The Story of Art

Our book today is the venerated and much-beloved classic, The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich, here in a gorgeous, handy paperback by Phaidon. Gombrich's book has been clutched in more museum-going hands than any comparable tract in the history of art-writing, and looking at it again in the very pleasurable task of examining this Phaidon edition has afforded ample reasons as to why that might be so.

As long as there've been painted pictures, I suspect, there've been docents of varying abilities to explain them to the rest of the people looking at them (one wonders if art wouldn't be more honest if those docents weren't just not there but not necessary ... neolithic cave paintings, reached by arduous spelunking, were free to evoke a private and entirely sincere sense of awe; sharks in formaldehyde require explication right out of the box), and the key to the experience lies in that 'varying abilities' part. There are few things more annoying that to have a piece of art carefully explained to you wrong (like the Uffizi guide years and years ago who droned about the "fierceness" of a painting's dog when the animal was clearly playing and clearly painted as playing by a painter who clearly knew he was playing), just as there are few things as thrilling as having it all done well, or really well (in other words, all of your should put Robert Hughes' documentary American Visions on your Netflix lists ... maybe even bump it up ahead of the porn)(no names, mind you)(coughcoughbriancoughcough).




Nobody does it much better than Gombrich, which is probably why his book has sold a gazillion copies. He starts his approachable, even-handed tone right from the first lines:

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the walls of a cave; today, some buy their paints and design posters for hoardings; they did and do many other things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realize that Art with a capital A has no existence. For Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish. You may crush an artist by telling him that what he has just done may be quite good in its own way, only it is not 'Art.' And you may confound anyone enjoying a picture by declaring that what he liked in it was not the Art but something different.

His insights dart everywhere, seeming to shed light on every period and style he touches, and even if you don't agree with him, he gets you thinking:

This building is characteristic of the taste for which Venetian art in the Cinquecento became famous. The atmosphere of the lagoons, which seems to blur the sharp outlines of objects and to blend their colours in a radiant light, may have taught the painters of this city to use colour in a more deliberate and observant way than other painters in Italy had done so far. ... But so much seems to be clear: the painters of the Middle Ages were no more concerned about the 'real' colours of things than they were about their real shapes.

Always he's the public's unappointed substitute, the kindly professor who's been thinking about art and writing about art and clarifying about art for so long that he's effortlessly successful:

What upset the public about Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty. That the caricaturist may show up the ugliness of man was granted - it was his job. But that men who claimed to be serious artists should forget that if they must change the appearance of things they should idealize them rather than make them ugly was strongly resented.




And of course one of the treats of a book like The Story of Art is hunting out what Gombrich hs to say about your personal favorites - does he like them? Hate them? Have anything interesting to say about them? This is certainly true also of the painting that's everybody's favorite:

If we now return to the 'Mona Lisa,' we may understand something of its mysterious effect. We see that Leonardo has used the means of his 'sfmuato' with the utmost deliberation. Everyone who has ever tried to draw or scribble a face knows that what we call its expression rests mainly in two features: the corners of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. Now it is precisely these parts which Leonardo has left deliberately indistinct, by letting them merge into a soft shadow. That is why we are never quite certain in what mood Mona Lisa is looking at us.

This Phaidon paperback edition is by far the most aesthetically satisfying one Gombrich has ever received (it's especially welcome after the gigantic, gawd-awful trade paperback edition of a few years ago), a positive joy to handle and carry and tuck onto the nightstand. It's slightly smaller than an average airport mass market paperback, and half its length consists of color plates of the works of art being discussed - and it's the back half, so the reader is able - indeed, encouraged - to read the flow of Gombrich's delightful prose without constant interruption, and then to contemplate the paintings, sculptures, posters, buildings, and gardens in a separate, more informed process. The edition comes with two pretty cloth bookmarks, one centered in the front to help with the text, the other centered in the rear to help with the paintings. It's the best physical setup possible, and kudos to Phaidon for producing it.




Of course there can be no one volume on art that will appeal to everybody. But Gombrich's broad tastes and sympathetic outlook bring this one pretty damn close to being that universal volume, and this is the edition of it to have.

In the Penny Press - Part Two!

Also of interest in this latest batch from the Penny Press was the cover article in the October National Geographic, a gripping (albeit maddening) piece by Stephen S. Hall titled "The Last of the Neanderthals."

The article centers on the 1994 find in northern Spain of a cave full of fossilized hominid bones from about 43,000 years ago. The bones belonged to Neanderthals, a widespread species of human at the time, and many of the bones show signs of knifework, suggesting that the meat was hacked from the bones - in all likelihood for the purposes of eating it (simple murder wouldn't explain the butchering).

Hall's prose is clear and straightforward, but his article has all the innocence of a Catholic school class on the birds and the bees. Everywhere throughout the piece, the stark, staringly obvious truth about "the last of the Neanderthals" is shuttered, obscured, and outright avoided. Take this, for example:

Within another 15,000 years or so, Neanderthals were gone forever, leaving behind a few bones and a lot of questions. Were they a clever and perserverant breed of survivors, much like us, or a cognitively challenged dead end? What happened during that period, roughly 45,000 to 35, 000 years ago, when the Neanderthals shared some parts of the Eurasian landscape with those modern human migrants from Africa? Why did one kind of human being survive, and the other disappear?

Or this priceless bit:

"Most Neanderthals and modern humans probably lived most of their lives without seeing each other," he [specialist Jean-Jacques Hublin] said, carefully choosing his words. "The way I imagine it is that occasionally in these border areas, some of these guys would see each other at a distance ... but I think the most likely thing is that they excluded each other from the landscape. Not just avoided, but excluded. We know from recent research on hunter-gatherers that they are much less peaceful than generally believed."

And then there's this stunning little line:

All this from a group of ill-fated Neanderthals buried in a cave collapse, soon after they were consumed by their own kind.

Something should be pointed out here that is pointed out nowhere in this article: there's not one particle of evidence that the Neanderthals in question were eaten by other Neanderthals. Other such sites also show the same bone-chipping as this one, but all that demonstrates is homicide, not cannibalism. To lock in cannibalism, you'd first have to conclude that Neanderthals were the only mammals around who could have fashioned the sharp-edged tools necessary to cause the bone-chipping. If there's another candidate who could do that, you can't lock in cannibalism.

Now quick everybody: look up from this computer screen and see if your eyes can't find a man-made sharp edge within ten feet of where you're sitting.

So-called 'modern' man (why 'modern' instead of 'extant' is a mystery) arrives on the scene (be it Eurasia or the Americas), and within a geological eye-blink, virtually all that scene's megafauna disappear (giant bears, giant sloths, giant lions, giant beavers, several species of elephants, dire wolves, giant tigers, etc., etc.) - often leaving behind fossil evidence of massive killing-fields. Likewise all other talking, tool-using hominid species disappear, often leaving behind fossil evidence that the flesh was carved from their bones (and almost always leaving behind evidence of cranial fracture - Hell, the photo of a Neanderthal skull in this issue has a beauty of a hole in its forehead, right between the eyes). But the best Hall or any of his experts can manage is to tamely note that hunter-gatherers aren't always as peaceful as previously believed?

Neanderthals were squatter than extant humans (although not dumber - their brains were on average larger than those of the sole surviving species of human), heavier, very much stronger, and no less socially organized, but they lacked the one essential defining characteristic of modern mankind: they weren't genocidal maniacs. Somewhere in the genetic evolution that provided homo sapiens sapiens with its magnificent brain, there also occurred a slight chromosomal twist, just a little nudge here or there, that resulted in a species bloodlust unparalleled anywhere else in the history of the animal kingdom. Every single person reading this post, young or old, male or female (or Beepy), has at some point in their life killed some living thing without any need or cause. Not statistically: every single one of you has. Even if other species were able to think of such things, they'd find it unthinkable - they might kill out of anger or competition, but it would never occur to them to kill out of idleness, and certainly not to kill all of a given form of life.




The question posed in this issue's table of contents, "Why did our Ice Age rivals vanish?" couldn't have a clearer answer. They were excluded, every last man, woman, and child of them. So everybody raise a glass to the dearly departed Neanderthals, and when you're done, make sure to bring it down with a nice satisfying thwack onto the spider whose only crime is that it's skittering across your table right at that moment.

In the Penny Press - Part One!

The latest issue of GQ had quite the little shocker, a brief paragraph by Bob Finch entitled "Hey, Boston, Shut the F#%* Up!" Here it is in all its rhetorical splendor:

Boston, I used to like you. I used to visit every couple of years, go for a long run along the Charles, eat some chowder down on the Fish Pier. But this year, something began to curdle inside me. The slobbery tears at midcourt (this was for Red!), the icy Papelbon glare (ooh, we're scared!), the creepy cult of (the genius) Bill Belichick and (the golden) Theo Epstein and (the dashing) Tom Brady and (the extremely fucking annoying) Yoooooooook ... Enough. We get it. You rule the universe. Yes, it's quite an impressive run you're on here. (For a small city.) But remember, fifteen years ago, your teams sucked large donkey balls (Pats: 5-11; Celtics: 32-50; Red Sox: 80-82). And because sports go in cycles, they will soon suck again. Try some humility. It becomes you.

We yield the floor to guest editorialist and Southie native Jim "Jimmie" Maranis:

Know what pal? We never liked you. You were always popping your collars and leaving before the check came. Yeah, you took your douchebag runs along the Charles, but we'd love to know how you ate your chowder "down on the Fish Pier" ... you carry the hot, steaming bowl from the nearest restaurant or what, dipshit? And suddenly the popped collars are making a whole lot more sense, seeing all the barely-disguised man-love in your cute little parentheses (Theo and Tom are both taken, dipshit). And isn't it funny that while you're making jokes about sports going in cycles you conveniently forgot that Boston is a four-sport town? Bruins 1990-91: Bourque, Neely, Moog, 44-24-15, dipshit. So while Boston sports might soon suck again, you, my friend, will suck always. Dipshit.

We couldn't have put it better ourselves!

Moab is my Washpot

Our book today is Stephen Fry's 1997 memoir Moab is my Washpot, and it can serve as a kind of breather from that last triptych of sci-fi pulps. In order for something to be a really good breather, it must itself be a restoring breath of fresh air, and in this regard Moab is My Washpot succeeds wonderfully. The 20th century was positively rife with memoirs, but even so, this is one of the best.

One of the best, despite the fact that it stops after only the first twenty years of Fry's life, that is, before all the acting and comedy work that made him famous and brought him to the public's attention in the first place. This is a memoir about the awkwardness of growing up in provincial working-class Britain, the awkwardness of being gay in such a setting, and above all, gloriously above all, the awkwardness of being Stephen Fry.

Reading this breathtakingly honest book, grappling with the author's unabashed sentimentality and unapologetic romanticism, the reader in astonishment begins to wonder if Fry's impeccable acting abilities and perfect comic timing (so marvelously on display in Blackadder and Jeeves & Wooster) might just be his backups, coming in second to a literary ability that at times reads like the best possible combination of Samuel Pepys and the Bronte sisters:

Looking at it coolly one can say that anyone might be drawn to such a fine head [as seen on the head of a fellow male classmate] of fair hair, seen from behind. One might say that anyone could see that this was a classy, peachy, and supreme set of buttocks confronting us.

One might add too, in cynical tones, "You say, 'you knew,' but just suppose he had turned his head and revealed the face of a pig with a harelip, a twisted nose and a squint, would you now be writing this?"

Did I really, really know?

Yes, reader, I did. I swear I did.

Of course, this grossly emotional openness can lead the impressionable memoirist astray, and occasionally this happens to Fry, most notably in his recollection of a pivotal TV scene that moved him quite a bit:

I remember an episode of Star Trek that ends with Jim turning to McCoy and saying, "Out there, Bones, someone is saying the three most beautiful words in the galaxy." I fully expected the nauseous obviousness of "I love you." But Kirk turned to the screen, gazed at the stars and whispered:

"Please, help me."

Star Trek fans will need no assistance - and, alas, no prompting - to point out all that's wrong with that heartfelt memory of Fry's, even if the thought's in the right place.



And that's the way with all of Moab is My Washpot: it's so immediate and frank that it wins over its readers almost immediately and has them rooting for the author on every page, through every broken heart and thought (and more) of suicide, through all the turmoil and upheavals that are inextricably linked with being a teenager. And sometimes, at odd intervals, the hard-won wisdom to which those upheavals lead is glimpsed in the narrative. They're almost always its best moments:

Only one thing counted for me then, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, and I suspected, quite rightly, that one day love would count for less. I did not suspect, however, that one further, finer day far, far forward, love would come round to counting for everything again. A lot of salt water was to flow down the bridge, the bent bridge of my nose, before that day would come.

Star Trek Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru

Our book today is a Star Trek Enterprise novel called Kobayashi Maru. It's written by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin, and as any Star Trek fan will immediately recognize, it's about a very memorable doomed little ship.

That ship is not, as some wags might have it, the Enterprise herself, specifically the ship under the command of Captain Jonathan Archer as portrayed in the late lamented TV show, the first incarnation of the Star Trek franchise to get cancelled since the original. One might think that cancellation would leave an ordure of failure on the series' four seasons, but they actually make for some fine viewing. The series flailed around a bit at its beginning (as series tend to do), but even from the beginning it boasted a strong acting cast and some fine bigger issues to play with. It lacked the grandeur that characterized the concluding seasons of Deep Space Nine, and of course it lacked the fantastic premise of Star Trek Voyager, but it also gained something from the fledgling fallibility of its heroes - here was an starship Enterprise that wasn't so incredibly powerful that writers needed to confront it with gods (Apollo in the original series, Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the Caretaker in Star Trek Voyager): ordinary alien vessels could - and often did - kick the crap out of poor Enterprise. Her captain and crew had to be quicker on their feet - her engineer always trying to improve on the relatively primitive technology with which they first venture into space, her armory officer always trying to put more bite in her meager arsenal, her Vulcan science officer always trying to make sense of this strange species called humans.

The main problem Enterprise faced was timing: the original series already had so many firsts. Captain Kirk was the youngest person ever to command a starship, so the Enterprise producers couldn't cast Milo Ventimiglia as the first captain. Spock was the first Vulcan to serve in Starfleet, so increasingly contorted ways had to be found to have a Vulcan serving on the bridge without having that Vulcan actually be in Star Fleet. And so many of the mysterious beings and situations the original ship and crew encountered were previously unknown ... it seemed to leave little for the Enterprise captain and crew to do.


The writers found lots of inventive ways to get around this, and then they finally settled on the best way: this incarnation of Star Trek should be all about showing us the history of all the others - and it should remind us, on a weekly basis, that history is exciting, and that it's made by ordinary flesh-and-blood people doing sometimes extraordinary things. The show's fourth season did that admirably well, indulging in multi-part episodes and giving fans treat after treat. It's a shame the show was canceled; it had a lot more ground to cover and lots more interesting stories to tell.




The Kobayashi Maru is one of those stories, and it's ingenious to connect it to Enterprise and the era of Jonathan Archer (oh! if only this had been an episode of the show!). As mentioned, all Star Trek fans will recognize the name of Starfleet's legendary no-win scenario: the Kobayashi Maru, a stricken vessel calling for help in the middle of hostile territory, with the Enterprise the only vessel nearby. Doing nothing means consigning the Maru and her crew to death; attempting a rescue means crossing the Neutral Zone and entering Klingon territory.

At the time, we'd all be lulled to sleep by Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and maybe we'd forgotten how thrilling the original series could be, even on a spit-and-styrofoam budget. But then Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came to theaters, and fans were very vigorously reminded of all the reasons why they loved the show in the first place and fought for its survival. And the opening of that movie (what many Trek fans still consider the best one) showed us a combat-retrofitted Enterprise bridge, populated by all our old familiar crew but presided over from the captain's chair by a Vulcan-looking woman.

That woman hears the distress call, decides to attempt a rescue, and gets her bridge blown apart for her troubles. One by one, we see our old heroes fall to the deck, apparently killed, as the Vulcan woman becomes more and more rattled. Then the simulation ends, the practice-room is opened up to a flood of light from the outside, and an older, more wizened Admiral Kirk starts to tease Captain Spock over the fact that all of his training cadets 'died' in the simulation. In the course of The Wrath of Khan, we're informed that James Kirk is the only person who ever beat the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario.

That's all a hundred years in the future, however, as far as this novel is concerned. What's happening now in Kobayashi Maru is some truly excruciating prose.

"Duh," you might say: "It's a Star Trek novel, for pete's sake! Of course the prose is excruciating." But this isn't necessarily so. There have been good Star Trek novels. But what Kobayashi Maru represents in our little science fiction troika here, is the pinnacle of corporate interference in an adaptation's actual prose. With The Last Days of Krypton, the interference was minimal - Superman Returns was something of a box office disappointment, after all. With Jedi Twilight, the interference was extensive but relatively benign - once you check in with the weird, crazy spider at the heart of the web, you're free to write more or less what you want. But Star Trek is about to relaunch as a gazillion-dollar franchise with a 'hot' director and more fan anticipation than Jesus. A whole new string of movies, a tribble-like explosion of marketing tie-ins, possibly even a new TV series .... so suddenly, the network and its parent studio are paying attention to everything Star Trek. And that attention can be summed up in one word: careful.

Kobayashi Maru is a mind-bogglingly careful book. Nothing is ever said about anything ever without eighty qualifiers; every emotion is first stated then quibbled away to nothing; words and words and words flow, but virtually nothing happens. There are more adverbs in this one book than in most dictionaries. And the result is always ridiculous. Take a scene in which the embryonic Federation Council is arguing amongst itself. Here's what one member says in opposition to a proposal from Earth:

"The Andorian government does not require the permission of Earth, or the Coalition for that matter, to take whatever action we deem justifiable and prudent in the face of this grave danger."

And here's how it's characterized:

Remaining in his seat, Samuels made an admirable display of equanimity in the face of such vehement opposition.

Vehement opposition. Whatever action we deem justifiable and prudent. See? I'm giggling just a little even now.

The homeliest turns of phrase abound in this book, and the careful, careful prose drags in so much instant, pointless recapitulation that the reader is bombarded with recaps of every single thing that happens, right while it's happening. It's like stereotypical high school composition prose, only the writers are overdoing it and getting paid fairly well. Just look this - you haven't seen this much mincing since the last Granny Cook-Off:

Facing front and leaning forward toward the helm, she said, "What's our ETA at Alpha Centauri?" She knew she probably sounded like a child asking "Are we there yet?" But given her current lack of sleep, as well as her preoccupation with Jonathan Archer's long-shot attempt to avert a seemingly inevitable war with the Klingons and/or the Romulans, she regarded it as a minor miracle that she sounded even halfway coherent.

Nevermind that we've already been told several times within six paragraphs that the character is lacking sleep; nevermind that the whole scene takes place right in the middle of the plotline about a possible war with the Klingons and the Romulans ... just look at the stultifying words themselves: current lack of sleep, seemingly inevitable, and/or, minor miracle, halfway coherent. It's practically schizophrenically bad.



A split-personality diagnosis would seem to flow naturally from the fact that the book is co-authored, especially since Andy Mangels is usually a talented, funny, snarky writer who wouldn't write lethally boring prose like that to save his life. His fans might naturally finger this Michael Martin character as the guilty party, the one throwing in all those counteractive adverbs and gumming up the prose.

The real culprit, though, is probably CBS Studios and their army of ad-marketing people. Probably some feckless, sunglassed drone was assigned to vet this book and neuter everything that moves. Or maybe our two authors were given extensively stringent "guidelines" for what they could and couldn't write, and how they could go about it. In the end, that's the charitable explanation. It means some studio rule book was ultimately responsible for this bland, lifeless concoction. If it's not true, if the writers themselves are to blame, well - any writer, no matter how talented, can lay the occasional egg (picture Homer's agent: "Homey, Homey! The Iliad? I'm there! The Odyssey? Boffo stuff! But these Hymns? Couldn't sell them to my mother ..."). And if it is true, let's all pray to the Great Bird of the Galaxy that all such studio hacks were banned from the set of the new movie, or we're all going to have to sleep through another The Motion Picture before we get to the good stuff.

Coruscant Nights Volume 1: Jedi Twilight

Our book today is the first novel in a Star Wars trilogy called(for reasons the books themselves fail to make clear) Coruscant Nights. It's called by Michael Reaves, and it's called Jedi Twilight, and its events take place immediately after the conclusion of the last Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith (anybody remember when this whole thing was just one quirky, hyper-enjoyable summer movie? I thought not .... sigh ...).

For those of you needing a refresher course, The Revenge of the Sith differs from the common run of big-budget sci-fi movies by ending with the total and resounding defeat of the good guys. The clone army, under the direction of the evil Emperor, has assassinated virtually all the Jedi Knights and driven the few remaining survivors into hiding or exile. Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi go into exile. Jax Pavan, the dour and capable hero of this trilogy (on the books' covers, he looks a bit like Patriots super-quarterback Tom Brady - who might just be up for the part, since his football days are over) goes into hiding, and he hides in the last place you'd expect a Jedi to hide (if you were prone to expecting such things): in the bowels of Coruscant itself, the capital city of the Empire, the seat of the aforementioned evil Emperor's power.

Jax Pavan goes into hiding as a kind of private investigator, but he's always on edge about the Imperial pursuit that forever dogs his footsteps, and even the slowest readers will quickly anticipate a confrontation down the line between our hero and Vader. Reaves is a talented, quick-footed author, however (Jedi Twilight is very often a very entertaining read), not one to blow his perfect climax early, as it were. Jedi Twilight has plenty of action, derring-do, and explosions to keep the pages turning in the meantime.

And there are plenty of subplots too, the best of which involves a reporter named Den Dhur and his trusty droid I-5 (who's been heavily modified in the personality department, just in case you were dreading another C-3PO), both of whom are also searching for Jax Pavan, although for different reasons. Dhur is just after a great story; I-5's motives center around Jax's father Lorn Pavan and a surprising undercurrent of stubborn loyalty. Even half-inebriated, Dhur is aware enough of this to let it irk him:

But did it make any sense to keep looking? Den thought about it, somewhat laboriously, one neuron blindly groping through the alcoholic fog to link with another. Though he hated to say it, hated even to think it, he couldn't help reaching the same conclusion over and over: No. It didn't. Lorn Pavan's son was either off-planet or akk chow by now. Either way, there wasn't a lot that could be done about it. The remaining Jedi had scattered to the four solar winds - a prudent move, in Den's opinion - and even if Jax Pavan was still somewhere on Coruscant, the odds of bumping into him on a street corner weren't too good in a planetwide city with trillions of inhabitants.

One of the most amusing little themes running through Jedi Twilight actually involves those trillions of inhabitants, or at least the species making up the bulk of them:

Humans. They dominated culture, trade, government, the military - everything, in short. Love them or hate them, you couldn't ignore them. For better or worse, humans were the architects of the galaxy's future. It was only such a benighted, aggressive, and hubristic species, it seemed to him, that could have created a monster like Darth Vader.




Of course, there are problems inherent in reading any Star Wars novel. The backstory is now so hysterically profuse - and the rabid fan base so, shall we say, up to date with all of it, that a writer in Reaves' position must either include explanations of what a Neimoidian is (and risk offending the geeknoscenti) or leave those explanations out and bewilder newcomers. And lurking in the background of all these books is the weird, insane spider at the heart of this vast web, Star Wars creator George Lucas, whose 'outlines' these books fill in and whose approval they all require. It's like if Gene Roddenberry were still alive, read every Star Trek novel, and were crazy as a shithouse mouse.

Still, when those obstacles are overcome, Jedi Nights and its sequels provide some better-than-average escapist action reading. Michael Reaves clearly knows his craft, and in addition to peppering his tale with enough special effects to keep the whole thing humming like a lightsaber, he also manages to slip in more characterization than any reader of a series like this would expect. Jax Pavan might remain a bit of a hero-manque, but lots of secondary characters (most especially I-5, but also certainly including Darth Vader himself) get some pretty loving attention. Franchise fiction has been worse served than this, certainly.

The Last Days of Krypton

Our book today is The Last Days of Krypton by prolific science fiction hack Kevin Anderson, and of course it's not referring to the periodic table. No, this is the planet Krypton, the homeworld of little Kal-el, better known to the movie-going public as Superman. In the character's hum-dinger of an origin story (created by Joel Shuster and Jerry Siegel, but really given flesh and bone by long-time DC Comics editor Julie Schwartz), the planet Krypton is doomed, and only visionary scientist Jor-el sees the end coming. His valiant wife Lara believes him, but virtually nobody else does, certainly not Krypton's ruling council, who scoff at Jor-el's repeated pleas that they build a fleet of space-arks to ferry the planet's populace to safety. It seems Krypton frowns upon the very idea of space travel, so if Jor-el wants to save his family, he must construct a private space ship on his own time.

Everybody is familiar with the rest of the story: the planet explodes, and that one-person spaceship takes the tiny baby Kal-el, like Moses in the bullrushes, through the wilds of space to the planet Earth - Kansas specifically, where the baby comes to be adopted by Ma and Pa Kent and raised in the bosom of the wholesome American Midwest until he's ready to put on bright pajamas and fight crime as Superman (nowadays, anyway - before DC simplified the story back in the 1980s, Kal-el first fought crime as Super-baby, then as a dreamy Superboy).

Ma and Pa Kent, Superboy and his super-dog Krypto (who was not a basset hound, otherwise he'd have been called Farto) and youthful crime-busting are all outside of Anderson's scope for this book. Here, he's dealing just with Krypton in its final days, and thanks to the ever-expanding Superman mythos of the 1950s and '60s, he's got a lot of stuff to cover. The alien mastermind Brainiac comes to Krypton and abducts the entire city of Kandor, for instance, shrinking it and all its populace and putting them in a bottle for sadistic display. Jor-el's brother Zor-el (father of Supergirl), taking precautions just in case his brother is right, takes steps to encase his own Argo City in a protective shield. And what would such a story be without a villain? In this case it's the military madman General Zod.

Zod (so immortally captured by Terence Stamp in Superman II) seems to get Anderson's creative juices flowing; he's one of the only characters whose depiction page to page is actually interesting (Lara also has her moments). Jor-el is pretty much a pious scientific cipher throughout, although Anderson does have him watch some pretty scenery:

Even though he viewed the world in terms of mathematics and science, the raw beauty of Kandor took Jor-el's breath away. With its temples to Rao, the shining pyramids, and the great Council ziggurat, Krypton's capital city was the pinnacle of civilization. Some exotic buildings had been grown from active crystals; other edifices were hewn from lustrous white veinrock or speckled granite polished to a sheen that reflected the red sunlight.

The rest of the book is much of a piece with that excerpt: it's competently if never beautifully written, and it entirely lacks the verve that so wonderfully filled Elliott Maggin's Superman, the Last Son of Krypton (to say nothing of all the great Superman-writing that's happened in his various comic books in the last ten years). It's better than most comic-book novels (we'll try not to think of the various X-Men novels that have been perpetrated in the last ten years), but of course that's not saying much.

Comics fans will find all the bases covered here. Anderson has read up on all the various Krypton-stories DC has published ever since the Superman mythos was streamlined. And with the aid of all those previous writers, he manages to tell a fairly interesting story - of General Zod vying to take over the entire planet and various resistance-fighters trying to stop him, all of them (except Jor-el, of course) ignorant of the much greater crisis building all around them. When Zod is defeated, Anderson does a good job of showing the relief the planet's populace feel, thinking the worst is behind them.

And while that relief is spreading, a drama familiar to comics readers and movie-goers is playing out at the home estate of Jor-el, where he and Lara are saying good-bye to their little baby:

"It's time," he said to Lara, who clung protectively to their baby. "We can't wait any longer." Tears ran down her face, and Jor-el realized that he was weeping, too.

Lara wrapped their son tenderly in the blankets of their great house, the finest blue and red fabric emblazoned with the prominent symbol of Jor-el's family. "Kal-el, you have to go, or you'll die with us." She trembled, then straightened. This was their only hope.

Lara gave her infant son a final kiss, brushing her lips against the delicate skin of his forehead. Her voice hitched as she said, "I wish you well on your new planet, Kal-el. I hope you find your way among the people of Earth. I hope you manage to be happy."

The final line of Anderson's story of Jor-el and Lara (though not the final line of his book - he follows the little rocketing baby tantalizingly close to Earth) is simple and almost elegant: "They closed their eyes, and the world ended around them."

Anderson's projected next book is a version of the first meeting between Batman and Superman, and at this point in its genesis, it seems to be set in the 1950s, in what will, as far as DC is concerned, be an "imaginary story" - i.e. not part of their official continuity. If that ends up being true, it's possible Anderson's creative impulses (which are on display throughout The Last Days of Krypton) will have more freedom. DC might well have been monitoring him closely during the crafting of this present book, making sure he didn't deviate more than a fraction from received doctrine. At least, that's the story we'll go with.

Comics! Uncanny X-Men #500!

Last week saw a milestone in Marvel Comics - the publication of the 500th issue of the Uncanny X-Men. Marvel marked the occasion by commissioning a painted front-and-back cover by quasi-deified comic book artist Alex Ross, and Marvel definitely got its money's worth (just how much does Ross get paid for a painting like this? Anybody out there hazard a guess?): the painting depicts all (well, most - the guy with the super-powered pet maggots is nowhere to be seen) the various ages of the X-Men caught between their two most emblematic foes, the mutant-hunting robot Sentinels and the world-dominating mutant master of magnetism, Magneto. There in the background is a ghostly telepathic image of Professor X, who recruited those five young mutants way back in 1963's first issue. Directly below him are the heroes those teenagers became: Iceman, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, and Cyclops, whose devastating ruby eye-beams carve an angle through the painting in classic Ross style (he loves the play of light in all its thicknesses). And surging forward toward the foreground is the new team that revitalized the comic in 1975 and changed the face of Marvel Comics forever: Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, Gambit, Rogue, and of course Wolverine, bigger and better drawn than all the others. It's a bravura piece of work, even for an artist from whom we've come to expect such work.

It would be wrong to say that cover painting is the best thing about the 500th issue of the Uncanny X-Men. It's the only good thing. As for the rest, Marvel has pulled off something uncanny indeed: they've commemorated the 500th anniversary of their most popular title with the single worse X-Men issue ever published.

That's saying something. Uncanny, through its countless variations and incarnations, has published some truly crappy issues over the decades. This issue has to compete with the aforementioned maggot-guy, with the disco-heroine Dazzler, with the onslaught of Onslaught, and with the mini-era of the snub-nosed Wolverine (a manifestation that still confuses us, here at Stevereads). It handles this competition easily; it's worse than all of those eras before it even reaches page 10.

We'll get to page 10, but first a bit of true confession: Uncanny X-Men was never our favorite among the Marvel titles. When it first came out, we bought it of course - at the time, this new imprint Marvel Comics seemed able to do no wrong, and this seemed like another winner. The organizing principle? These super-powered kids, this team of kids and their somewhat creepy instructor (I wasn't the only one who suspected Marvel of doing a quickie-ripoff of the Doom Patrol, which, if memory serves, came out only a few months earlier and also featured a creepy instructor), were born that way. They didn't study with the Ancient One in a mountaintop retreat; they weren't struck by radioactive waste, spiders, rays, or bombs - instead, they just developed their abilities at puberty, the same as all their readers! When I first read it, I immediately started mentally listing all the other heroes who fit the same bill (what can I say? Way, way back then, I was something of a geek): Wonder Woman (who even as a child was stronger and faster than other Amazons) but not Superman (if Krypton hadn't exploded, he'd have been a poor powerless schlub like everybody else), the Martian Manhunter (on Mars, it seems, everybody could shapeshift) but not the Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, or Supergirl. The Sub-Mariner, but not, as mentioned, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, or the Hulk.


(And what of my beloved Legion of Super-Heroes, you ask? I did the rundown on them too! Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, Phantom Girl, Chameleon Boy, Shadow Lass, Shrinking Violet, Triplicate Girl, Matter-Eater Lad, even Element Lad, yes - Wildfire, Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, Mon-el, Invisible Kid, Sun Boy, Colossal Boy, Princess Projectra, Timber Wolf, no ...)

It was an interesting take, but the first issue was sloppily done. Too much exposition, boring action sequences (even Jack Kirby could nod), and a team of weaklings the Thing alone could probably stomp into the ground before lunch.

The title won me over a few times ("Not a Dream! Not a Hoax! Not an Imaginary Story!" was an unbeatable hook for one issue, and of course there was the great Neal Adams for a too-short while, giving us the first truly great X-story with the introduction of the Sentinels) and lost me a few times, and like everybody else, I thought the 1975 re-launch (featuring Cyclops leading a team of heroes nobody'd ever heard of) was really good. But even during the Dark Phoenix Saga, my comics-reading heart lay elsewhere - with Thor, and Conan, and the Avengers, and Superman, and, of course, the Legion. And like all sensible sentient beings, I've had two parallel reactions to the modern incarnation of the title: one the one hand, a growing and awestruck appreciation of Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, and on the other hand, a near-hysterical avoidance of the 100 percent pure crapola being produced in all the other X-titles.

Still, when a comic turns 500, you gotta read it. I was there, of course, for Action Comics 500 and was very much not disappointed - it was a great, epic retelling of the Superman story combined with a first-rate Lex Luthor plotline. It delivered.




Uncanny X-Men 500 miscarries. In fact, if it were a baby, it would miscarry so bad it would cause all the other babies in the whole friggin maternity ward to croak.

Some brief background, some of which we've already covered here: the mutant Scarlet Witch, in a fit of pique, warped the world's reality and thereby eliminated the super-powers of all but a handful of Earth's mutants - including Magneto, her father, who was left a powerless wretch. The X-Men still remained, dedicated to fighting the good fight against mankind's intolerance and evil mutants. That brings us to the latest issue, the #500 landmark.

Matters open with decidedly substandard Terry Dodson artwork (how exactly Marvel got substandard artwork out of somebody as talented as Dodson is a mystery all on its own - he shares haphazardly divided art chores in this issue with the notorious Ted Land, suggesting that either Dodson or Land or perhaps both learned rather late they'd be drawing any part of this issue), showing a pretentious artist receiving some old-style Sentinels in order to transform them into a modern art display. Our scene immediately shifts to the X-Men's new headquarters on the Marin Headlands across the bay from San Francisco, whose mayor is right then being flown to meet our heroes by Storm - who, despite now being queen of Wakanda, still finds time to for the whole super-heroing thing. The mayor has been given a 'psychic blindfold' by the X-Men's resident telepath, Emma Frost, despite the fact that she's a super-VILLAIN and always has been (these days she shows this mainly by making snide remarks).

The mayor's on some sort of good-will visit, so the X-Men show her around. Here the artwork is handled by Greg Land, so Emma Frost is of course beautiful - and, um, I guess so is Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, except that he's built like a steroid-popping weightlifter (what, can't Land find pictures of skinny models?). Hank McCoy, aka the Beast (still looking like a great big kitty-cat) shows up, introducing himself as "Hank McCoy, scientist" (which causes no one to laugh, even though it's absurd), and they're all telling the mayor how 'green' their new headquarters is when Warren Worthington, aka Angel, scolds them all for not wining and dining her - he promptly shows her the view of San Francisco across the bay, which kind of defeats the purpose of the psychic blindfold, since she can see her house from here.

When she tells the X-Men (at least, I think these are the X-Men - nobody bothers to enumerate the team-roster; I think it consists of Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Emma Frost, Nightcrawler, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, and maybe-sorta Cannonball) about the pretentious artist-type and his Sentinel-installation, they're understandably upset - they vow to attend the gala opening, just to make sure nothing untoward happens. Exactly why they think mixing mutants with Sentinels, even deactivated ones, would calm things down is a mystery our writers don't bother with; instead, they shift the scene to the gala opening, where our heroes are mixing and mingling with slobbering fanboys (who are mocked even though their real-life counterparts are the ones who'll be buying the damn issue) and growling about the Sentinels standing there. Everbody's in X-Men costumes, and when a big guy dressed as Magneto hands Colossus a champagne glass, Colossus starts to tell they guy he's not a waiter - when gasp! it turns out to be the real Magneto! Why Colossus doesn't recognize the real Magneto when he's six friggin inches away is a mystery our writers don't bother with; instead, Magneto says "Now then, where were we?" uses his apparently-restored powers to hurl Colossus through a skylight, then says' "Now then, where were we?" again.

Angel says "Magneto! Put him down!" Cyclops says "Magneto tactics, team. Response squad, you're with me" Storm says (no snickering now) "Tyrant. Your villainy will be held here." But what follows is nevertheless a disorganized fiasco in which virtually nothing makes sense. Magneto handles everything the X-Men throw at him, then Cannonball hits him really hard and - presto! - we see that he's wearing some sort of power-simulating suit. It naturally comes with a transporter, so Magneto is able to disappear once he's been beaten. In the meantime, Colossus, Wolverine, and Angel (yes, Angel, who manages to take out a Sentinel on his own despite having no powers to speak of other than big, white wings) have defeated the reactivated Sentinels, and our landmark 500th issue thus ends in an ungainly heap.

And part of that ending? Emma Frost telepathically amplifies Cyclops' thoughts as he broadcasts to every mutant on the planet that X-Men headquarters is now a mutant sanctuary, that every mutant who wants to can now come there and be safe. Why on Earth he would say this, when his telepathic broadcast has just drawn a gigantic bullseye on the Marin Headlands location, is yet another mystery. The issue's full of them, and none of them the good kind. To put it mildly, this kind of X-Men execution is as far away from the stuff Joss Whedon was doing over in Astonishing as it's possible to get. In that title, Whedon made a fantastic new epic out of almost entirely new characters and material; in this one, two already-great characters and concepts - Magneto and the Sentinels - are wasted simultaneously.

Who knows what happened? Maybe despite the 499 rehearsals, issue 500 somehow snuck up on all involved. That would explain the lack of any cohesion in this issue, the feeling that it's all been cobbled together at the last minute. It's issue 500, so you have to read it, but there's nothing here to warrant anybody obeying any kind of telepathic summons to show up for issue 501.

Rats, Lice, and History

Our book today is Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History, and it completes the little popular-science triptych we've been indulging in here at Stevereads (an arbitrary stopping-point, since we could, otherwise, cover really, really entertaining popular science books literally every day for the next year without running out of wonderful titles). Zinsser, a native New Yorker who spend his life as an increasingly-famous bacteriologist, wrote this, the best-known of his books, in 1935, which makes it a good deal older than our other two titles, but it's the best of the three, a deep and intensely satisfying study with numerous digressions.

Zinsser sets his task right from the start: to write a biography. But he himself faithfully catalogues his obstacles:

There will be no prenatal influences; no Oedipus or mother complexes; no early love affairs or later infidelities; no perversions, urges, or maladjustments ... We shall have no gossip to help us, no personal letters which there was no time to burn. We cannot count upon the reclame of a libel suit barely averted, or of scandals deftly hinted at. We have not even the comfort of preceding biographers and essayists whom we can copy, paraphrase, or refute. Indeed, we are quite stripped of the sauces, spices, and dressings by which biographers can usually make poets and scientists into quite ordinary and often objectionable people; by which they can divert attention from the work of a man to his petty or perhaps vicious habits; by which they can create a hero out of a successful commercial highbinder; by which they can smother public guilt by domestic virtue, or direct interest from the best and lasting accomplishments of their subject to the utterly unimportant private matters of which he was ashamed.

The habitue of biographies will ask himself how, without these indispensable accessories of the biographical tradesman, we can dare to enter this field. The answer is a simple one: the subject of our biography is a disease.

That disease is typhus, whose global path of destruction Zinsser recounts from earliest times (and all of whose vectors - through lice, through the fleas of infected mice and rats, and through infected nightcrawlers - are covered by his narrative reach) to the present, when the West made huge strides against the disease (many of those strides were made by Zinsser himself, or colleagues he inspired and helped). Typhus is a hugely successful family of bacteria, hardy and opportunistic, most widespread in conditions of abysmal sanitation - conditions that, in a world full of the squalor and waste of human cruelty, are not hard to find. The disease has been rampant in times of war, famine, and concentration camps since the dawn of mankind. It's easily treatable with antibiotics, but the most formidable foe it ever faced was likely Hans Zinsser.




He wears it all lightly, as you could tell from the above excerpt (as is also abundantly evident from that excerpt, with Zinsser's book we are dealing with a level of prose many orders of magnitude more advanced than either Stephen Jay Gould or Carl Sagan - as either one of them would have been quick to concede). Rats, Lice and History is immensely learned and informative, but it is also very funny, very clever, and often very playful. These things are not antithetical to the well-stocked mind, nor are they detrimental to a high purpose. Zinsser has fun throughout his book, and he tries his best to share that fun with his readers (and he's had readers! This book has been through countless editions).

In writing his biography, and especially in dealing with something at once as complex and as simple as bacteria (they are hard to understand, although not nearly so hard as viruses), Zinsser tries to start with the broadest possible canvas: what is life itself? How do we define it? And where did it come from:

Did life originate spontaneously by such progressively complex associations of matter through enzymes - unformed, regulated intermediaries, capable of building up and expending energy? Or did it come to our earth from elsewhere - cosmically, - in which case it would have had to possess the capacity of resisting, without destruction, exposure to temperatures ranging from absolute zero to incandescence. We cannot deny these possibilities, but we have no clue to either. We are beginning to know that all the processes which take place in living beings are governed - though with more complexity - by the same physiochemical laws which govern the reactions in dead chemical systems. Yet this purely mechanistic understanding is insufficient for the final answer, and vitalism is reborn again and again to bridge the gap.

(Zinsser's speculation, though gripping, is in this case fanciful: no living organism could possibly survive the trauma of planetary entry - all Earth life is certainly Earth-originated, although the rest of his ruminations on the flickering boundaries between life and non-life are spot-on)

A hardy disease that thrives on squalor - it's easy to see why typhus in all its various forms would have such a successful life among mankind. That it thrived even in comparatively modern times is well-known and deplorable; Zinsser extensively catalogs its domination of more ancient eras as well:

In earlier ages, pestilences were mysterious visitations, expressions of the wrath of higher powers which came out of a dark nowhere, pitiless, dreadful, and inescapable. In their terror and ignorance, men did the very things which increased death rates and aggravated calamity. They fled from towns and villages, but death mysteriously traveled along with them.

Centuries later, things have scarcely improved:

The Thirty Years' War was the most gigantic experiment in epidemiology to which mankind has ever been subjected. Europe, as we have seen, was a spot map of constant small outbreaks of every conceivable infectious disease; and through this area, for a little over twenty-nine years, armies marched and countermarched, and disbanded soldiers, fugitives, and deserters vagabonded far and wide. Famines resulted and populations wandered in fugitive hordes toward food and protection. Wherever men traveled, disease followed them.

In a withering footnote, one of many swipes Zinsser takes at the carnage of the First World War, he writes:

Nature sets up her experiments of epidemiology in times of war and famine, and when, as in the wars of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, these dreadful experiments can be observed by a competent medical profession, much of value to mankind may be learned. It can well be said that nobody won the last war except the medical sciences. The profit was not worth the loss, but the increase in sanitary and medical knowledge was the sole determinable gain for mankind in an otherwise utterly disastrous catastrophe.

It's precisely this tone, this perfect balance between the frustration of a scientist and the optimism of a humanist, that gives Rats, Lice and History its perennial appeal, and it's a tone Zinsser maintains all the way to the book's conclusion, which is caustic, cautionary, and celebratory all at the same time:

Typhus is not dead. It will live on for centuries, it it will continue to break into the open whenever human stupidity and brutality give it a chance, as most likely they occasionally will. But its freedom of action is being restricted, and more and more it will be confined, like other savage creatures, in the zoological gardens of controlled diseases.

The happy day Zinsser envisioned, when all strains of typhus would be safely confined in laboratories, is as far off today as it was when he first wrote his book; the diseases abound in the modern world, and several modern countries (most certainly including the United States) have toyed with the possibility of developing 'weapons-grade' typhus for use as a biological weapon (it has a satisfyingly high mortality rate if untreated, but it can't readily be spread human-to-human). Sadly, the stupidity and brutality of humanity noted by Zinsser, also seem incapable of eradication. We can only hope a bell-note wonderful book like Rats, Lice and History survives as well, infecting everybody it touches.

august in open letters!

Let the word go forth that the August 2008 issue of Open Letters Monthly is live and a thing of beauty! As usual, we have a bounty of intellectual goods on display, in a variety that will take your breath away! We have impressionable young freelancer Steve Brachmann telling you all about how Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage helped him steer his life through a rocky patch; we have Lianne Habinek exploring the relationship between legendary pianist Glenn Gould, his favorite piano, and the man who tried to keep them both in tune; we have Laura Tanenbaum reviewing a couple of new books about stupidity of the current American voter (not to be confused with those worshipful hordes in Oregon, as pictured above); Daniel Green takes us through James Wood's criteria for what does and does not constitute good fiction (the blurb for Green's piece refers to Wood as the world's most influential critic, a happy exaggeration we here at Stevereads will magnanimously pass over in silence!); Greg Waldmann makes some mighty big objections to Robert Kagan's mighty small new book; father and son freelance team Thurlow and Zack Truman relate the low point of Samuel Pepys' career; far-flung correspondent Bartolomeo Piccolomini tells us all about the navigation of Christopher Columbus; King Henry VII gets his turn in the sun in "A Year with the Tudors."

And this month Open Letters has something special for you all: the site's founding editors, Sam Sacks, John Cotter, and yours truly, have each turned in a review of Evan Connell's new collection of short stories, Lost in Uttar Pradesh. And true to Open Letters form, each of those pieces is not only a much broader look at Connell's work than just one book, and each of them wonderfully reflects the stylistic tri-corner hat that is that founding trio: Sam's is wonderfully dense with analysis of all the deeper issues, John's is dancingly alert to the glories of the prose itself, and mine harps on a couple of minor points and then mostly talks about me. The three pieces together form an unprecedented tribute to one of America's greatest living literary figures - if it doesn't make you want to go out and read Evan S. Connell, nothing will!

Add to all that a poem by Matt Klane, a playful issue-photo by Sven Vorkmeister (and people say my pseudonyms are transparent ...), and some eye-catching new graphics by Tom Hartley, and you have a literary confection fit for every aesthetic sweet tooth! So click on over and dig in - and as always, feel free to leave copious comments! Comments are the currency of the Web, and we're always looking to add to our stash!

The Panda's Thumb

Our book today is The Panda's Thumb, the 1980 collection of natural history essays by Stephen Jay Gould, who published them all originally in his "This View of Life" column for Natural History magazine, back when that publication was (largely due to his presence month after month) still worth reading.

Gould was an evolutionary biologist, an entomologist, an anthropological theorist, and, more than any of those things (and the half-dozen or so other interdisciplinary hats he wore from time to time), a natural-born teacher, able to summarize and jazzercise virtually any subject, no matter how abstruse, into eight or ten jaunty, inviting pages anybody on Earth would enjoy reading. This is not a trait often found in scientists, and it is not to be scorned (the ones who do scorn it, both inside and outside the scientific world, are invariably the ones who can't do it, or who are too lily-livered to try). Given a small lead-time and no more reference-works than could be found in his overstuffed personal library, Gould could write an essay on, say, neotony, that you could not only hand to your fundamentalist grandmother but that would leave her wanting more. And he did it all amiably, without ever striking a strident note.

This last is all the more remarkable when viewed alongside his peers, some of whom could be very strident indeed. The mind naturally turns to Richard Dawkins, who shared an intellectually heated - and temporarily famous - exchange of letters with Gould in the pages of The New York Review of Books years ago - letters in which Gould comes off the better. Dawkins' 'selfish gene' idea of gene-dominated evolutionary drives never met with much enthusiasm from Gould, as he writes at one point in The Panda's Thumb:

Still, I find a fatal flaw in Dakwins's attack from below. No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them - direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favors some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.

If, in favoring a stronger body, selection acted directly upon a gene for strength, then Dawkins might be vindicated. If bodies were unambiguous maps of their genes, then battling bits of DNA would display their color externally and selection might act upon them directly. But bodies are no such thing.

Gould will be known in the science-history books mainly as the co-creator (along with Niles Eldredge)(who, with a colleague like Gould, ought to legally change his first name to "along with") of the idea of punctuated equilibrium: the concept that the process of evolution by natural selection is far from the stately, Lyellian progression tradition had made it out to be:

A new species can arise when a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of the ancestral range. Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread. They must build slowly in frequency, but changing environments usually cancel their selective value long before they reach fixation. Thus, phyletic transformation in large populations should be very rare - as the fossil record proclaims.

Gradualism, the belief that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It represented a common cultural bias, in part a response of nineteenth-century liberalism to a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life's history.

But the history of life, as I read it, is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era. Prokaryotes ruled the earth for three billion years until the Cambrian explosion, when most major designs of multicellular life appeared within ten million years. Some 375 million years later, about half the families of invertebrates became extinct within a few million years. The earth's history may be modelled as a series of occasional pulses, driving recalcitrant systems from one stable state to the next.



Gould's essays (The Panda's Thumb contains such classics as "Piltdown Revisited," "Were Dinosaurs dumb?" and the glowingly inimitable "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse") dance happily from one subject to the next, as Gould's own interests did (baseball and Gilbert & Sullivan get equal - and equally loving - attention). And always he returns to the big picture, the broader canvas on which the forces of evolution work and one which he tried to think (and succeeded more often than most mortals ever come close):

The best illustration of dinosaurian capability may well be the fact most often cited against them - their demise. Extinction, for most people, carries many of the connotations attributed to sex not so long ago - a rather disreputable business, frequent in occurence, but not to anyone's credit, and certainly not to be discussed in proper circles. But, like sex, extinction is an ineluctable part of life. It is the ultimate fate of all species, not the lot of unfortunate and ill-designed creatures. It is no sign of failure.

The remarkable thing about dinosaurs is not that they became extinct but that they dominated the earth for so long. Dinosaurs held sway for 100 million years while mammals, all the while, lived as small animals in the interstices of their world. After 70 millions years on top, we mammals have an excellent track record and good prospects for the future, but we have yet to display the staying power of dinosaurs.

It's not given to science-writers like Gould to have much staying power at all, and slowly, one by one, his many delightful titles will proceed out of print. But the books themselves will always lurk in the interstices, available for your curious mind. The man himself died in 2002, far too early, but echo of his many enthusiasms can be found in books like The Panda's Thumb, from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical.

The Dragons of Eden

Our book today is Carl Sagan's wise and witty little 1977 masterpiece, The Dragons of Eden, which spent a gratifying number of weeks on the bestseller lists and delighted a very large number of readers who might otherwise have considered themselves the furthest thing in the world from being science readers.

The reason for the appeal is that Sagan was a masterful popularizer (the late 60s and 70s were a golden age for such popularizers, for reasons that remain slightly obscure), and in none of his books is this more evident than in The Dragons of Eden, whose nine chapters cover in enthusiastic and illuminating detail many of the highways and byways of what it means to be human. When we here at Stevereads read it (an advance copy was sent to us by Asimov, as always craving our attention), we felt as if we were once again in the presence of Pliny the Elder, hearing of marvels, seeing everything entirely anew.

Every separate chapter in The Dragons of Eden is a self-contained masterpiece (honed to perfection by test-runs on countless student audiences throughout the years), an essay of nearly incantatory elegance and power. "The Brain and the Chariot" and especially "Tales of Dim Eden" are marvelous probings of the soft workings of the human brain, where many of the mysteries Sagan confronts are still mysteries today. In the chapter "Genes and Brains," the digression on hybrids affords our author an irresistible chance for some fun:

In earlier times it was widely held that offspring could be produced by crosses between extremely different organisms. The Minotaur whom Theseus slew was said to be the result of a mating between a bull and a woman. And the Roman historian Pliny suggested that the ostrich, then newly discovered, was the result of a cross between a giraffe and a gnat. (It would, I suppose, have to be a female giraffe and a male gnat.) In practice there must be many such crosses which have not been attempted because of a certain understandable lack of motivation.

Our nominee for single best chapter is "The Abstraction of Beasts," in which Sagan explores the subject of animal cognition with a sensitivity both rare and pleasing to find. Here he deals with Washoe the chimp learning sign language and opening up to scientist an entire new world, in which mankind's nearest genetic relative could directly express sadness, joy, creativity, grief, embarrassment, and linguistic creativity:

Washoe was observed "reading" a magazine - i.e. slowly turning the pages, peering intently at the pictures, and making, to no one in particular, an appropriate sign, such as "cat" when viewing a photograph of a tiger, and "drink" when examining a Vermouth advertisement.

Sagan wrote his book when the Western world was on the cusp of enormous technological change, far greater change than even science's most talented visionaries (and he was science's most talented visionary) could guess. As he correctly intuited, such change can be frightening (The Dragons of Eden is rife with great quotations from other writers, and one of the best deals with the very subject - Alfred North Whitehead: "It is the business of the future to be dangerous ... the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur"), but likewise these changes - and the fascinating forces behind them - could have no better, no more welcoming emissary than Carl Sagan.


His secret was wonder, and despite the generous lampooning he received when American television audience's got a glimpse of that trait in Sagan's mini-series Cosmos, it was real; he never stopped feeling the thrill of being a free mind in a world of wonders.

Perfect case in point: years ago he and I were leaving the same lecture (James Van Allen, as always ending his talk with a quick fusillade of dazzling ideas), emerging into a crossroads crammed with cars and trucks, all honking their horns in a heavy downpour. We shared a rough geographical proximity, so we agreed to split a cab. Moments later we were logjammed, rain pouring down, horns honking everywhere, and the cab driver made some grousing remark about the traffic jam.

Sagan immediately started talking about the beauty of it all, about the sheer statistical rarity of pure drinking water falling free out of the sky, about the tremendously complex harmonics the falling rain made on the various car and truck roofs, how the wind and the thickness of the roof metals and the horns and the echoes bouncing back and forth were nothing less than an acoustic miracle, a fantastic riff-session that was totally unique to this moment and would never come again.

Impulsively, he rolled down his window (this was back when you could still do that in a cab, at least in the trusting Midwest), letting in gusts of water. Turning his face up into the rain, smiling that weird, beatific smile of his, he said, "This isn't a traffic jam; it's a symphony."

Perhaps neither I nor that cab driver could quite access the sheer wonder he was feeling at that moment, but we knew enough to shut our mouths while we were seeing it.

The Dragons of Eden is completely filled with that same wonder, here preserved for all of you to read anytime you like, without your copy of the TLS getting soaked. The book's print run was enormous; you'll find a copy in every thrift shop and library sale in the country, so don't cheat yourself of an opportunity to be science reader!

After Shakespeare

Our book today is After Shakespeare, subtitled "Writing Inspired by the World's Greatest Author" and edited by that greatest of 20th century editors, John Gross. It's a huge and bursting compendium of things written about Shakespeare, and we here at Stevereads can confidently tell you one amazing truth: of all the countless thousands of books written about Shakespeare, this is the first one to have, the one to buy and thumb through and lose yourself in even before you acquire Bradley or Burgess or some collected Coleridge. Gross has done his usual herculean best and brought together such a staggering variety of fun stuff that you'll be happily lost for hours and days before you even think about wandering elsewhere.

Gross is right, in his preface, to say that no author has inspired more writing than Shakespeare (no discernible author, he points out, which is his neat way of not giving Homer the top spot), and the goal of this anthology is to sample from as much of that writing as possible. A million anecdotes are here, and diary excerpts, and poems galore, and even chunks from fictions written about the Bard, all of it presented with a minimal whisking of clarifying footnotes and introductory matter.

Gross laments that only one thing is missing, because he couldn't find it: the reactions to Shakespeare of the so-called Common Reader, although Gross isn't sure this is a bad thing: "The Common Reader is an admirable and indispensable thing, but I suspect that when he picks up his pen or sits down at his word processor, he has a way of turning into the Commonplace Critic." But this confession itself is a little odd, since as readers of Stevereads will know, there exists at least one Common Reader who never hesitated to share his thoughts on the Swan of Avon, as for instance:

September 29 - to the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer Night's Dream", which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.

Yes, of course, it's Samuel Pepys, and he's liberally quoted in After Shakespeare, despite being denied his Common Reader (and Commonplace Critic) status.

Virtually everybody else is in here too, from the Edwardian actor who sniffingly said, "My Rosencrantz was not up to much, but my Guildenstern was tremendous" to this immortal exchange between P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves:

"Remember what the poet Shakespeare said, Jeeves."
"What was that, sir?"
" 'Exit hurriedly, pursued by bear.' You'll find it in one of his plays. I remember drawing a picture of it on the side of the page, when I was at school."

There's Victor Grey's vicious parody of the 'Seven Ages of Man':

Seven ages, first puking and mewling,
Then very pissed off with one's schooling,
Then fucks, and then fights,
Then judging chap's rights;
Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

Of course, as is only fitting, there's a long passage from Anthony Burgess' great Shakespeare novel Nothing Like the Sun, in which a blithe and slightly stupid Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, cannot see how much Shakespeare, WS, is in love with him:

'Will,' said Harry, 'I am in love.'
WS put down his pen carefully. He stared for full five seconds. 'In love? In love?'
Harry giggled. 'Oh, it is not marriage love, it is no great lady. It is a country Lucrece in Islington. She is the wife of the keeper of the Three Tuns.'
'In love. In love. Oh, God save us.'
'She knows not who I am. I have been with Chapman. She believes I too am a poet. She will have none of me.' He giggled again.
'So the seed stirs at last. Well. He is in love.' Then WS began to laugh. 'And what thinks the husband of all this?'
'Oh, he is away. His father is dying in Norfolk, and yet he will not die. It is a slow quietus. I must have her, Will, before he returns. How shall I have her?'
'I should think,' WS said slowly, 'that your new friends will help you there. The Sussex men are, I hear, a wenching crowd.'
'They are not. They are all for boys. There is a house in Islington.'
'Well. Well, well. In love.' He picked up his pen, sighing. 'I have a poem to write, a commission of your lordship's. My mind is wholly taken up with the harm that comes to those who force the chastity of noble matrons. I should think like harm will come to the author of lowlier essays.'
'You mock me now. Write me a poem I can give to her. You have written sonnets enjoining me to love a woman, now write one that shall persuade a woman to love me.'
'Your friend Master Chapman is perhaps less busy than I that he can take you drinking to Islington. Ask him, my noble lord.'
'Will, I have no taste for this mockery. George cannot write that sort of verse. She would never understand any poem of his.'

The transcribing of Burgess makes us sorry for one exclusion After Shakespeare, one book missing that should have been excerpted: John Mortimer, he of Rumpole fame, wrote the novel that accompanied his BBC mini-series "Shakespeare" many years ago (the mini-series is well worth your time, if you should ever come across it, with Tim Curry like you've never seen him act before, in the title role), and for our money here at Stevereads, his Shakespeare is in many ways the single best Shakespeare novel ever written.

But such lapses are almost unknown in After Shakespeare, which features heaping helpings of just about everybody else, from Frank Harris to Duke Ellington to Herman Melville to Cole Porter to Virginia Woolf, who wrestles with the author in her journal as mightily as Jacob with the angel:

I read Shakespeare directly after I have finished writing, when my mind is agape & red & hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet know how amazing his stretch & speed & word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace & outrace my own, seeming to start equal & then I see him draw ahead & do things I could not in my wildest tumult & utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less & worser plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else's quickest; & the words drop so fast one can't pick them up. Look at this, Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd (that is a pure accident: I happened to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought; &, relaxing lets fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write. This is not 'writing' at all. Indeed, I could say that Shre surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

And of course where would any anthology of Shakespeare writing be without that sprightliest of intellects, John Jay Chapman, writing with his customary verve:

Parts of Shakespeare are ugly, and much of him is whimsical, and some of him is perverted. But his work is all a natural product, like the silk worm's thread. One can never be quite sure that even Thersites may not show under the microscope some beautiful patterns on his back, as Caliban does.

Make no mistake: you should all pull down your Shakespeare and read him first, for pleasure, for education, for the sheer goose-pimply thrill of his brilliance. But if you're in a mood for something connected but different from that great treasure-trove, another such trove awaits you. After Shakespeare will keep you reading, enthralled, until way past your bedtime.