This page is a series of random reviews of books that I read and which for some reason inspire some kind of response from me, good or bad or mixed. At the moment I’m not going to provide a contents list or group the reviews into categories because there are so few, but if they increase in number I may eventually need to. But that’s probably way down the line.

Any new reviews on here will start life in LATEST before being archived here.

Get Real: How to see through the hype, spin and lies of modern life by Eliane Glaser, Fourth Estate, 2012.

This is one of those books that your heart desperately wants to be wrong, but your brain realises is depressingly right. Glaser’s basic message is that the whole of modern life is built on bullshit. We have lost the ability to distinguish because real and fake because everything is fake, screaming out an ‘authenticity’ which has been fabricated for the purposes of profit or flattery or self-regard. And we are all infected. It is not just a wicked ‘them’ manipulating an honourable ‘us’ – we are all to blame for creating this world of fairground mirrors in which dead civilians become ‘collateral damage’ and promises of ‘transparency’ guarantee exactly the opposite.

It makes for a dispiriting read. Whether it’s the pretence that ideology no longer exists in order to further an unspoken neo-liberal ideology, or fake anti-elitism propagated by the very wealthy and privileged, or greenwashing and eco-advertising by companies that trumpet corporate social responsibility while stripping the earth bare, or the claims of cybertechnology as a way of setting the people free, Glaser’s critique hits the spot.

Glaser references Baudrillard only briefly, but his shadow hangs over this book. He is far from popular or widely respected, especially in the Anglophone world, and it may be true that he was prone to hyperbole and extravagant statement, but he at least made a genuine attempt to understand a world dominated by images and PR, a world powered not so much by overt oppression as by weasel words, sophistry and self-delusion.

In fact, one possible (Baudrillardian?) criticism of Glaser is that this problem with acknowledging reality is perhaps not peculiarly modern, but forms instead a permanent part of what used to be called ‘the human condition’, of our ability to play games with reality. There are other species which dissemble – mother birds that feign a broken wing to lead predators away from their chicks – but this behaviour appears limited and instinctual, not the hall of mirrors which human beings inhabit where images stretch to infinity and reality is as much linguistic construction as unmediated sense perception. Perhaps we are simply born liars.

The problem with books like this is that they leave us with a sense of total helplessness: the world is going to hell in a handcart and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. I don’t intend this to be a negative comment about Glaser: her critique is trenchant, substantial, and coherent, and she sets it out with relentless and impressive logic. In many ways, the sense of helplessness we feel on reading it proves her point: as Nazis tend to say in grade-Z movies, ‘resistance is futile’.

Books of this nature often offer a glimpse of hope in the form of ‘last chapter salvation’, where the author, having taken us close to closing the garage doors and switching on the carbon monoxide, now reveals how we can reverse all the depressing truths of the previous two hundred and fifty pages. Glaser is not so glib – all she offers in the way of resistance is the value of critique and healthy skepticism as a corrosive of all our dissembling. It’s not much of a platform to build our hopes on.

Failure: Why science is so successful by Stuart Firestein, Oxford University Press, 2016.

This book attracted my attention because it’s written by a scientist, yet champions the value of failure. I am old enough to have been around when ‘the right to fail’ was a clarion call in the arts, especially the theatre, and there was general agreement that government funding should go to challenging work that took risks and broke the mould, since this was the route to progress. So I was intrigued to find a book by a scientist which seemed to be saying something rather similar about advances in science.

Firestein does not write like a typical scientist. For a start, he is willing to be open about his errors and candid about his limitations, and he shows a genuine respect for the arts and humanities. I am not arguing here that all scientists are arrogant – most are commendably modest when they talk to each other – but that modesty tends to vanish as soon as they communicate with the non-scientific public. Then they revert to the stereotype of the man in the white coat: the cool, detached seeker of objective certainty who sifts impartially through the evidence in order to find the Truth with a capital T. Firestein doesn’t buy into this at all and is willing to say so publicly.

He is not merely arguing for the role of luck or serendipity in the praxis of science: on the contrary, he suggests that this is exaggerated, quoting Pasteur’s dictum that ‘Chance favours the prepared mind’. He argues instead that progress in science largely occurs through failure and error, since a failed experiment generally opens up more avenues for progress than a successful one. The nod to Kuhn’s ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science is obvious, and this book makes direct reference to Jacob’s similar categories of ‘night science’ and ‘day science’, but Firestein seems to be claiming more than either of these thinkers. Far from the white-coated seeker of Truth, the scientist is more like a person scrambling to find something in the dark, informed by his ignorance as much as by his knowledge. This mirrors similar thoughts in the arts: works that are flawed but ambitious often point the way forward, while those that are more narrowly successful but take no risks rarely lead anywhere interesting.

As a novelist and poet, I am heartened by Firestein’s recognition that science does not operate on some Olympian level of objectivity and his readiness to place science on the same footing as other forms of human endeavour. I worked in a STEM university in Singapore for two years, and I’m interested in philosophy of science and read lots of work by the New Atheists, so I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the arts are seen as frippery by many practising scientists. Of course, there are polite denials of this, and people like Dawkins make the right noises about the value of the arts, but he can’t quite disguise that essentially he sees them as entertainment, something we do in our spare time when we are relaxing from the substantive work of science. Gould’s concept of non-overlapping magisteria might be brought into play to counter this scientism and suggest some kind of equally valid role for the arts and humanities. But even if scientists are willing to accept Gould’s idea – and many are not – deep down most seem to operate within a hierarchical mindset which places science at the peak of human knowledge: the objective, heroic male doing the serious stuff while the arts dab on lipstick in the background.

One area of the book that I found depressing was Firestein’s assertion that funding for science has become focused on what is tried and trusted and is taking fewer and fewer risks. This has become true of the arts, where accessibility and anti-elitism have become the key criteria of the current century and the way to get public money. Of course, there is a lot of fine talk about ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ – these buzzwords are used all the time – but as is often the case with buzzwords, they are honoured more in the breach than in the observance. I assume this risk-averse behaviour is yet one more baneful effect of the increased role in academia and public life in general for well-paid administrators whose function is to create boxes for people to tick. It was very sad to read that this is also true of funding in science.

I have probably overstated Firestein’s critique of science as a disinterested and rational search for truth. But I agree with him that failure is a strong and positive force in human progress and I only hope we continue to embrace it in the future.

How We Got to Now: Six innovations that made the modern world by Steven Johnson, 2014, Riverhead Books.

 

This is a highly readable book based on a simple idea: take six of the most significant innovations in human history and tell a potted story of each to show how they have helped to shape the modern world. Johnson’s six are the manufacture of glass, ice and how we learned to keep things cold, the history of recording and playing back sound, the rise of sanitation and the fight against germs, the accurate measurement of time, and the production of artificial light.

Johnson is a very accessible writer whose work reads smoothly without ever becoming glib or banal. He has the enviable knack of knowing just how much serious information to give so that his book never descends into coffee-table froth, while avoiding the kind of pernickety elaboration of detail which would turn reading it into a chore. He picks his nuggets wisely. He is also expert at balancing human interest stories with the abstract ideas that they highlight. It all sounds easy, and Johnson makes it seem easy, but I’m sure it’s not.

Above all, he is a master of the memorable little detail. My favourites include the microchip plant in Texas where people have to wear space-age suits not to protect themselves but to ensure that they don’t contaminate the space with their microbial parasites and their flaking skin . Then there’s the story of the workers who used to crawl inside the skulls of sperm whales to scrape off an oily white substance in order to make candles. Or the fact that the first item to ever be bar coded was a stick of chewing gum. Or that the first shipment of ice to the Caribbean was a failure not because (as we might imagine) all the ice melted, but because the locals had no idea what to do with it when it got there.

Several themes emerge during the book, although on the whole Johnson deals with them en passant and avoids too much direct theorising. One is that the historical changes set off by technological advance are unpredictable and often come in completely unrelated areas (what Johnson calls the ‘hummingbird effect’, from the way the evolution of nectar in plants altered the design of hummingbirds). For example, he links the chlorination of water to prevent disease with changes in styles of bathing costume for women (via the building of public swimming pools). Another theme of the book is how often technological or scientific discovery blossoms in several places at the same time, as if there is indeed a zeitgeist or synchronicity operating within history. Another is how often innovation is a collective phenomenon, although this is obscured by the fact that the history books tend to be dominated by a handful of key names.

This would be a great holiday read for the beach – it’s more than fluff and yet it won’t give you a headache. You could also read it in small chunks, picking it up and putting it down without any loss of flow. I’ve read a lot of popular books of this quality over the last few years. Academia may be heading for crisis as the bean-counters and box-tickers take over, but intelligent writing for the lay reader seems to be in rude health.