Photos as Social History: New York, Sunshine and History

    Roger Whitehouse. New York: Sunshine and Shadow. (1974) New York from 1850 to 1915, in photographs. A splendid collection of photos, with informative captions, adding up to a social and economic history of the city. We forget that New York began as a scattered collection of villages and hamlets, which were absorbed into the city as it expanded northward from its beginning on Manhattan Island. The early photos show buildings surrounded by fields. The roads were surfaced with gravel and mud. The elegant streets of middle and upper middle class houses became slums when their former residents moved ever further away from the city centre.
     Study and contemplation of these photos shows, I think, why New York became the world class city that it now is: from the beginning, its residents focused not only on making money, but on using that money to invest in amenities. Modern accounting methods would not have justified ventures such as the building of the street railways, or of apartment and office blocks at a country crossroad. Some of the earliest mansions of the oligarchy were built in the middle of fields, but the streets were already laid out to accommodate the carriages and cabs and streetcars that followed the first builders.
     Reproduction of the photos is above average for the 1970s. Whitehouse has done his research. A secondhand-book sale find, given to me. A keeper. ****

Humans Survive: After Doomsday by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson. After Doomsday (1962) Not a post-atomic-holocaust novel. This time, it’s the aliens who have destroyed Earth. Sterilised it, in fact. But a handful of Earth ships that were in interstellar space have survived, and these preserve Earth’s heritage even while they hunt and eventually find Earth’s killers. Typical SF pulp from the Golden Age (1940-60s), with its plausible but hokey science of FTL travel, its motley collection of alien civilisations, its courtly love romance between hero and heroine, but unusual in its assumption of women’s equality to men (within a strictly 1950s moral framework, however).
     Anderson’s not only a skilful craftsman (the story moves along at a nice clip), he’s also wildly inventive, albeit within a rather limited understanding of sociology and biology. A sterilised Earth would no longer have any oxygen, for example, for without green plants there would be no regeneration of the oxygen that would have been bound to carbon etc when the planet burned. The aliens just aren’t alien enough: they are really just humans with funny body-plans and peculiar bio-chemistry. Of course, inventing a truly alien psychology is by definition impossible: we can imagine only variations on our own. But within these limits, Anderson’s a cut or two above the rest.
     This is a relatively early book, clearly a potboiler, but an above average example of the genre. I enjoyed reading it. **½

The Tipping Point (Gladwell 2002)

     Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point (2002) Gladwell developed the book from an article in The New Yorker, and it shows. While the whole text is interesting, longeurs do threaten to set in before the halfway mark. Extending the text to book length required adding examples, which means repetitions. I read the first four chapters over a couple of days, then took almost three weeks to finish the book.
     Gladwell examines the tipping point in a social context, and identifies the factors that trigger a “social epidemic.” His bibliography suggests that he didn’t look at chaos theory, else he would have realised that he was discussing a classic chaotic system: a network of feedback loops that can change size and state very rapidly when one or more variables reach some threshold.
     It’s a tricky business identifying those variables and thresholds. Gladwell is most interesting (to me, anyway) when he discusses how experience established some of them. For example, Hutterites have found that when a colony reaches 150, it must fission. They’ve made it a rule. Just why group size has a negative effect on how well the group fulfills its goals when it passes 150 is “not well understood”. A priori, there is no reason to suppose that communication should become compromised at this size, but that’s what happens. The group size effect is important for management theory and practice: Gladwell has a case study that examines how one company rigorously enforces the group size rule when organising projects and expanding capacity.
     Gladwell is most interested in how insights into several factors can be be used to control and to trigger social epidemics. Marketers love the book for this reason, as the pre-title blurbs make only too clear. Group size, message “stickiness”, and the behaviours of key figures he labels connectors, mavens, and salesmen are key factors. He wrote the book before the rise of Facebook and other social platforms, which have magnified and accelerated social epidemics. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading. It certainly clarified my thinking about why and how Facebook has exacerbated tribal divisions.
     Despite its age, the book is not outdated. Recommended. ***½

Wycliffe digs into the past: Wycliffe and the Four Jacks

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Four Jacks (1985) A famous but extremely publicity-shy writer ends up dead after receiving five warning letters in the mail. Wycliffe happens to be on holiday in that part of Cornwall, so of course he has to lead the investigation. As often with Burley’s stories, the past is the key to the murder. A typically low-key Wycliffe tale, with nicely done local ambience, and enough glimpses of Wycliffe’s marriage, his collegial relationships, and local people to create a world, one that I like to live in for a few hours. I think Burley’s Wycliffe stories are undervalued. There was a TV series, too. Recommended. ***

Bland and boring: Cat Lover's Companion

     [Project Team]. Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: Cat Lover’s Companion (2006) The Bathroom Readers began as edgy, often rude, eclectic collections loosely related to some theme. I emphasise loosely. Fun reads, excellent potato chip books. This one lacks the edginess, doesn’t roam into “that reminds me” territory, and tells not only bland but useful stories. I found it at a Value Village, and should have left it there. *

Three Nero Wolfe Stories.

     Rex Stout. Death Times Three (1985) Two uncollected magazine stories and an unpublished one. The usual snappy narrative by “Archie Goodwin”, Nero Wolfe in fine form, solving neatly plotted puzzles, all fairly clued, and just enough characterisation to keep us interested for the fraction of an hour’s entertainment offered by each tale. I found this at a yard sale, still in print, available from the usual sources. At 25 cents, the price I paid, a great bargain. ** to ***.

Krakatoa

     Simon Winchester. Krakatoa (2003) Another yard sale find. This book became a best-seller on publication, and made Winchester something of a media personality. He’s written a few more books since then. If they are all at least as good as this one, they’re worth reading. It’s a discursive multi-layered history not only of the volcano’s eruption (and destruction) on August 27, 1883, but of geology and vulcanology. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when plate tectonics (first adumbrated by Alfred Wegener) was elucidated, that the mechanism of the eruption was understood. Confession: I grew up when Wegener’s theory was still characterised as pseudo-science, and I felt vaguely embarrassed for feeling there might be something to it. A salutary reminder, in hindsight, that it’s not easy to tell the difference between crackpot and incomplete theories.
     Winchester’s talent is creating a large and detailed story combining many narratives. If that occasionally creates longeurs, that’s a low price to pay for finally understanding how it all hangs together. The book is still in print, and used copies are available from all the usual sources. Recommended. Look for Winchester videos on Youtube. *** See also The Professor and the Madman.

1930s German Taste: A book of photos taken with a Rollei

     Walther Heering. Le Livre D’or du Rolleiflex. (1936) Paul Franck and Reinhold Heidecke teamed up in 1920 to produce optical stereo cameras. They used their experience to design and make the Rolleiflex, a twin-lens reflex camera that earned a well-deserved reputation for technical excellence and reliability. Its design was copied by several other makers, including Yashica: my father bought one of those at a Rexall drugstore in Edmonton, and eventually passed it on to me. I still have it. The technical problem with any medium or large format camera is to ensure corner to corner focus. Before computers enabled the design of lenses with complicated surfaces, lens makers had to rely on experience and skill. Plus a good dollop of intuition. Franck and Heidecke succeeded brilliantly.
     So in1935 Dr Walther Heering sent out a request to users of the Rollei to send in their best photos, and this PR book was the result. Published in German, English, and French, it includes an historical essay by Heering, a list of contributors and technical details of exposure and film, and 180 rotogravured plates. The printing quality is excellent. The photos themselves, not so much. Grouped by subject, they are technically very good: excellent exposure, development, and printing. The book is clearly aimed at photographers, both amateur and professional, people who took picture making seriously. This collection of “excellent pictures” was intended to inspire would-be photographers, to show the reader how to make pictures “in his or her own way” with a Rolleiflex.
     How well did Dr Heering succeed? If he intended to challenge photographers to extend their practice, he failed. If he intended to confirm them in their comfort zone, he succeeded. The photos tend to the sentimental, banal, pleasantly platitudinous. Yet this was the time of the photo-essay and reportage of LIFE and Picture Post. In the USA, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to record the effects of the Depression. Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Adams, Cartier Bresson, Man Ray and many others had shown what could be done with photography. They used the camera to extend seeing, to enlarge one’s visual understanding of the world.
     None of the images in this book prompt one to reconsider what one is looking at. They are nice pictures, presenting a world of nice people doing nice things. The selection holds to the notion that art should show beautiful and interesting things, not that art should make things look beautiful and interesting.
     As a collection of photos, average; as documentation of German taste in the 1930s, useful. **

A Comic Alphabet for 19th century children

     Amelia Frances Howard Gibbon. An Illustrated Comic Alphabet (Designed 1859. Published 1966). Howard Gibbon was a teacher who designed this alphabet to help her charges learn their letters. The manuscript was donated to the Osborne and Lillian H. Smith Collection of the Toronto Public Library, who arranged publication by Oxford University Press. It’s a charming alphabet, firmly in the style of children’s book illustration of the mid 19th century.
     It illustrates a well-known rhyme, “A is for Archer, who shot at a Frog....” Except for the ones explicitly named as women, the figures are all boys about 10 years old, dressed up in suitable costumes, standing or performing in equally suitable landscapes. The text is beautifully rendered in a fanciful typeface, with the initial letters coloured red. Well done. I wonder why Howard Gibbon did not publish her manuscript.
     She has an interesting history. Granddaughter of the 11th duke of Norfolk, and a cousin of Edward Gibbon (author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), she emigrated to Canada with her widowed mother. This book’s endnote has more details. The book was published by and for the Friends of the Osborne Collection. I was a member for a few years in the 1970s. The Friends have issued reprints of several classic children’s books in the collection. I don’t know if they’ve published other manuscripts. This book rates ****.

From Quebec City to St Anne de Beaupre: QRL&P Co.

     Thomas Grumley. Quebec Light & Power Company: Montmorency Division (2006) Published by the Bytown Railway Society, well known for its albums of historical photos. As a photo-album, this book is pretty good. It seems that the Montmorency Division didn’t attract many photographers until it reached the end of its life. Most of the photos date from the 1951-1954 period when it was under CN ownership, and the selection is somewhat repetitive. The last scheduled passenger train traversed the line on March 15, 1959.
     As expected, photo reproduction is excellent. The captions are informative, and a couple of short essays summarise the line’s history. But there’s no map, and curious omission, since most readers will have at best a hazy mental image of Quebec City and its environs. A good read for the fan, adequate for the amateur historian. ** PS: An online search failed to produce a map. Bah!

Twelve Railroads to Inspire Model Railroading

     [No editor credited] Railroads You Can Model (2002) Kalmbach’s Model Railroader for some years had a regular “Railroad You Can Model” feature. These were collected into two previous books, and finally a dozen were republished in this collection.
     As the foreword points out (twice), these track plans are guides. With a couple or three exceptions, they aren’t meant to be built as drawn. They show how to adapt the information about the prototype into a workable design with enough detail to begin building. Two of the chapters show how the pieces that represent towns and yards could be placed around a room and spliced them together with additional track. (Such pieces are now called “Layout Design Elements”, or LDEs). The larger plans are merely one possible arrangement of LDEs, and as such are a good guide to layout design.
     Most of the plans are for large rooms, single garage or half-basement size. A couple are 5x9 feet, slightly larger than the traditional 4x8 foot starter layout. For most readers, the book will have as much interest as a collection of histories (The Ma & Pa, McCloud River RR, G&MO, NY&O, etc) as a collection of track plans. **½

Young Widow Learns to Cope: Lolly Winton's Good Grief

     Lolly Winton. Good Grief (2004) I bought this book at the Food Bank Permanent Floating Yard Sale. The first two or three pages got me. I put it aside for later reading, and now, about a year later, I’ve read it. Was it worth the wait? Yes, in many ways. Its presentation of the effects of grief trigger recognition in anyone who’s lost someone close.
     Sophie Stanton has lost her husband to cancer. She can barely cope. After appearing at work in her robe and pink bunny slippers, she takes a break. Eventually, she sells the house and moves to Oregon to be closer to her friend, who’s lost a husband to another woman. It’s here that the story begins to feel constructed rather than imagined. Sophie needs someone to distract her from her grief. H’m, let’s see, a new romantic interest? Check, a handsome actor, but there will be a few bumps on that road. Someone to care for? Check, a Little Sister, but ditto. An unexpected discovery of a new interest? Check, Sophie likes baking, which presents a Business Opportunity! So everything ends happily, and somewhat too easily.
     Winton writes well, she gives Sophie a convincing inner voice. She’s especially good at the wry or mordant one-liner, which make Sophie a complicated and flawed self-appraiser. She knows she’s wallowing in self-pity, but she also knows she can’t really do much about that. It’s the occasional external shock (such as being moved from table service to the kitchen) that nudges her towards recovery from her depression.
     It’s the other characters that don’t quite work: we see them entirely through Sophie’s reactions to them, and Sophie is more interested in her own responses to them than in their stories. She asks them hardly any questions. So they are barely more than brightly coloured cutouts.
     Worth reading? Yes, if you’re looking for something that will pass the time agreeably but won’t be too demanding. It will I think help those who are still working through their grief. **½

Floods and misleading clues: Babes in the Wood (Ruth Rendell).

Ruth Rendell. Babes in the Wood (2002) Rain, rain, and more rain. Rising floodwaters cover roads, bridges, and Wexford’s lawn. Two missing children and their minder are presumed drowned. But Wexford doesn’t think so. A leisurely telling of a tangled tale leads to a plausibly tangled solution. Rendell is really more interested in psychology than in police procedure. We get some more about Wexford’s family. Burden is little more than a well-dressed sounding board for Wexford’s musings. A good read for the fans, but not up to Rendell’s past standards. **