The World of Agatha Christie (Martin Fido, 2012)

Martin Fido. The World of Agatha Christie (2012) A series of two-page spreads on topics that add up to a life and a survey of the works, and their adaptations to other media. I learned a few new facts about Christie’s ancestry and early life: she had an upper middle class upbringing. Her service in a hospital during the 1914-18 war no doubt widened her view of life, which helped her devise convincing plots and characters.

Her wartime marriage to Archie Christie meant more to her than him. As Mary Westmacott, she wrote love romances. I think she needed to write them to work out her feelings of abandonment and betrayal by Archie Christie.

A good summary of Christie’s life and work, but not a keeper. **

Two by Feynman: Occasional pieces add up to an autobiography

 

Feynman explaining one of his diagrams, and a couple of helpful hints for his students

Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (1985) Feynman’s memoirs, recorded, assembled and edited by his student and friend Ralph Leighton.

Feynman is one of my heroes. Ever since I heard his anecdote about how his father showed him the difference between knowing words and knowing things, I’ve been hooked on his straightforward common sense. I don’t understand his contributions to quantum mechanics, because I can’t do the math of quantum mechanics. But I understand that his approach to making sense of the world works.

He was an intensely curious man. If he came across something he didn’t understand, he tried to figure it out. The puzzles that he loved most were about physics, but he also strove to make sense of art (he learned to draw, which trained his perception well enough that he could tell the difference between a Raphael and painting by one of Raphael’s students). He wanted to understand dreams, and how we can make images when we don’t have sensory stimuli to prompt perception (he died before fMRI scans provided the basis for an answer). He wanted to understand hallucinations, and spent several sessions in Dr Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks.

He liked mastering gadgets, earning pocket money as a boy by fixing broken radios. He wanted to master drumming, so he practiced, practiced, practiced. He did the same with combination locks used on file cabinets at Los Alamos when he worked at the Manhattan Project, demonstrating how insecure they were, which eventually prompted the authorities to buy better safes. (He tells how a big-wig colonel who wanted the best safe for himself didn’t bother resetting the combination from the factory setting, thus proving well before computers that the greatest weakness in any security scheme is the human being). When he discovered something that mattered to him, he changed his behaviour: when he was still a young man he stopped drinking because he didn’t want to screw up his thinking machine.

He didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially when they came on stage with pompous claims to scientific rigour. His Caltech commencement address dissected “cargo cult science”, of which he found depressingly many examples in the social sciences. He didn’t like what receiving the Nobel Prize did to his reputation: he found his fame was used by many institutions to attract audiences. To have a Nobelist as a guest speaker reflected glory on the sponsor. Feynman hated that.

I’ve heard Feynman speak on recordings and in videos available on YouTube. Reading this book, I heard his voice again. A wonderful book by a wonderful human being. ****

Richard P. Feynman. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988) More memoirs, lectures, and anecdotes, as well as letters, sketches, and reports. Part 1 includes the title piece,  Feynman’s memoir of his first wife Arlene, who died of tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Part 2 is a dossier of his participation in the Challenger investigation. His key insight, that the rubber sealing rings in the booster joints could not adapt to cold temperatures, was prompted by his Pentagon minder, a General Kutyna, who was savvy in the ways of Washington, and so was able to give Feynman the hint that set him on the trail. The book also includes photographs, badly printed, but good enough to get an impressions of people and the occasion.

Two things stood out for me. First, that Feynman was a private man, who took great care in showing only what he wanted to show of his inner life. His love for his wives and his family nevertheless comes through, as do his essential playfulness, and his fierce love of the truth. Then there’s his integrity. He won’t fudge the truth as he sees it, nor will he pretend certainty where there is none. A remarkable man. ****

Update 2026-05-11: I've come across a video supposedly showing Feynman explaining why getting to Mars is impossible. It was generated using AI.  Th explanations are valid, but they're not quite in the style of Feynman. "Feynman" is shown in colour, but his facial expressions are limited, and he doesn't move around like Feynman actually did. Beware: there will be many more of these.

 

Conan Doyle's Father

 

Michael Baker. The Doyle Diary (1978) Reproduction of one of Charles Altamont Doyle’s sketchbooks, made while he was at Sunnyside, a lunatic asylum in which he spent most of the last years of his life. He was Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. Arthur in his early reminiscences dealt harshly with his father, who was not the financial success he could perhaps have been. Later, Arthur mellowed, perhaps because both his medical and his personal experience showed him that Charles was a sick man, badly treated. Baker tells the story at length, not easy to do, because there is little documentary evidence of Charles life, and partly because there was a good deal of reticence about the details of his ill health. Baker concludes that Charles suffered from epilepsy made worse by alcoholism. Charles was not a pushy man, he lacked his older brothers’ ambition and energy. Dicky Doyle had a successful career as a cartoonist for Punch, for example. Perhaps alcohol was self-medication for his sense of failure.
     The drawings and text of Charles sketchbook show us a man of gentle feelings and sometimes mischievous humour. He describes himself as a “harmless old gentleman”, which on the evidence he was, He certainly wasn’t a lunatic, even by the vague standards of the time. Long-term care homes existed, but were little more than hotels with some medical services, so the asylum was the only place to tend him when he became unable to care for himself and his family.
     I don’t recall where I found this book, or when. And addition to a collection of Holmesiana, and a document relevant to the study of our treatment of the harmless ones among us. **½

Alan Bullock: Hitler

     Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) A re-read. See my first review  About the only things to add are, first, that Hitler suffered from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
     In his Epilogue, Bullock points out that Hitler was a European, and that the malaise that he embodied was not unique to Germany. He writes Hitler’s idiom was German, but the thoughts and emotions to which he gave expression have a more universal currency. Quite so, and the rise of the far right, of ethnic nationalisms, of the paranoia triggered by the globalisation of our world, show that these thoughts and emotions are never far below the surface.
     Bullock ends his Epilogue with  [Hitler] was in revolt against ‘the System’ not just in Germany but in Europe, against the liberal-bourgeois order, symbolised for him in the Vienna which had once rejected him. To destroy this was his mission, the mission in which he never ceased to believe, and in this, the most deeply felt of his purposes, he did not fail. Europe may rise again, but the old Europe between the 1789, the year of the French Revolution, an 1939, the year of Hitler’s War, has gone forever – and the last figure in its history is Adolf Hitler, the architect of its ruin. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – If you seek a monument, look around.
     The European Union is an attempt to refashion that liberal bourgeois polity. Brexit is an attempt to repudiate it. It’s ironic that the liberal democracy that refused to surrender to Hitler in 1942 is now the carrier of the same infection, and the one that came to England’s aid is sick with it.
     800 and some pages, and oddly enough a page-turner. Recommended. ***

Great Depression Memoir (Why Shoot the Teacher, Braithwaite 1965)

   Max Braithwaite. Why Shoot the Teacher (1965) Autobiography dressed up as fiction. The names have been altered, and probably some details too, to prevent too easy identification of the people whom Max met and worked for in his first job. He detrains at “Bleke”, Saskatchewan, and avoids frostbite on the ride to the school only by running behind the wagon from time to time. A foreshadowing of his mostly depressing experiences teaching in a one room school in the middle of the Great Depression.
    His teacherage consists of two rooms partitioned off in the school basement, populated by mice. There is no human company within sight after the children go home. Nor a tree. The farmers are barely able to feed themselves and their livestock, never mind a teacher, yet they manage to eke out some entertainment and pleasure at a dance and the Christmas pageant. At the end of the school year, Max decides to leave. He notes that never once did Lyle King, the school-board chair, call him by his name. Max doesn’t mention his name either.
    The book was made into a film, available on Youtube. It reconstructs the book into a story. Braithwaite’s book is a series of extended anecdotes and musings about his job, education, the economy, the society that surrounds him, and so on. It adds up to his experience of the Depression, and has the ring of truth. Braithwaite developed a reputation as a humourist, but there’s damn little humour in this book. The title has nothing to do with the book. But it’s worth reading all the same, especially if you want to get a feel for what it was like to live through the Depression on the Prairies. **½

The Life And Times of Agatha Christie

     Martin Fido. The World of Agatha Christie (1999) I bought this book because the photos in it looked good. Now that I’ve read it, I’d recommend it to any Christie fan as a very good summary of her life and work.
     Fido uses the coffee-table book format to present carefully constructed snippets of information that add up to a complete picture of Christie’s life, and a fairly good summary of her work.  He’s a fan, but not a blindly idolising one, and reminds us that Christie was capable of producing duds. He notices her political naivete and casual racism, which contrast with her basic kindness and decency, suggesting that she didn’t reflect much on some aspects of life. We learn that she was an accomplished musician, that she took her work seriously, that she aspired to serious fiction as Mary Westmacott, that she and Max Mallowan had a happy life together, and that religion for her was a matter of faith, not rules and rituals.
       Well selected photos, but not enough of them. The date means that more recent adaptations aren’t treated. Too many typos, the kind perpetrated by over-reliance on spellcheck. There’s a more thorough Life of Christie hiding in this slim book. Recommended. ***

Dr. Karl Theodor Heigel. Andreas Hofer. Ein Vortrag (1875)

     

Dr. Karl Theodor Heigel. Andreas Hofer. Ein Vortrag (1875) The title translates as Andreas Hofer: A Lecture, it’s the text of a talk given at a meeting of the Münchener Volksbildungsverein, which I infer to be one of the many societies for popular education that flourished all over Europe in the 19th century. Heigel surveys Hofer’s life, and analyses the resistance to Bavarian and French occupation of the Tyrol. This occupation was a part of the messy transfers of territory during the Napoleonic wars. Bavaria got the Tyrol because Austria was defeated. Later, when Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, the Tyrol reverted to Austria.
     Hofer was a Tyrolese patriot and fervent subject of the Hapsburg Emperor. One of the tragedies in his story is that Vienna didn’t feel strong enough to support his fight, even though he saw it as a struggle for the Tyrol’s rightful place in the Hapsburg empire. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Hofer.
     The lecture is quite readable, clearly composed to be heard by a non-academic audience. Heigel proposes two main theses: first, that Hofer was a complicated character, with many virtues and faults, whose adherence to principle could be seen as stubbornness in the face of overwhelming odds; and second, that his patriotism is a model for German nationalists.
     Apparently, at the time Austrians didn’t revere Hofer as they later did. I was taught that Hofer was an iconic Austrian patriot, a model for Austrian self-awareness. Heigel equivocates about his admiration of Hofer’s resistance to Bavarian authority, partly I think because he can’t very well defend a rebel against his own government, and partly because Hofer was merely a peasant. As a military leader, Hofer is notable as a wager of what we now call guerrilla warfare. In the last few paragraphs Heigel slides into pan-German nationalism, and elevates Hofer from local rebel to national hero. Neat trick.
     The author, a professor of history and Bavarian State Archivist, wrote a number of works on German and Austrian history. Collections are available, but I don’t know whether or which collection includes this lecture. My copy is an original. I could not find an entry for it in the German National Library. German Wiki has a brief bio: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Theodor_von_Heigel
     Interesting and informative, despite its tendentious use of Hofer for Heigel’s pan-German ideology. **½

Update 2020 06 28: I donated this pamphlet to the University if Alberta, Edmonton. As far as I know it one of only three extant copies.

The Imitation Game (2014)

      The Imitation Game (2014) [D: Morton Tyldum. Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode] A fictionalised version of Turing’s life, focussing on his work at Bletchley Park, where he improved on a Polish code-breaking machine and invented the theoretical basis of the digital computer, and ending with his arrest on charges of gross indecency and the effects of synthetic estrogen on his personality and mind.
     The script emphasises the strained human relationships and emotional costs, and strongly hints that Turing was autistic. It dramatises the research and the conflicts within Bletchley Park, portraying its Commander as a narrow-minded results-focussed martinet who despised academics. The relationship between Turing and Joan Clarke has the ring of truth, despite the use of Knightley to act the part. The producers skim over the math and logic, rightly deciding I think that too much technical detail would cause eye-glazing. But an unfortunate side-effect is a variation on the mad-scientist-geek stereotype: Turing is not normal. I think that many, perhaps most, movie-goers will on the one hand sympathise with the emotional pain Turing suffered, and on the other will feel confirmed in the attitude that science is not for ordinary folk. The victimisation of Turing as a gay man will cause similar mixed responses.
     Having seen Codebreaker (See review of February 24, 2015) I think was an advantage, since it supplied an objective framework for this film’s point of view. We can never know what it feels like to be someone else; we even have difficulty reconstructing our own early selves. Biopics like this one help us, and when a nuanced script, a uniformly high level of action, and a carefully paced narrative rhythm come together as they do in this movie, we only be grateful. It’s worth seeing, both as a great movie and as a credible and moving interpretation of a troubled man’s life. ****

The Genius Within (2009)

      The Genius Within (2009) A bio of Gould that pays homage to his music, but focuses on his love life. He fell in love with Cornelia Foss, and she with him, so she moved her children to Toronto, and for a while it seemed they might marry. But Gould became increasingly dependent on his anti-depressant meds, and eventually she returned to her husband. Gould died of a series of strokes in 1982 at the age of 50. His death hit the children especially hard.
     An above average documentary, with reminiscences by Cornelia, the children, Lorne Tulk (the sound engineer on Gould’s recordings), and other friends and acquaintances. The biographer speaks a few times, and confesses that there’s a mystery he was not able to penetrate. This remark is echoed by other people. In the end, what remains is Gould’s music, and  the impression of a life that was perhaps less fulfilling emotionally than it might have been.
     Does the genius of Gould’s interpretations of Bach match the cost of his and others’ emotional pain? Perhaps. Everybody must balance the costs and gains of his life. Gould came to accept the cost, enjoying his time at the family cottage, and in playful impersonations of imaginary figures, recorded in photographs. Hearing his second recordings of the Goldberg Variations, I imagined scenes from a movie, of figures in a cityscape at night, together but alone, wandering in and out of lights and shadows, while some unknown hunters close in on them with dispassionate intensity, preparing for the kill. ***

Julie & Julia (2009)

      Julie & Julia (2009) [D:Nora Ephron. Amy Adams, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci]
     A mostly pleasant account of how Julie Powell cooks and blogs her way through Julia Child’s book over one year, alternating with Child’s career as cook and author.
     In 2002, Julie Powell decided to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about it over 365 days. Her story is alternates with Julia Child’s, beginning with a posting to Paris with her foreign service husband Paul, attending a Cordon Blue cooking school, and so on. Powell later wrote a book about her year of cooking, Child wrote an autobiography, these form the basis for the screenplay.
     The food was gorgeous, I wanted to eat it. The story unfolds slowly, the cross-cutting between Powell’s and Child’s lives works. We need to know something about the history of the 1950s to fully understand Child’s story; the movie makes me want to read her book. Powell’s story has an oddly 60's feel to it, even though it’s set in early 2000s New York.
     Adams as Julie Powell is appealing, even though her marriage to Eric (Chris Messina) is a little too good to be true. Tucci as Paul Child is cool, calm, and collected, and very supportive of Julia, not surprising considering the fabulous food she cooks for him. Meryl Streep as Julia Child is irritating. She’s not acting, she’s impersonating, and the result is a caricature. At one point, Julie and Eric watch a Saturday Night Live parody of Julia’s cooking show, and there’s really not much difference between that Julia and Streep’s version.
     There’s no question that Julia was one of the people who moved food from being a more or less inoffensive fuel to a central pleasure of life. She was a larger than life figure, but the nuances of her character and her relationships with friends and family are barely hinted at here. We need a well-done biopic of this amazing woman. I liked Powell’s decision to straighten herself out by assigning herself a year-long task, but I don’t feel any desire to know more about her. I would like to enjoy some of Julia’s dishes. **½

B. Foss & J. Anderson. Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (2000)

B. Foss & J. Anderson. Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (2000) Catalogue and essays to accompany an exhibition. Mary Reid was married to George Agnew Reid, six years her junior. They met at art school in Pennsylvania (where she was born), and moved to Toronto after their marriage. Mary was an accomplished artist, but she kept herself in the background. In fact, the two first hits on-line for George Agnew Reid's bios don’t even mention her. Janet Anderson in her essay claims that Mary negotiated a difficult line between housewife and professional artist, by accepting conventional ideas about “woman’s sphere”, and making her art conform to those conventions, at least in subject matter. I suspect that George more or less subtly dominated her. He married a mutual friend and collaborator within a year or so of Mary’s death (she also is not mentioned in those bios).
    

  In any case, although Mary enjoyed both critical and commercial success in her lifetime, especially as “painter of flowers”, her popularity declined steeply after her death, and she was until this exhibition forgotten. Her art was much influenced by contemporary aesthetic conventions; it reminds me most of the “atmospheric impressionism” of Central Europe, itself a development of both French impressionism and earlier classicism. She is a superb colourist. Her A Harmony in Grey and Yellow is an astonishing exploration of these colours, offset with rosy pinks, subtle greens, and pale blues, using an arrangement of flowers as the ostensible subject. The soft and diffused lighting accentuates the subtlety and range of colours. Other titles also suggest a compulsion to explore colour. I think she was a true artist, who wanted to work out how to use paint to enhance one’s power to see the world around us. 

    The few photographs of her show a guarded expression. Mary looks as if she did not want anyone to know her true feelings and attitudes. One taken at about age 50 does show a slightly melancholy and perhaps irritated set of the mouth. One must be careful what one reads in posed portraits, but the hints of suppressed anger are all the more significant for being almost perfectly concealed. She was 31 when she married George, who was 25. She was headed for spinsterhood, and perhaps discovering what must have appeared as a kindred spirit in art school gave her expectations of happiness that were not fully realised. Even George’s portrait of her shows a woman who is keeping herself hidden from the viewer’s gaze. This concealment is doubly significant considering that it was her husband that painted the portrait.
      George on the other hand got what he presumably wanted: a wife who would understand his artistic temperament, and would be willing to support him in his work. I’ve looked at images of his paintings. Arranged chronologically, they show a competent workman who adapts easily to the latest fashions in draftsmanship and colour. Contrast Signing the Mortgage from 1890 with Dawn from 1925. The former is very “Victorian” in its classicist use of light, its placement of figures, its modelling, and above all in its telling of a sentimental story. Dawn, painted 35 years later, is an art nouveau pastiche in its use of dark foreground trees backlit by the rising sun, and a discreet nude semi-hidden in the shadows. It follows the new style of illustrating magazines and advertising, and decorating the home. The paintings are so different that one could be forgiven for thinking they were done by different men. I don’t get a sense of George from his pictures; I do get a sense of a man who was willing to paint all kinds of things, as long as they would sell. He was a decorator; in fact he was associated with what we would now call an interior decoration consultant. He had great skill, but lacked vision.
      As it is, I don’t see in George’s work what I see in Mary’s: an attempt to make sense of paint and light and colour. Not that George is a piker. His work is extremely skilful. And that is the highest praise I can give him. C W Jefferys (in a previously unpublished essay) claimed that Mary’s work was a perfect harmony of self and subject, the best form of self-expression, which he takes to be the essence of art. After looking a George’s work, I think I see what he means.
      Mary committed almost nothing to paper: she is one of the least documented people of that time, especially considering that her social and professional status both imply a legacy of notes, minutes of meetings, letters, a diary, and so on. Where are they? This reticence encourages the speculation that she deliberately concealed her true self, that she wore the conventional housewife as a disguise. All we have are her paintings, which range from mildly interesting (Nightfall at Wychwood Park) to exceedingly competent (the chrysanthemum paintings, many of the landscapes) to stunning (A Harmony of Grey and Yellow, Morning Sunshine). She liked green, often the bright sunlit green that Varley also favoured, and like Varley, she used a range of oranges, reds and browns to contrast with the green.
      She also, like so many Canadian artists, expresses an odd stillness, as if the landscape, or the few figures she painted, were holding their breath, waiting for something ecstatic or terrible. Perhaps this stillness is another mode of disguise. The conventional subjects are painted in a way that suggests feelings, attitudes, and interests that she chose not to state explicitly in her work, but did hint at in her titles. Unlike George, whose lack of personal content I think results from his journeyman stance, Mary had something to say, but would not say it for fear of offending the carefully constructed middle-class roles she and her husband needed in order to make a living as artists. As long as potential buyers saw them as respectable providers of decorative and uplifting genre paintings, they were safe. What amazes (and delights) me is that a sense of Mary’s genius comes through her work despite her efforts to present herself as a woman who knew and accepted her role. Janet Anderson believes this role was imposed, and limited Mary, ignoring the evidence that an equally bourgeois role was imposed on George. Women and men generally accept the roles they perceive as proper for themselves, however much they may chafe against the specific strictures of their times. Mary, unlike her husband, transcended those strictures in her art. This may be why Jefferys saw her art as expressing her self. That he identified this self as a pure and womanly one merely shows that he too was a creature of his time. I don’t know whether he saw similar qualities of self-expression in George’s work. I don’t.
      All in all, an interesting read, with very good reproductions of Mary’s work. We bought this book some time ago, well after the exhibition, which we did not see. It was Marie’s choice. Good one. *** (2010)

    Update 2021-09-09: The Toronto Star has a review of  Molly Peacock's The Flower Diary, an imaginative recreation of Hiester Reid's life. Find it here.

Simon Winchester. The Professor and the Madman (1999)

     Simon Winchester. The Professor and the Madman (1999; p/b reissue 2005) Winchester’s Krakatoa prompted the reissue of this book, which promptly made the best sellers lists too. A Dr Minor committed a murder, was confined to Broadmoor, and spent a large part of his life there assisting in the production of the OED. James Murray eventually went to visit him, and a friendship ensued. Minor’s contribution to the OED consisted of several tens of thousands of quotations. This work certainly mitigated the effects of his mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, which nowadays would be treated with drugs and behavioural therapy, a treatment that would probably prevent Minor from doing the work which helped him survive for so many years. His last years were marked by increasing severity of his symptoms, and physical decay. He was a medical doctor, which means that he would be (at least intermittently) fully aware of what was wrong with him. Good book. **½ (2008)

James Filby. Credit Valley Railway (1974)

     James Filby. Credit Valley Railway (1974) This is an annoying book. Filby has done a lot of research, but has neither the scholar’s understanding of the significance of his data, nor the journalist’s sense of narrative. The result is more of a compilation of source material, both quoted and paraphrased, with bridging remarks. What he needed was an editor. The maps on the end pages are awful, being a reproduction of a printed map with thick ink strokes superimposed to show the route of the CVR. The photos are poorly reproduced, which is the fault of the Boston Mills Press (their later books have much better quality printing). It’s a pity, since this could have been a good history of the CVR. Whoever writes one will no doubt find Filby’s work useful, if only for its source list, if he can decipher it, that is, as Filby has no idea how to format a bibliography. * (2008)

Ngaio Marsh. Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) & Opening Night (1951)

 

    Ngaio Marsh. Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) A murder takes place in plain view of a roomful of restaurant guests, including Alleyn. The puzzle is one of Ngaio’s lesser efforts, too tricky by half, and with insufficient clues, but the story-telling and the characterisations are as usual very well done. **½ (2007)

     Ngaio Marsh. Opening Night (1951) One of Marsh’s best: it’s about theatre and Theatre, told mostly through the viewpoint of Martyn Tarne, a New Zealander whose cash was stolen shortly after her arrival in England and who fetches up at the Vulcan Theatre, run by a distant relative of hers. The theatrical plot is complex, the characters are believable, the on- and back-stage atmosphere is beautifully rendered, and the murder, when it comes, is seamlessly integrated into the story of how Martyn comes to go on as understudy and succeeds in her role and ambition. Alleyn does a neat job of ‘tecking, but we’re used to that. Wonderful book, worth reading as a story about theatre (with a bit of crime included.) **** (2007)

A. C. Kalmbach. Model Railroad Track and Layout (1953, 5th edition)

     A. C. Kalmbach. Model Railroad Track and Layout (1953, 5th edition). Kalmbach covers all the bases, focussing mostly on design of the layout, with the latter chapters of the book dealing with track, and bench work. Like Armstrong in the 50s and later, Kalmbach emphasises prototype operation. Some of the material is reprinted from Model Railroader. Still a good text, although not as well organised as it could be, and of course the line art and halftones suffer from the shortcomings of mid-20th century printing technology. Out of print, but worth buying if you find a copy. **½ (2007)

Earnest F. Carter. Electric Control of Clockwork Railways (1951)

     Earnest F. Carter. Electric Control of Clockwork Railways (1951) After reading this, I wonder why anyone would want to go to the trouble of electrical control of clockwork trains. Carter is a born tinkerer, and his solutions undoubtedly work, but oh what complicated devices he ends up with! A brake that works by electromagnetic attraction to the steel wheel of the (O scale) trains. A ramp with a sliding shoe that engages a pin on the loco and brings it to a slow stop. A magnetic governor to control the speed of the locomotive by creating electromagnetic drag on a spinning iron core. All very ingenious. All to make clockwork trains behave as much like electrically driven ones as possible. And, after all is said and done, no cheaper than electric trains, unless one prices one’s labour at zero or less. A negative labour price means a positive return on one's time, which may be Carter's aim, since he obviously spent many happy hours devising and building his gadgets.

IOW, the book is lovely example of what happens when someone hangs onto an obsolete technology long past its viability. The last chapter describes making a zinc-potassiumbichromate battery, a fearsome thing that requires mixing a sulfuric acid solution. A curio, and a very English book. *** (2007)

Simon Schama. Scribble, Scribble. Scribble (2010)

     Simon Schama. Scribble, Scribble. Scribble (2010) Schama‘s TV series impressed me hugely, so I couldn’t resist buying this book. He’s passionate and personal about his subjects, supporting his insights and judgments with thorough scholarship. These occasional pieces for the most part deal with non-scholarly subjects such as cooking, travel, politics, and ice cream. He’s one of those foodies who makes you believe you can cook, at least while reading the essay. Even his most casual investigations entail historical and cultural research. He’s a scholar no matter what, especially when he’s discussing art, which changes the way you look at pictures. He tells us enough about his life and family that we believe his more focussed responses to what he’s talking about.
     And “talk” is the word. Even if you hadn’t heard him on TV, I think you’d hear a voice here. The voice of a man who’s found what he likes, what he wants, what matters to him, and can share his intellectual and emotional engagement. The essay from the beginning was personal. The charm of Montaigne is our sense that we are in his company when we read him. This goes for Schama, too, and exhilarating company it is. ****

W. J Burley. Wycliffe and the House of Fear (1995)

     W. J Burley. Wycliffe and the House of Fear (1995) An ancient and dysfunctional Catholic family’s house supplies the setting. Five years after the current scion’s first wife dies in a boating accident, the second wife appears to have committed suicide. Wycliffe, on convalescent holiday in the neighbourhood, is near enough the end of his leave that he’s assigned the crime. A typical Burley meditation on crime and criminals, moody, atmospheric, psychologically perceptive. Family history and misplaced pride causes the tangle of stupidity that triggers the crime; the perpetrator is clearly insane. I’d like to see more of Wycliffe’s marriage. Burley’s books are better in the setup than in the resolution, but are always interesting reading. **½

Eric L. Johnson The Iron Horse Comes to the Klondike (2012)

     Eric L. Johnson The Iron Horse Comes to the Klondike (2012) A labour of love, about as complete a history of the Klondike’s railways as we likely to get. It’s an expanded an updated version of Mining Railways of the Klondike (1994), including field research and new photos by friends of the author.
     Almost as soon as the gold rush brought people to Dawson City, coal mines were developed for heating and power generation. Narrow gauge railways and river boats transported the stuff. It was poor coal, but it served the purpose. It’s unclear just how much money was made and lost on these lines, but the few available figures indicate that the promoters must have made a fair coin on their commissions. There’s enough photographic evidence that one could build a credible model based on one of these lines, and a few drawings based on the extant bits and pieces rotting in the bush. Porter supplied most of the motive power.
     Much of the history is gathered from newspaper stories. The tone throughout these stories is boosterish and optimistic. The photos are well enough reproduced that one can tell that many of the older originals were I think mostly afterthoughts made when a photographer happened to be handy and had an unexposed plate or two left.
One of those wonderful books that gets written and compiled only because someone was willing to devote far too much time and energy in the project. ****

Alfred Bester. Star Light, Star Bright (1978)

    Alfred Bester. Star Light, Star Bright (1978) Anthology of Bester’s best, volume 2. Bester is a clever writer. He likes to take on new challenges, in theme, genre, motif, plot, and so on. The result is usually entertaining, sometimes thought-provoking, but never moving. I didn’t reread a number of stories that I’d read before; the ones that were new to me passed the time pleasantly enough.
     The plots are what I call gimmick twists. For example, the title story is about a kid whose talent is wishing. He doesn’t realise this, of course, but the results are spectacular. His friend wants to use his telescope in the rain, so the kid wishes he had a telescope that would see through the rain and clouds. It does. This and other gadgets  attract the attention of the government, who want to use him as some kind of weapon. He wishes these and other people who bother him would just go away and leave him alone. So they end up on a road forever going away. *½ to **½