, exciting and sometimes even funny account of the race to unravel the structure of DNA. It is unflinchingly honest in describing not only the thrill of scientific discovery but also the more ordinary impulses including scientific rivlaries and everything from the desire to win the Nobel Prize to the desire to win over girls. It is also a great account of collaboration, not only with Francis Crick but also with Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Linus Pauling -- in the case of the later three the collaboration was mixed with a fervent desire that they not beat Watson and Crick to the discovery of the strucure of DNA. Finally, it is also an excellent detective story as Watson and Crick follow fragmenatory and contradictory evidence along several false leads but eventually stumble on the extremely elegant answer.

The Double Helix is at the opposite extreme of Einstein's book Relativity which presents the pure science, derived from first principles, and explained to the lay reader. Instead in The Double Helix, the extensive descriptions of the science are all subsurvient to moving the story of the discovery forward. None of these scientific discsussions are derived from first principles or includes any explanation for the reader (and I, for one, started the book with no knowledge of x-ray crystallography or stereoscopic chemistry and only pieced together a dim understanding of them over the course of the book). And there is virtually no discussion of the implications of the discovery, what followed, or really much in the way of context. But it is hard to hold any of that against The Double Helix, especially when many, many other books have handled all of those topics, while this book uniquely and superlatively describes the process of discovery itself.

Very readable from beginning to end. It starts out with the narrator recounting the discovery of a body in the thawed snow at the end of a long Moscow winter. The narrator then goes back, in the form of telling all to his soon-to-be-wife, to the beginning of the winter and tells a noirish story of getting entrapped deeper and deeper by two young, attractive Russian "sisters". Because of the framing device, the reader knows that nothing is on the level, that the narrator is being trapped in some scheme, but also that it will end OK for him because he's the one telling the story. And it is hard to believe that the narrator himself in real-time did not realize that nothing was on the level, although it increasingly does dawn on him.

The story itself is simple with no major or unexpected revelations. The interest is in the noirish narration, the depicition of Moscow in the 2000s, the interesting characters of the two young Russian women Masha and Katya, and the narrator himself.

The origin of the word robots, although they are not so much robots as golems. Only there are lots and lots and lots of them -- eventually millions. It all starts out well but ends epicly badly. It suffers somewhat from a certain didacticism about technology, Communism, and other themes, that I don't remember in War with the Newts and other Capek books. That said, it is a classic that I've been meaning to read for a long time and am glad I finally got around to it.

A remarkable global history from 1493 to the present, describes the trade and exchange of people, plants, commodities, and microorganisms between Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. It is nowhere nearly as original as Charles Mann's previous 1491, with presented a revolutionary portrait of pre-Columbian America, nor Guns, Germs and Steel, which covers some of the same terrain. But it is still a thoughtful, balanced, creative, and large-scale history of what the author, following earlier works, calls the "Columbian exchange." The book is journalistic in nature and draws on a wide variety of research including conventional history, genetics, environmental studies, farm studies, and economic history.

Mann's thesis is that since 1493, a massive Transatlantic and Transpacific trade has helped create a new era in global environmental history, the Homogenocene -- which is a homogenizing of the people, plants and people around the world. Some of the exchanges he describes are well known and well documented, like the slave trade. Others I had never heard of, like the large role that the guano mining and trade played in 19th century agriculture. All of them are described in a vivid and humanizing way, for example describing the horrors of guano mining by essentially enslaved Chinese laborers, the boomtowns that it created in Peru, the cartels that controlled it, and the impact it had on European agriculture. In between these levels of familiarity, are detailed descriptions of the trade in tobacco, silver, the potato, rubber, rice, sugarcane, malaria and yellow fever.

In the course of this, the book covers the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the founding of the America's and the rise of Europe. It is also interesting in that it spends as much time on China and Asia, not just as a source of materials for the West but also in describing how the trade in items like silver and the potato transformed Asian economies, societies, and even their physical topographies. The Philippines get a particularly interesting treatment in the book, as the crossroads of the Asia, the New World, and Europe.

I appreciate Mann's balance in writing the book. He is unstinting in his descriptions of the human and ecological horrors brought by the exchange. But he is also clear and forthright about their massive benefits that these exchanges have brought.

In 1855, Charles Dickens formally withdrew from the formal list of law students, permanently giving up the idea of a stable career in the law. At the time he was already the most famous novelist in England, the author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Bleak House.

This fact captures what appears to be intended as the thesis of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens. The book is intended as a counterweight to what might be called the Whig history of Dickens, the inevitable march from Sketches by Box to the Pickwick Papers all the way through to completing the first half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood before his death. Instead, Douglas-Fairhurst focuses on the first 26 years of Dickens’ life, ending in 1838 when he first signed a novel with the name “Charles Dickens.”

The thesis is that before Dickens settled into his role as novelist, he pursued a number of other potential careers. Douglas-Fairhurst zooms in on several of these, starting with the blacking factory, as a clerk, in a law office, as a parliamentary reporter, and even after his current trajectory started, branching off into writing plays, editing memoirs, etc.

Every single page of the book is interesting and insightful, very light on the biography and heavy on the literary criticism – either how events were later reflected in the multiplicity of Dickens’ or deeper dives into some of the early individual pieces, like the first story Dickens wrote, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk.” Every chapter works as a unified essay.

But the chapter’s don’t add up to a book that supports the thesis or provides a completely original insight into Dickens life. In part this is because Dickens became a hugely popular writer at age 24 so there really were not a lot of roads not taken. In part, this is because Dickens continued to restlessly follow multiple paths his entire life, as an editor, public speaker and amateur dramatist, among other vocations. And in part all of this has been well told before, by Michael Slater and others.

Becoming Dickens is still an excellent book. Just not quite as original or proven as the premise it sets up.

Not many authors of literary fiction take a turn at writing young adult novels. Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was one of the best short story collections I've read (I haven't read either of her previous novels). Now she has written The Apothecary, an adventure novel about a trio of fourteen year-olds who fall into a magical world of an apothecary and the ancient art/science/magic of alchemy. It is very good, although falls short of outstanding.

The most interesting aspect of the novel is its setting in postwar Britain in 1952, with a backdrop of a city still scared by bombs, suffering through rationing, and living in fear of a nuclear war. Although these themes are highlighted by the contrast with sunny California, where the narrator is from before following her blacklisted parents to London. It also does a good job capturing British public schools, a magical cockney boy named "Pip", and the world of fourteen year old children.

The magic itself is somewhere between imaginatively magical and a somewhat annoying deus ex machina that always makes books like this suffer to some degree from a combination of the improbable and the inevitable. If anything, the parts before the magic starts to reveal itself are more interesting. The adventure too moves along quickly with a series of short chapters. But it too is somewhat hackneyed and not fully satisfying, but never boring.

A first rate biography of Isaac Newton. The biography is a relatively short, standard cradle-to-grave account, with significant discussions of Newton's scientific thinking and discoveries, starting with mathematics, then optics, and finally physics -- not counting alchemy, biblical studies, and his role as master of the mint.

James Gleick puts you directly into Newton's life and world through extensive quotations from letters and other documents, all with the original spellings. In some cases, like Newton's playing with infinite sums, Gleick reproduces a facsimile of the document itself.

No scientific life I know is as full of bitter rivalries, secrecy, and a continuum from the ultra-rational to the completely irrational. Towards the end of the book Gleick quotes Keynes' apt description of Newton: "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago."