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Project Gutenberg eBook: Kim

Helen is the book equivalent of a "chick flick"—a featureless romance—with pretentious French phrases and fragments of English verse scattered throughout. This was the last novel by Mrs. Edgeworth and I would have expected something more mature (although Wikipedia says she purposefully tried not to focus on moral lessons in this book).

Project Gutenberg eBook: Helen

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An interesting book, but the title is misleading: science is not going wrong in the stories told. In the first case, the science—using fetal brain cells to treat Parkinson's Disease—is in the research phase. A man suffering from Parkinson's is not able to get in any of the groups studying this method of treatment, so he finds a shady surgeon who takes him to an out-of-the-way, third-world-level hospital in China, where fetuses are sold on the street, to perform the procedure. The patient receives some temporary relief, but then dies suddenly. The autopsy is gruesome and, to my mind, reveals that the science is not at fault, it's the shady surgeon.

Another case involves a nuclear mini-reactor built by the military which blows up in 1961 during a maintenance procedure; 3 men were killed. Again, the science was not at fault, it was the engineering. The design of the reactor had a single point of failure during the maintenance procedure—and it failed in this instance. Later reactors were redesigned to not have a single point of failure.

A third case involved the release of anthrax into the air from a biological weapons?/defense? laboratory in Russia. An air filter was clogged up, so it was removed and a note was left for the next shift that the filter should be replaced before starting up the equipment. The filter wasn't replaced, the vent was wide open, and the equipment was restarted—about 40 people died downwind from the facility.

One last case. A nuclear researcher seems to have incredible luck creating new chemical elements (beyond the end of the Periodic Table). Luck? Science gone wrong? No, fraud.

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Jane Eyre was a fine story, but, in my lonely opinion, not well-written. Or, should I say, it was too well-written. When Jane recorded her thoughts (on the book page, not in a diary), they were written in high-falutin' language. I was constantly asking myself, "Who thinks like that?" Shirley suffers from the same problem, but to a lesser extent. For example, Caroline Helstone, a giddy 18-year-old, says to her 30-something, distantly related uncle, Robert Moore:

"Yes, an old English book—one that you like; and I will choose a part of it that is toned quite in harmony with something in you. It shall waken your nature, fill your mind with music; it shall pass like a skilful hand over your heart, and make its strings sound. Your heart is a lyre, Robert; but the lot of your life has not been a minstrel to sweep it, and it is often silent. Let glorious William [Shakespeare] come near and touch it. You will see how he will draw the English power and melody out of its chords."

Who talks like that in real life? Oh, well, perhaps I am alone in thinking that Anne Brontë was more talented than Charlotte and Emily and that her novels were better than her sisters'. Go ahead, hit me over the head with a large-print copy of War and Peace!

Project Gutenberg eBook: Shirley

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Also see the Water Footprint Network.

Oops! I got about 20 pages into this book and realized I didn't really feel like reading an introduction to statistics. Then, I figured, it's not too long a book, so I might as well go ahead and finish it. It is a very interesting book, a non-mathematical introduction to statistics with loads of examples of the correct use of statistics and the incorrect or purposefully misleading use of statistics.

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Project Gutenberg eBook: The Fair God; or, The Last of the 'Tzins: A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico

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Project Gutenberg eBook: The Heir of Redclyffe

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Also see Evolutionary developmental biology (Wikipedia).

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Project Gutenberg Canada eBook: The Red Ledger

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Also see New Scientist's special, "The nature of nothingness".

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Project Gutenberg Canada eBook: The Daughter of Time

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An Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe, travels to a fictional, French-speaking town, Villette, to "seek her fortune" as a governess. She ends up teaching in a private school. Lucy is not the most beautiful person nor the brightest, but, by applying herself, she manages to make her way in the world.

The plot pulled me into the story right away and the book was interesting. Two aspects of the writing stood out for me. First, a lot of the dialog is in French, not for effect as in Helen, but because the story takes place in a French-speaking environment. Fragments I remember from high-school French sufficed for some passages, but I had to skim over most such conversations. Second, there were a lot of English words I had never seen before; for example, "ichor" (the gold blood of the gods) and "oppugnant" (opposing). I wish my E-reader had a dictionary!

Project Gutenberg eBook: Villette

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Also see "Svante Pääbo on creationist reactions to Neanderthal interbreeding".

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Project Gutenberg Canada eBook: The Charing Cross Mystery

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Project Gutenberg eBook: Rachel Gray: A Tale Founded on Fact

... James Lind ...

Also see The James Lind Library—"Explaining and illustrating the development of fair tests of treatments in health care". The site, primarily devoted to scholarly information about conducting clinical tests of health treatments, includes an excellent article by Iain Milne, "Who was James Lind, and what exactly did he achieve?" Milne's article provides a well-researched and readable account of what is known about Lind (not much!) and, in particular, looks at his 1753 book, A treatise of the scurvy. Lind's research is put in historical context with an examination of earlier reports on the treatment of scurvy and of subsequent developments in the ensuing centuries.

Stephen R. Brown's book above, Scurvy, made use of Smollett's comic novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random, as a source for describing the abysmal conditions aboard British Navy vessels at the time James Lind was attempting to treat scurvy in British seamen. In the novel, Roderick Random served at one time as a naval-surgeon's mate and an account is given of his experiences caring for sick sailors in horrendous conditions.

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Project Gutenberg eBook: The Adventures of Roderick Random

(I read up to about page 200 of this 1000-page book and there are a couple of other books I'd rather be reading. Should I stop and switch? Okay, try a little longer. I'm approaching page 500—should I stop now? Oh, the author is talking about post-war Guam and my father was stationed on Guam in World War II; I've got to read this. Pages 600, 700, and 800 slip easily by. I'm not too far from 1000 when the book abruptly ends around page 850; the rest is a glossary, footnotes, and an index. I'm glad I read the book, but it could have been half the length.)

... Island Biogeography ...

There are a lot of things I don't know, among which is the fact that elephants can swim. Wow! Quammen describes them swimming between Sober Island and Sri Lanka, a fair distance.

Also see Nick Matzke's "The Monkey's Voyage Will Take You on a Voyage Throught a Biogeographic Revolution" about the "dispersal versus vicariance" controversy.

The first 100 pages of Camilla set in place all the pieces for a good, rustic English novel. Rustic, well, not totally—the characters travelled around to urban and coastal cities. The next 500 pages dragged on and on, with a single thought running continuously through my head: "Edgar, you putz, stop listening to Dr. Marchmont and talk to Camilla. Camilla, get a clue, stop putting yourself in compromising situations, and talk to Edgar." The last couple of hundred pages was like a wild roller-coaster ride, well worth the preceding 600 pages.

One pleasure I find in reading earlier English novels is differences in the use of language. A couple of novels I've read recently use the word unexceptionable where we would now use exceptional. (Current authors sometimes confuse unexceptionable with unexceptional.) Another example is the not infrequent use of the word desert ("that which is deserved or merited"), which only survives to the present day in the often misspelled just deserts. Burney introduces my favorite: horse-ponded. A horse pond is a pond dug for watering horses. I'm guessing that horse-ponding someone means to duck them in a horse pond. Aside from appearing in Burney's Camilla and Cecilia, the only other occurrence of horse-ponded I could find was in The Male-Coquette, by playwright and Burney admirer David Garrick. (Update 2019: I'm reading Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper and the common folks frequently call for the target of their jeering to be taken to "the horse-pond"!)

Also see "Disability studies—Victorian; women's perspectives", which mentions Eugenia, Camilla's sister. Spoiler Alert!

Project Gutenberg eBook: Camilla, or A Picture of Youth

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Girlebooks: Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress

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Also see "Megadeath in Mexico" (Discover magazine, Bruce Stutz, February 2006), an alternative view about smallpox epidemics following the Europeans' arrival in the New World.

Lady Audley's Secret is Braddon's most famous novel. It may very well be her best, but as I write this in September 2015, a year later, I haven't the vaguest remembrance of the story. I tried refreshing my memory of the plot at Wikipedia, but that didn't help. To be fair, I can't remember the storylines of a lot of the other fiction I've read. Braddon's Thou Art The Man (which I finished reading in September 2015) is very good and I'm currently (September 2015 again!) nearing completion of Henry Dunbar. The latter was published two years after Lady Audley's Secret and, in my opinion, is not as finely crafted as Thou Art The Man, published 30 years later.

In the passage, "a diary, perhaps, or a memorandum-book — some obscure rival of Letsome", Letsome probably refers to Sampson Letsome's The Preacher's Assistant.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Lady Audley's Secret

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." So begins Rebecca. For a reason that escapes me, this sentence is considered one of the most famous opening lines of a story. Oh, well!

After reading so many Victorian and pre-Victorian British novels, Rebecca, published in 1938, was a change of pace. The writing had a modern, almost stainless-steel-like tone to it, but I quickly got used to it. The plot was excellent, although I would have liked to have seen some of the loose ends tied up at the end of the story.

While reading the book, I happened upon a one-sentence spoiler on the web. It reminded me of the end of a black and white movie I saw many years ago; I only saw the very end, not the whole movie. Sure enough, Alfred Hitchcock's film adaptation (IMDB) of the novel was released in 1940.

Also see the official Daphne du Maurier website.

... Wikipedia entry for the book ...

A little over 80 pages, this book is short, but it's a well-told story. Ethan is a 28-year-old farmer who is barely keeping his head above water in a small, snowy, and very cold Massachusetts town. He lives with his sickly, 35-year-old wife, Zeena, who is cared for by her young cousin Mattie. Ethan falls in love with Mattie. The book has a surprise twist at the end, tragic but nonetheless humorous in a way.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Ethan Frome

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Project Gutenberg eBook: Mr. Meeson's Will

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Project Gutenberg eBook: The Lamplighter

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Some trivia ... The medical director, William C. Gorgas, was a fan of H. Rider Haggard's novels. LuAnn de Lesseps of the "reality" TV show, The Real Housewives of New York City, was formerly married to Alexandre de Lesseps, a descendant of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who oversaw the building of the Suez Canal and the French attempt at the Panama Canal.

Also see Wikipedia's Panama Canal and the History of the Panama Canal.

Aeneas was a Trojan warrior (and son of Aphrodite/Venus) who, according to Virgil's Aeneid, founded Rome; his family tree shows Romulus and Remus as descendants of Aeneas and his second wife, Lavinia. Not much is said about Lavinia in Virgil's poem, so Ursula K. Le Guin has written her story, told from Lavinia's point of view.

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Also see the Little Ice Age (Wikipedia).

Word of the book: galliard - lively, spirited.

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Scarlet Letter

This is the partial autobiography of a slave, Harriet Jacobs. The book was originally published under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, which is why everyone calls her "Linda" in the book. I didn't learn more from the book about slavery than I already knew; Jacobs alludes to the horrors of slavery, but does not go into the graphic detail that modern media do. However, her story is fascinating. When she escapes, she doesn't go far; she goes into the nearby town and hides in some type of shed in her grandmother's house. The space is very cramped and she is exposed to the cold of winter and heat of summer. She lives there, with slaveholders periodically searching around for her, for a few years, before finally escaping to New York. Because of the cramped living space, she has trouble climbing stairs. I was surprised at the extent to which her owners went to try and recover her, including several trips up to New York.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

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Project Gutenberg eBook: Thérèse Raquin

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Reddit comment by kohoutek:

"There is no one universally accepted definition for the source of a river. Common definitions include:

• greatest distance
• greatest altitude drop
• tributary of greatest inflow
• a lake with many inflows, but only one prominent outflow
• where people stop using the river's name

Also, depending on definition, the source can vary by season, and temporary flows are created and dry up."

Top Gear, Season 9, Episode 6:

Richard Hammond: "If the other explorer Livingstone bloke were alive, he would drive a Subaru Impreza WRX estate."
Jeremy Clarkson: "Yeah, but Speke, my favourite of all the Victorian explorers ... Beemer man."

• John Hanning Speke (1827-1864) (Wikipedia) (Project Gutenberg)
• Richard Francis Burton (1820-1890) (Wikipedia) (Project Gutenberg)
• James Augustus Grant (1827-1892) (Wikipedia) (A Walk Across Africa)
• Samuel White Baker (1821-1893) & Florence von Sass Baker (1841-1916) (Wikipedia) (Project Gutenberg)
• David Livingstone (1813-1873) (Wikipedia) (Project Gutenberg)
• Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) (Wikipedia) (Project Gutenberg)

 

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

by Jordan Ellenberg (Wikipedia) (pub. 2014)  

Riceyman Steps

by Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1923)  

North Pole, South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth's Magnetism

by Gillian Turner  

The Clever Woman of the Family

by Charlotte M. Yonge (1823-1901) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1865)  

The Black Tulip

by Alexandre Dumas père (1802-1870) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1850)  

An Antarctic Mystery

by Jules Verne (1828-1905) (Wikipedia) (Translation by Frances Cashel Hoey) (pub. 1897, original French)  

7 Billion: How Your World Will Change

National Geographic Magazine Special Series 2011  

Marivosa

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865-1947) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1930)  

Zoom: How Everything Moves, from Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees

by Bob Berman (Wikipedia)  

A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

by Robert M. Sapolsky (Wikipedia)  

The Incredible Honeymoon

by Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1921)  

The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

by Henry Hitchings (Wikipedia)  

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot  

Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA

by Daniel J. Fairbanks  

Benito Cereno

by Herman Melville (1819-1891) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1855)  

For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink

by Sarah Rose  

Desperate Remedies

by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1871)  

Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo

by John Varley (Wikipedia)  

The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India

by Rupa Viswanath  

A Bell for Adano

by John Hersey (1914-1993) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1944)  

Mammoth

by John Varley (Wikipedia)  

Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon

by Paul Rosolie  

The People of the Mist

by H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1894)  

Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo (1802-1885) (Wikipedia), translated by William Moy Thomas (Wikipedia) (pub. 1866, original French)  

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

by Stephen Jay Gould (Wikipedia),  

Dead Men Tell No Tales

by E. W. Hornung (1866-1921) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1899)  

The Sea-Wolf

by Jack London (1876-1916) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1904)  

The Rosary

by Florence L. Barclay (1862-1921) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1909)  

Women and Islam: Myths, Apologies, and the Limits of Feminist Critique

by Ibtissam Bouachrine  

Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature

by David Quammen (Wikipedia) (pub. 1985)  

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1962)  

Silence: A Christian History

by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Wikipedia)  

The Fixer

by Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) (Wikipedia) (pub. 1966)  

A Speck on the Sea: Epic Voyages in the Most Improbable Vessels

by William H. Longyard (pub. 2003)  

Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong: The Drunken Wisdom of China's Most Famous Chan Buddhist Monk

by Guo Xiaoting, translated by John Robert Shaw (d. 2005) (translation pub. 2014)  

Economic Fables

by Ariel Rubinstein (Wikipedia) (pub. 2012)  

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr (Wikipedia) (pub. 2014)

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... Hugo De Vries:

To put it in the terms chosen lately by Mr. Arthur Harris in a friendly criticism of my views: "Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest."

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... book review in the Social History of Medicine

Tergiversative
Veridicality

Although I'm a big fan of Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden wasn't really on my to-read list. However, it was mentioned in Cholera: The Biography (above), so I decided to try it. The story is about a young English girl, Mary Lennox, born and raised in India. A cholera epidemic carries off her parents and many of the household servants. Mary, a child with sour looks and a personality to match, is sent to England to live with her miserable uncle, who has never gotten over the loss of his wife.

The Secret Garden is a children's book, but it offers a lot for adults, too. The portrayal of nature awakening in the springtime is beautiful and uplifting.

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Secret Garden

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The mother develops a maternal interest in her son's friend, the "Little Russian", Andrey Stepanovich. She is concerned that his ragged boots will do him no good in the snow. He responds (with, I'm sure, a big grin on his face):

"You know, you are my real mother. Only you don't want to acknowledge it to people because I am so ugly."

Project Gutenberg eBook: Mother

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Also see his blog, Sunny Side Up.

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Project Gutenberg eBook: The Lady of the Camellias

I set out to read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, but a few pages in I learned she is a literature professor. Suspecting there might be literary allusions to Lolita, I decided I should read the original first.

Nabokov's Lolita, set in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is about a man with a proclivity for young girls, specifically a 12-year-old named Dolores. Her mother calls her "Lo" for short, so the man calls her "Lo, Lola, Lolita". For me, the only redeeming aspect of the book is that it is very well written. The subject matter is intended to shock and it does, but that doesn't make the book any better. For more opinions, see Goodreads reviews by other ordinary readers.

Nabokov uses an abundance of fancy/unknown words, but one caught my eye and will be the word of the book: incondite - "Badly-arranged, ill-composed, disorderly (especially of artistic works)." It obviously reminded me of recondite, which Nabokov does use later in the book. Interestingly, Nabokov first wrote Lolita in English and later made a Russian translation.

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Also see Hossein Fatemi's photographs in "[Another] view of Iran".

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... Florence Blenkiron ...

Also see:

• AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame - Theresa Wallach
• Through Africa by Motor-Cycle (1934-1935) - movie footage they shot on the trip?
• "The Cult of Curiosity" (scroll down) by Theresa Wallach

... Congo Free State ...

Also see:

• "Congo Free State, 1885-1908" by Dean Pavlakis
• "Belgium confronts its heart of darkness" by Michela Wrong

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Also see Harvard University's Justice with Michael Sandel.

In the United States these days, conservatives often invoke a reverse chain of events to attack Planned Parenthood, an organization devoted to providing reproductive health services (including, in a small percentage of cases, abortions) to women. The chain goes like this: abortions -> Planned Parenthood -> Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood -> Margaret Sanger was active in the eugenics movement. (Actually, Margaret Sanger founded two organizations that later merged into one and that was later named Planned Parenthood.)

As Sharon Leon shows, the eugenics movement of the early 20th century (in the USA and other countries) was not especially controversial. Who doesn't want healthy, smart children? Even the Catholic Church was fine with the goals of eugenics and some of the leaders in the eugenics movement were Catholic. What finally broke the Church away from eugenics were the issues of birth control and forced sterilization, both of which were antithetical to Church teachings. Abortion doesn't seem to have played a part in eugenics, perhaps because medical technology hadn't advanced to the point at which a pregnant mother could learn if her baby was developing normally.

Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map—about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London— discusses system(s) of sewage disposal at the time. His book piqued my interest in the subject and Lee Jackson's Dirty Old London was the perfect book to answer my questions.

Victorian London was a densely populated city with a rapidly rising population; it was considered one of the filthiest cities among comparable cities around the world ...

Victorian London was not a unique case. Densely populated "Dirty Old" cities are still with us. Witness the beginning of the popular movie, Slumdog Millionaire (Wikipedia), or the present-day book below, Richard Connerney's The Upside-Down Tree, in which the author lives in a populous, relatively poor Indian city with the same problems as Victorian London.

The last 5 chapters of Dirty Old London cover the following additional topics:

• Chapter 5: Vile Bodies - The overcrowded graveyard
• Chapter 6: The Great Unwashed - Public baths and washhouses
• Chapter 7: The Public Convenience - The public toilet
• Chapter 8: Wretched Houses - The slums
• Chapter 9: The Veil of Soot - Chimney sweeps and fog

(With respect to Chapter 5, see Catharine Arnold's Necropolis: London and its Dead.)

Words of the book—or that you might not know if you're not British:

• breeze - "ashes and residue of coal or charcoal".
• rate(s) - tax(es).

Also see:

• Dirty Old London (the book's web site)
• The Cat's Meat Shop (the author's blog)
• Dictionary of Victorian London (compiled by the author)
• "Fascinatingly Filthy: How Bad Science Saved Lives in Victorian London" (based on an interview with the author)

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Word of the book (and Dictionary.com's Word of the Day, February 1, 2011!): ambisinister - "clumsy or unskillful with both hands". Connerney wrote, "I feared I had simply become ambisinister until I realized that his sitar had fewer frets than mine did."