Special Circumstances

William Congreve and the Rockets of Mysore

From This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William E. Burrows, 1998 (ISBN: 0-3757-5485-7)

The first major battles with rockets that involved Europeans occurred during a revolt against the British which began in 1781 in the Mysore region of southwest India and lasted through 1799. The Indians fired crude but effective rockets against British regulars during battles at Seringapatam in 1792 and 1799. "No hall could be thicker," a young English officer named Bayly lamented in his diary. "Every illumination of blue lights was accompanied by a shower of rockets, some of which entered the head of the column, passing through to the rear, causing death, wounds, and dreadful lacerations from the long bamboos of twenty or thirty feet, which are invariably attached to them."

The Royal Laboratory at Woolwich Arsenal was therefore ordered to design and develop a dependable war rocket that could be produced in large quantities as standard equipment for the artillery. This was done by William Congreve, a Cambridge-educated socialite who was an intimate of the Royal Family and whose father was commandant of the Royal Artillery and Woolwich's comptroller. Congreve had studied law and run a newspaper. As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, and in the aftermath of the battles in India (and in anticipation of others with France), he responded by turning his keen intellect and imagination to inventing a better rocket.

After at least three years of experiments, Congreve published A Concise Account of the Origin and Progress of the Rocket System, in November 1807. Even then there were those who fretted about national security and the danger of leaks, and since Congreve was one of them, he happily "sanitized" his report. "In the following pages I have cautiously avoided any disclosure which might lead to a discovery of the interior structure and combination of the rocket, on which all powers depend, this rule I have observed for obvious reasons," the inventor wrote with evident pride.

Noting that the Indian rockets had had a range of less than a thousand yards, Congreve designed one that traveled twice as far. It was an iron cylinder stuffed with seven pounds of compressed powder, and it weighed thirty-two pounds. The breakthroughs were using metal "carcasses" instead of paperboard; refining the powder through granulation machines to give more predictable results; and using pile driver presses to compact the powder so it was a denser and therefore more even-burning charge. He also incorporated noses into his design--warheads, in today's jargon--that could carry a variety of munitions, including incendiary, shrapnel, explosive, or shot. Other models would follow in relatively quick succession.

Congreve realized early that rockets were particularly suited to naval warfare because, unlike cannons, they did not recoil and destabilize the ship. He therefore suggested that his 2,000-yard model be used as part of a plan, soon accepted, "for the annoyance of Boulogne" by the Royal Navy. Ten boats were fitted with incendiary rockets for an attack on the French port city on November 21, 1805, but a fierce storm prevented the attack. A second attempt, on October 8, 1806, was successful. "In about half an hour above 2,000 rockets were discharged," Congreve reported with evident relish. "The dismay and astonishment of the enemy were complete--not a shot was returned--and in less than ten minutes after the first discharge, the town was discovered to be on fire." The rockets were used with even greater success to shell Copenhagen in 1807 and then other European cities. And Congreve was at least indirectly responsible for the national anthem of the United States. On the night of September 13-14, 1814, his ubiquitous rockets were used to shell Baltimore's Fort McHenry, causing the "red glare" that inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Previously posted: a review of This New Ocean.

A Peace To End All Peace: the Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

The Middle East became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would premanently endure. During and after the First World War, Britain and her Allies destroyed the old order in the region irrevocably; they smashed Turkish rule of the Arabic-speaking Middle East beyond repair (Which is not to deny that the Turks also played a role in the destruction of their empire, and that, in any event, there were forces within the Middle East making for change). To take its place, they created countries, nominated rulers, delineated frontiers, and introduced a state system of the sort that exists everywhere else; but they did not quell all significant opposition to those decisions.

As a result the events of 1914-22, while bringing an end Europe's Middle Eastern Question, gave birth to a Middle Eastern Question in the Middle East itself. The settlement of 1922 (as it is called here, even though some of the arrangements were arrived at earlier or a bit later) resolved, as far as Europeans were concerned, the question of what -- as well as who -- should replace the Ottoman Empire; yet even today there are powerful local forces within the Middle East that remain unreconciled to these arrangements -- and may well overthrow them.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire is a large event in history that is largely ignored in favor of the more recent history of the so-called Middle East (a term whose invention is discussed in this book), when, in fact, it provides the most insight about the politics of the region today. In particular, this book provides an invaluable perspective of the events in terms of the Great Game between Britain, Russia and France. As is usual in Great Game politics, allies morph into enemies and back again within the timespan of a scant decade from 1914-1922. See "Tournament of Shadows" for a comprehensive look at Great Game politics between Britain and Russia in the Central Asian sphere.

Apart from the Great Game perspective, Fromkin makes Winston Churchill the main central character of the book, illustrating the events through a view of his chequered career at the time. Through most of the book, Fromkin maintains a strong narrative making many jostling events of the time fairly coherent and easy to grasp. The later part of the book flounders in this respect but this complaint applied only for a chapter or two.

For those seeking historical causes of the conflict between Israel and its neighbours, for those who wonder how Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and Syria became the political entities they are now, this book is an excellent guide. In many cases, as can be seen in this book, the long shadow of colonial thinking is still cast on the events of the 21st century.

This book manages to provide a historical perspective without much philosophical pandering and not much `clash of the civilization' style of argumentation and the fact that this approach is rare among books about the region is another reason to recommend it. It does impugn politicians from short sighted colonial powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries for much of the mess, but this much seems uncontroversial.

%T A Peace To End All Peace
%T :the Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
%A David Fromkin
%I An Owl Book: Henry Holt and Company
%P 635
%D 1989
%G ISBN: 0805068848
%K history

Review written: 2002/12/07

Marie Stopes

From The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, ISBN: 0679451145), I quote footnote number 74 in its entirety:

Marie Stopes was born in London in 1880, showed insatiable curiosity and scientific gifts as an adolescent and despite strong disapprobation (similar to that which delayed the entry of women into medicine at the time) was able to enter University College, where she obtained a Gold Medal and a first-class degree in botany. Her passion for paleobotany was already developing by this time, and after graduating she went to the Botanical Institute in Munich, where she was the only woman among five hundred students. Her research on cycad ovules earned her a Ph.D. in botany, the first ever given a woman.

In 1905 she received her doctorate in science from London University, making her the youngest D.Sc. in the country. The following year, while working on a massive two-volume Cretaceous Flora for the British Museum, she also published The Study of Plant Life for Young People, a delightful book which showed her literary power and her insight into youthful imaginations, no less than her botanical expertise. She continued to publish many scientific papers, and in 1910 another popular book, Ancient Plants. Other writings, romantic novels and poems, were also stirring in her at this time, and in A Journal from Japan she gave poignant fictional form her own painfully frustrated love for an eminent Japanese botanist.

By this time other interests were competing with botany. Stopes wrote a letter to The Times supporting women's suffrage, and became increasingly conscious of how much sexually, as well as politically and professionally, women needed to be liberated. From 1914 on, though there was an overlap with paleobotany for a few years, Stopes's work dealt essentially with human love and sexuality. She was the first to write about sexual intercourse in a matter-of-fact way, doing so with the same lucidity and accuracy she had in her description of the fertilization of cycad ovules -- but also with a tenderness which was like a foretaste of D.H. Lawrence. Her books Married Love (1918), A Letter to Working Mothers (1919), and Radiant Motherhood (1920) were immensely popular at the time; no one else spoke with quite her accent or authority.

Later Stopes met Margaret Sanger, the great American pioneer of birth control, and she became its chief advocate in England. Contraception, Its Theory, History and Practice was published in 1923, and this led to the setting up of Marie Stopes clinics in London and elsewhere. Her voice, her message, had little appeal after the Second World War, and her name, once instantly recognized by all, faded into virtual oblivion. And yet, even in her old age, her paleobotanical interests never deserted her; coal balls, she often said, were really her first love.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

A book that has drawn several references to "The Name of the Rose" and "The Alienist" in its reviews. It has a similar ambition of exposing a period of history through a murder mystery. The particular setting of this novel is a period of great turmoil in England, a time of Civil War, from 1625 to 1688.

Perhaps the boldest stroke of this novel is the cast of characters which includes people like Robert Boyle, the `father' of chemistry, Thomas Ken, lecturer of logic and mathematics, John Locke, the great philosopher, Richard Lower, the most famous physician in London at the time, John Thurloe, secretary to Cromwell and spymaster, John Wallis, noted mathematician and cryptographer, Anthony Wood, historian of that period and Christopher Wren, astronomer and architect (famous for St. Paul's Cathedral).

The murder is that of Robert Grove, don in Oxford University. In what appears to be a cover-up, his servant girl Sarah Blundy is arrested. She confesses to the crime and is sentenced to be hanged. Unlikely as it may seem, Sarah is linked deeply to various political powers that operate under the surface in the England of the 17th century and her conviction for the murder of Robert Grove is only the start of a convoluted process behind the truth of the murder, which unfortunately for a book which is a murder mystery remains mostly beside the point for the author.

The novel is split up into four parts. Each is narrated by a different observer. The "Rashomon" series of accounts, while not novel, is certainly executed with great skill by Iain Pears. However, the mystery and the history explored in this novel cannot sustain four long narratives and its immense length. The first narrative by the Italian, da Cola, and the fourth and final one by Anthony Wood, are extremely compelling. However, the two narratives in the middle while carrying some relevant information could have been compressed substantially without affecting the book. As it stands, you might not get to the interesting last part of the novel due to its obese middle.

I'd like to thank R. Hwa for recommending this novel, and letting me "borrow" it.

%T An Instance of the Fingerpost
%A Iain Pears
%I Riverhead Books
%P 692
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 1573220825
%K crime-fiction

Review written: 2002/09/12

City of Gold: the Biography of Bombay by Gillian Tindall

... the Portuguese church on the main island; its first site was just beyond the Fort where Victoria Terminus now stands and which place was already occupied by the temple to Mumba Devi ...

... Mumba or Mombai is a goddess without a mouth -- ironically, she is the Mother Goddess of Bombay, the city with no one common language but many ...

... Though an obscure local deity, an aboriginal personification of the Earth Mother, Maha Amba Aiee or `Mumba Devi' has turned out durable. The very name `Bombay' almost certainly comes from hers, for the city is called `Mumbai' in the vernacular. The British settlers assumed the name to come from `Buan Bahia', the Good Bay in Portuguese, and this theory was reiterated in most nineteenth-century books about the place, but it is now discredited: it cannot be right, since the earliest Portuguese settlers already called the place Bombain.

Bombay has a history unique among the major Indian cities: borne out of colonial wrangling, it has grown to become one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. This book illuminates at least part of the story that has lead to what is now home to around 20 million people.

However, this history, while a slim and readable introduction to Bombay's British period does not tell the whole story. The emphasis is not on the varied populations of Bombay over the years, but mostly on the architecture, the buildings, and the people (usually British) who built them. A few temples are mentioned here and there, but nowhere is there an explanation as to why all the names of places are in Marathi or Konkani (in the `vernacular' as Tindall calls it, not bothering to even find out what languages the native populations spoke and still speak).

The lack of detail outside of British history is blamed by Tindall in her preface on the lack of historical research done by Indians. Perhaps a history of Bombay will be written someday which includes original research. The rest is certainly here in this book.

By the early nineteenth century this community [of Baghdadi Jews] were coming under pressure from the Turks, the current overlords, and were turning their eyes eastwards, attracted by accounts of the religious tolerance and trading opportunities available in British India. (This fact should not be forgotten, wherever imperialism is discussed today in contemptuous terms) [emphasis added]

Gillian Tindall's prose reeks of Raj nostalgia despite several protestations to the contrary (I was under the impression that the term `heathen worship' was an anachronism; not so for Ms. Tindall). Like Peter Hopkirk, the view of history is presented as unbiased but with biases that are buried so deep that they are invisible to the author.

%T City of Gold
%T :the Biography of Bombay
%A Gillian Tindall
%I Penguin Books
%D 1982
%G ISBN: 0140095004 (pb)
%P 210
%K history

Review written: 2002/05/17

The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 by Thomas Barfield

The nomads of Inner Asia have remained a subject of fascination and controversy into modern times: the stereotype of barbarians who were both feared and despised, or romantically portrayed as wild and free by those who admired them. However, most histories fail to make the region and its people comprehensible. These accounts consist of seemingly random events presented chronologically, with one obscure tribe following another. When the nomads did make an appearance on the stage of world history by invading their neighbours, such events were treated as a form of natural history, like a plague of locusts.

Barfield's thesis is simple, and its basic premise is laid out in the introduction itself: the creation of a powerful state by the seeming consolidation of the steppe tribes was a result of a natural opposition to its sedentary neighbours, particularly China, with whom they had a complex relationship of extracted tributes and mutual distrust. In their long shared history, a collapse of the Chinese dynasty usually resulted in the collapse of the nomadic one. The great expansion by Chinggis Khan in the 13th century is explained by Barfield within the framework laid out by this theory. However this is not a popular history book -- far from it. The prose is terse and assumes a lot of the reader.

However, if you have ever despaired at the simplistic or harebrained documentaries about Chinggis Khan, or if you want to get further insight into how nomadic cultures in Central Asia were organized and the complex history of the region, then this book is a must-read. While it takes quite a bit of effort to read, the finely textured detail of history will shine through and dazzle the patient reader.

Other notable books in this topic are: Owen Lattimore's classic "Inner Asian Frontiers of China".

Contents

1. Introduction: The Steppe Nomadic World (Nomadic Pastoralism, Tribal Organization)
2. The Steppe Tribes United: The Hsiung-nu Empire (Foreign Affairs - the Han connection, Hsiung-nu Civil Wars)
3. The Collapse of Central Order: The Rise of Foreign Dynasties (Hsien-pi ``Empire'', Ch'in and Liang, the T'o-pa, the Jou-jan, the Sinification of the T'o-pa Wei)
4. The Turkish Empires and T'ang China (A Chinese Khagan, the Uighur Empire)
5. The Manchurian Candidates (The Khitan Liao Dynasty, the Jurchen Chin Dynasty conquers China)
6. The Mongol Empire (The Rise of Chinggis Khan, the Yüan Dynasty)
7. Steppe Wolves and Forest Tigers: The Ming, Mongols and Manchus (Mongolia in Post-Yüan Era, the Oirats and the Ming, Altan Khan and the Ming Capitulation, the Rise of the Manchus, the Early Ch'ing state)
8. The Last of the Nomad Empires: The Ch'ing Incorporation of Mongolia and Zungharia (Manchu conquest of China, the Zunghars -- last of the Steppe Empires)
9. Epilogue: On the Decline of the Mongols

%T The Perilous Frontier
%T :Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757
%A Thomas J. Barfield
%I Blackwell
%D 1989
%G ISBN: 1557863245 (pb)
%P 325
%K history, anthropology

Review written: 2002/02/23

The Tragic Tale of a Genius by Freeman Dyson

© Image courtesy of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

In The Tragic Tale of a Genius Freeman Dyson (published in the New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 12, July 14, 2005) reviews Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (Basic Books). (temporary url)

His review also includes information from Norbert Wiener's two autobiographies: Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Simon and Schuster, 1953) and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Doubleday, 1956).

In academic computer science departments there is often a science/engineering split, where one side of the split prove theorems, and the other side build systems to solve 'real-world' problems. Some of the most admired computer scientists like Alan Turing, Don Knuth and Norbert Wiener (to name a few) teach us how to bridge this gap. From Dyson's review:

Wiener was unusual among mathematicians in being equally at home in pure and applied mathematics. He made his reputation as a pure mathematician by inventing concepts such as the "Wiener measure" that have passed into the mainstream of mathematics. Wiener measure gave mathematicians for the first time a rigorous way to talk about the collective behavior of wiggly curves or flexible surfaces. While continuing to publish papers in the abstract realms of mathematical logic and analysis, he loved to talk with the engineers and neurophysiologists who were his neighbors at MIT and Harvard. He became deeply immersed in their cultures, and enjoyed translating problems from the languages of engineering and neurophysiology into the language of mathematics.

Unlike most pure mathematicians, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to apply his skills to the messy practical problems of the real world. He understood, more clearly than anyone else, that the messiness of the real world was precisely the point at which his mathematics should be aimed.

Norbert Wiener is best known as the founder of cybernetics:

As an applied mathematician, he worked out a general theory of control systems and feedback mechanisms, a theory which he called "cybernetics." Cybernetics was a theory of messiness, a theory that allowed people to find an optimum way to deal with a world full of poorly known agents and unpredictable events.

In 1940 he wrote a memorandum explaining in detail why digital language would be preferable for the computers whose existence he already foresaw. But his own contributions to communication theory happened to be written in analog language, for four reasons. First, his work as a pure mathematician had mostly been in analysis. Second, his practical experience with antiaircraft prediction was concerned with analog measurements and analog feedback mechanisms. Third, his conversations with neurophysiologists had convinced him that the language of sensory-motor feedback signals in the brains of humans and animals is analog. Fourth, the transmission of signals by chemical hormones is evidence that the action of the brain is at least partly analog. For all these reasons, Wiener's book Cybernetics, which summarized his thinking in 1948, was written in analog language.

Meanwhile, also in 1948, Claude Shannon published his classic pair of papers with the title "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," ... [It] was mathematically elegant, clear, and easy to apply to practical problems of communication. It was far more user-friendly than cybernetics. It became the basis of a new discipline called "information theory." ... Electronic engineers learned information theory, the gospel according to Shannon, as part of their basic training, and cybernetics was forgotten.

But Wiener was not ignored everywhere. His theories had wide circulation in India and Russia, and he was welcomed personally by Nehru and other leaders in India. Wiener did advocate founding of technical institutes and the encouragement of home-grown technical industries, but I find Dyson's claim that this is why India and to some extent Russia is now strong in information technology as too simplistic.

Dyson also compares this new book about Wiener with two previous biographies "John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death" by Steve Heims (MIT Press, 1980) and Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 by Pesi Masani (Birkhäuser, 1990). About the Heims book, Dyson says:

The Heims biography emphasizes politics. It is mainly concerned with Wiener's activities as a social critic in the last third of his life. It presents the parallel lives of von Neumann and Wiener as a simple struggle between black and white... In a review of the Heims book which I published in Technology Review in 1981, [February/March issue, pp. 17–19] I wrote:

If Heims had been willing [to stay in the background], to present his work as a historical narrative with the protagonists speaking for themselves, he would have made an important contribution to the understanding of the great moral dilemma of our age. Unfortunately, ... he stands at the front of the stage between his characters and the audience, making it difficult for us to hear their voices and to see the drama of their lives [in historical perspective].

And about Masani's book, Dyson writes:

Pesi Masani's biography is from a scholarly point of view the best of the three. Masani was a professional mathematician, born in India and settled in the United States. He collaborated with Wiener and published several substantial papers with him in the 1950s. After Wiener died, Masani edited his collected papers for publication. ... The Masani biography is the only one that portrays him as a working mathematician.

Masani explains Wiener's mathematical ideas with admirable clarity, and he has found and reproduced many historical documents that the other biographers have missed. One particularly illuminating document that Masani reproduces in full is a long and friendly letter from von Neumann to Wiener, written in November 1946, discussing the mysteries of the human brain and the various ways in which the mysteries might be explored. ... Von Neumann's letter shows how far he had come in foreshadowing the era of molecular biology that he never lived to see. The letter also shows how far Heims diverged from the truth when he portrayed von Neumann and Wiener as polar opposites. They shared a passionate interest in biology. Both of them saw a deeper understanding of biology as the ultimate goal of their explorations of the science of computing and information.

So after two biographies, why a new one? As Dyson says:

After Heims has described Wiener's politics and Masani has described his mathematics, what is there left for a third biography to do? This third biography give us a new and intimate portrait of Wiener as a person, and describes his stormy relationships with his friends and family. ... Their aim is to explore the roots of Wiener's lifelong malaise and often weird behavior.

Wiener's personal life was marred by several problems, some of them perhaps because of his genius:

The drama of Wiener's personal life begins with his years as an infant prodigy, tormented by his brilliant but tyrannical father. Either as a result of his father's training or from genetic predisposition, he suffered from violent swings of mood that continued throughout his life. ...

Another major theme of this biography is Wiener's marriage. His wife, Margaret, was a student of his father, and the marriage was arranged by his parents. Margaret was chosen to take over from his parents the job of caring for him and organizing his life. ... She coped with his moods and raised his daughters.

But Margaret was in some respects even crazier than Wiener. She had emigrated from Germany to America at the age of fourteen. She was a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler and kept two copies of Mein Kampf displayed prominently in her bedroom, one in German and one in English. She made no secret of her political views, to the intense annoyance of Wiener, who was himself Jewish and had many friends who were victims of Nazi persecution. When the daughters were teenagers and began to acquire boyfriends, she made their lives miserable by accusing them of nonexistent sexual delinquencies. ... As a result of her paranoid accusations, both daughters escaped from home as soon as they could and thereafter had little contact with her or with Wiener.

The most tragic episode of Wiener's life happened in 1951 when he was fifty-seven years old and passionately involved in a collaboration with his friend Warren McCullough and a group of young colleagues that he called "the boys." ... Margaret was insanely jealous of McCullough and his boys, and resolved to break up their friendship with Wiener ... she informed Wiener that McCullough's boys had seduced his daughter Barbara when she was a teenager staying at McCullough's house. This story had no basis in fact, but Wiener believed it ... and immediately wrote an angry letter to the president of MIT dissolving all connection between himself and the McCullough team.

Dyson tries to find some balance in this story:

Margaret is now the one who is accused and will never have a chance to answer her accusers. She never spoke with the authors, and left no friend behind to speak for her. The evidence against her is well documented and seems convincing. And still, the reviewer wonders.

Wiener is in many ways a forgotten hero of computer science. I certainly have not read any of Wiener's books on cybernetics: and nobody in contemporary AI seems to bother to read them either. The digital-analog war is pretty much over and no prizes for guessing which side won: Shannon's theories seem highly relevant for research in AI and machine learning today while Wiener's theories are, for better or for worse, left behind.

If you've read this far, you might want to read my review of Steve Heims' biography of Norbert Wiener which touches on Wiener's ethical ideas on responsible behaviour as a researcher. That book was also reviewed by Rudolf Peierls in Odd Couple (New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 2, February 18, 1982).

Do the other things

If you have watched any documentary on the Apollo space program, you've heard (and seen) the following excerpt from John F. Kennedy's address delivered at Rice University, Sept 12, 1962.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

I have always been bothered by this excerpt because the referent for the other things is almost never included in the video or audio clip (I can't think of a single documentary which includes the referent). So what does the other things refer to? Is it unambiguous?

The answer is clear from watching video footage of the entire speech. Here is the paragraph that precedes the previous paragraph in the transcript of Kennedy's speech:

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard ...

So it seems that the referent for the other things is the set: { "climb the highest mountain", "fly the Atlantic 35 years ago", "Rice playing Texas" } . Apart from the last item, it is quite easy to grasp Kennedy's comparison. The same set is also presumably the referent for the second case of anaphora: one which we intend to win, and the others, too. Climbing the Everest and transatlantic flight are clear analogies for going to the moon, but the 'Rice playing Texas' item requires some further explanation.

Here is what Bill Little has to say about the Rice-Texas football rivalry in an article published on 9/24/2004:

It began 90 years ago, when Rice, playing in only its third football season, lost to a Texas team that included six players who would enter the Longhorn Hall of Honor after it was started more than 40 years later.

They were legendary names, folks like Louis Jordan, the team captain, and Gen. K. L. Berry, Pig Dittmar and Clyde Littlefield. And that was only the beginning.

A year later, Rice and Texas met on October 16, 1915, in the Longhorns' first game in a new league alignment called the Southwest Conference. For 82 years, from that beginning season in 1914 through 1995, the two schools played every year. In its time, it was longest continuous streak of any Longhorn opponent.

Texas controlled the series in the early years, but the fledgling Owls did post a notable win in 1924 under their new coach, a guy named John W. Heisman (for whom the famous trophy is named). But beginning in 1930, the series between the university on South Main in Houston and the guys from the Forty Acres in Austin was second only to Texas A&M as the Longhorns' biggest rivalry until the mid 1960s.

In 1937, Texas hired D. X. Bible, and Rice followed in 1940 with the hiring of Jess Neely. Heisman not withstanding, the two coaches brought credibility and respectability to both the game and the coaching profession that was unsurpassed.

From 1930 through Neely's final win over Texas in 1965, Rice actually held the edge in the series, 18-17-1. In 1957, Darrell Royal took the Texas job, and he would go on to become the fourth member of the prestigious College Football Hall of Fame to coach in the series.

Royal was the winningest coach in Southwest Conference history. Neely finished tied for second in a career that spanned 26 years.

For years, the Rice-Texas game was the social event of the football season, and when the Owls opened their state-of-the-art stadium in the mid-1950s, it was usually packed with 70,000 folks for the meeting with Texas.

The series also took on an unusual quality. From 1954 until the Longhorns snapped the string with a victory in Houston in 1964 and Rice returned the favor by winning in Austin in 1965, the home team won. The only exception was a 14-14 tie in 1962, when a heavy underdog Rice team knocked Texas from its spot as the No. 1 team in the nation. Otherwise, Rice won in Houston, and Texas won in Austin.

But beginning with Neely's final season of 1966, Texas reeled off 28 straight victories until Rice ended the streak on a rainy Sunday night in Houston in 1994.

Presumably, the comparison of the Apollo program to a Rice-Texas football rivalry was due to the unlikely victory of the Owls against the Longhorns in 1962. If you watch the entire video footage closely, you will notice that Kennedy, every bit the accomplished public speaker, gets the loudest applause just after his line: "Why does Rice play Texas?". On the video footage, watch closely for the cigar smoking man just to Kennedy's right for a good example of the crowd's reaction to Kennedy's comparison of the Moon missions with the Rice-Texas football rivalry.

Creation by Gore Vidal

If a historical novel could place itself anywhere, the 5th century B.C. would be the most ambitious. It was a time when Socrates, Pericles, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Anaxagoras were alive in Greece. In Persia, Zarathustra (Zoroaster, to the Greeks) had only recently passed away, Darius I ruled at the height of the Persian Empire initiating the Greek Wars and after Darius it was Xerxes who continued the war. In China, Lao Tzu had perhaps only recently died and Master K'ung or Confucius was at still teaching wherever he could. In India, the Buddha had attained enlightenment and was teaching his first congregation, while elsewhere many different kingdoms were forming along the River Ganga and the beginnings of the caste system were being established. And this book is that ambitious. All of these historical figures and events appear in its pages.

The stories of ancient Greece, Persia, India and China are told through the life of a remarkable man made up by Gore Vidal just for this purpose. Cyrus Spitama, 75 years old, is the Persian ambassador to Athens. He is irked by a particularly embellished reading by Herodotus and recites his life to his nephew and 18-year old protege, Democritus. The same Democritus who later in life advanced the atomist theory of Leucippus and who seems to be one of the earliest philosophers of science. The arc of the story follows Cyrus Spitama from his childhood and teaching in the Persian court, to his mission of opening trade with the various kingdoms in India, and a subsequent mission to China to open a Silk Road to Persia. The story of this life ends with Cyrus Spitama's impressions, at the end of his life, of Athens in the time of Pericles.

Cyrus Spitama is half-Persian and half-Greek. He is a Median and the grandson of the Persian prophet Zoroaster. At an early age, he is a witness to the death of Zoroaster and hears Zoroaster's final revelation. This gives him access to the court of Darius I as a child, and he is taught with Xerxes, the likely successor to Darius.

Due to various intrigues at the Persian court, Cyrus Spitama as an adult travels to India and in a subsequent trip to China. His travels lead him to meet all the great thinkers of his time. The descriptions are muted however, probably because Gore Vidal is reluctant at times to embellish beyond known historical details. Many visceral details are left to the reader's imagination. Despite such omissions, the novel weighs in at almost 600 pages.

In the part set in China, rather than concentrating on dialogues with Daoist thinkers and conversations with Confucius, Gore Vidal spends more time than necessary on the violent struggles between the various provincial warlords in a politically fractured China. This was the only part of the book where I felt I was being forced to take a detour.

Gore Vidal also hides behind the ambiguity of opinions that are forwarded through Cyrus Spitama. For example, when Cyrus states that he thinks Confucius is an atheist it is entirely unclear whether this comment comes from the ancient perspective of a devout Zoroastrian or whether this is a statement by the author.

In order to make the premise of the story workable, Gore Vidal takes full advantages of the lack of knowledge currently possessed about when many of these historical figures were actually alive. The death of Zoroaster in placed in this book early in the 5th century B.C., but Zoroaster could have been alive at any time since 1000 B.C. (a more likely date given the linguistic analysis of the Old Avestan documents presumably composed by Zoroaster). There are other such permissible liberties taken with the dates, but concentrating on this point would miss the reason for reading this book.

This book is a work of counter-history rather than a historical novel. It seems to be reacting against the conventional attitudes of intellectuals at least those raised in the Western tradition. Gore Vidal makes it a point to make his protagonist be a person who would ridicule the Greeks, but still point out the merits of living in Athens in the fifth century B.C. I think this is why there is no prominent rabbi talking about Judaism or a Gentile talking about pagan philosophy in this book.

When Gore Vidal picked his favorite books published after the Second World War (Gore Vidal at salon.com), he picked "Creation" as one of them. It is clearly an enjoyable read although a bit excessive in scope (Paul Theroux's review of Creation in the New York Times calls it a great book).

For further reading into the history behind this novel, here are some sources: "From Aristotle to Zoroaster: An A-To-Z Companion to the Classical World" by Arthur Cotterell. "The Oxford Classical Dictionary" by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth (Eds.).

%T Creation
%A Gore Vidal
%I Ballantine Books
%D 1981
%G ISBN: 0345340205 (pb)
%P 593
%K historical fiction, religion

Review written: 2000/12/31

The Tarim Mummies by J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair

Early European explorers of the Silk Road like Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin found some astonishing mummified corpses buried in an elaborate ritual style in the Tarim Basin. The ancient oasis cities that skirt the Taklamakan desert have such dry weather that ancient bodies buried in the desert have preserved perfectly for thousands of years.

In later years, Chinese archaeologists have discovered many such burial sites and recovered an amazingly large number of mummies from various sites. For example, the Qizilchoqa cemetery was discovered by Wang Binhua in 1978. Victor Mair, on noticing the strangely Caucasoid appearance of the well-preseved bodies embarked on the pursuit of an answer to their origins and whether they had any contact with prehistoric Chinese civilizations, a topic close to his academic life. The search would be most effective if it involved the fields of archaeology, historical linguistics and genetics. To this end, he enlisted the efforts of J. P. Mallory, a noted scholar in the study of the hypothesized Proto Indo-European language and Paolo Francalacci who assisted in the DNA analysis of the mummies. In the end, the most promising clues of DNA analysis could not be applied since they were able only to analyse and report results on a single specimen. Hence, the focus of the book is mainly on the archaeological and linguistic facts.

The astonishing Chinese discovery of wonderfully preserved four-thousand-year-old human bodies with clothing in perfect condition in the Tarim Basin of western China is fully described by Mair and Mallory in this fascinating and well-researched account. They reach the daring, and perhaps provocative conclusion that these were `the first Europeans in China' -- a view certain to prove controversial.

Colin Renfrew

I'm not aware if the authors had anything to do with this quote being at the back of this book. But this blurb encapsulates the kind of writing style that made the first half of this book exasperating for me. This notion of `the first Europeans in China' is belied by the conclusions they they reach as the most plausible at the end of the book (reproduced below):

1. The earliest Bronze Age settlers of the Tarim and Turpan basins originated from the steppelands and highlands immediately north of East Central Asia.
2. These colonists were related to the Afanasevo culture which exploited both open steppelands and upland environments employing a mixed agricultural economy.
3. The Afanasevo culture formed the eastern linguistic periphery of the Indo-European continuum of languages whose centre of expansion lay much farther to the west, north of the Black and Caspian seas. This periphery was ancestral to the historical Tocharian languages.
4. By about 2000 BC the Afanasevo culture, which was at the time being absorbed by the Andronovo culture from its west and other cultures in the Yenisei region, pushed southwards and came into contact with settled Indo-Iranians to the northwest of the Tarim Basin. ...
5. Many of the Bronze Age mummies preserved in the archaeological record of East Central Asia may be assigned a probable (Proto-) Tocharian identity.

There are few more conclusions that are drawn, but even from these points it can be seen how incorrect the blurb at the back of the book is and it shows the hype used to promote this book is mostly misplaced. It does not detract from the actual findings, but it seems that even in academic writings the notion of truth in advertising is slipping away.

By `Europe' (when used with or without quotes in this book), they mean the European (sometimes called Eurasian) Steppe, and usually the easternmost part of the so-called Western steppe which forms one part of the overall plain. The Western steppe extends from the grassy plains at the mouth of the Danube River along the north shore of the Black Sea, across the lower Volga, and eastward as far as the Altai Mountains. In this book they seem to place the origins of the mummies as the north-west shore of the Black Sea. In other words, hardly `Europe' as most laypersons would understand the word.

In fact, from the above conclusions the truth is actually even more complicated. The origin of the Caucasoid mummies is placed most plausibly in the steppes immediately north of East Central Asia. Hardly Europe, but despite their own conclusions the first half of this book is littered with hints that the origin of the mummies has to be European.

And here we must face the frequently ignored asymmetry of the Indo-European space-time continuum.

And then there's the goofy style of presentation. For a book aimed at the pedantic audience the authors far too cavalier at several points where you reasonably expect some precision in the writing. The authors spend interminable amounts of text explaining historical details which in the final analysis are completely irrelevant to final conclusions. They take us through their (understandably) tangential thought processes in their search for an answer to the puzzle of the origin of the mummies. They include discussion of Herodotus and ancient Chinese legends. Inspite of this, they fail to introduce to the reader in the earlier chapters the prehistoric Afanasevo and Andronovo cultures from the northern part of East Central Asia which forms a crucial part in their final answer. Also, they change the focus partway through the book to only the prehistoric mummies, ignoring the mummies from later periods (4 B.C to 400 A.D.). However, in earlier chapters they take great pains to explain the environment of the entire known history of the Tarim Basin, even the complex history during which it served as part of the Silk Road.

%A J. P. Mallory
%A Victor H. Mair
%T The Tarim Mummies
%T :Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West
%I London: Thames and Hudson Ltd
%P 352
%D 2000
%G ISBN: 0500051011 (hc)
%K history, archaeology, linguistics

Date written: 2001/02/09

Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac

In the light of history, I think the Game really was a game, with scores but no substantial prizes.

H. V. Hodson, editor (1950-61) of the London Sunday Times

This book is a recent addition to a short list of books that survey the history of the Great Game. The Game pitted Russia against Britain (especially the Indian Raj) for the control of Central Asia including areas now part of China such as Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Tibet. The Game started in the late 1700s after the British secured a foothold in India and when Russia expanded eastwards and finally concluded when the British Empire disintegrated and when Russia's empire collapsed from internal causes for the second time in the same century.

Comparisions of this book with the many works of Peter Hopkirk on this topic are inevitable. This book is both greater and smaller in the number of topics covered than the several books published by Peter Hopkirk on this period of history (like "The Great Game", "Trespassers on the roof of the world", "Like Hidden Fire" and "Setting the East Ablaze"). Some additional topics to be found here are:

• The strange case of Duleep Singh, Victoria's favorite Maharaja: a ruler without any subjects. He spent his life in Britain after the British annexed the Sikh kingdom founded by his father, Ranjit Singh.
• The stories of people like Madam Blavatsky and Nicolas Roerich who exerted a strong mystical influence on people who determined the foreign policy of many Western nations including Britain, Germany and America.
• The story of the American `Panda hunters', Suydam Cutting, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt.
• The 1943 OSS mission to Tibet lead by Major Ilia Tolstoy (the grandson of the famous Russian author) and Captain Brooke Nolan. They formed Lhasa's first offical contact with Washinton.
• The secret Nazi mission to Tibet under the direction of Himmler's Ahnenerbe, the SS's `Ancestral Heritage' office.
• The American camp in 1961 located in the Colorado Rockies set up to train eastern Tibetan Khampa warriors to fight a guerrilla war against the Chinese Communists. The Khampas were routed by the Chinese and as is common in such cases were soon abandoned by the Americans.
• The Indian attempt under Prime Minister Nehru to annex the Aksai Chin glacier as an attempt at a `forward policy' which lead to a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962.
• The last chapter is full of subsequent modern repurcussions of the Great Game as it was played out before the Second World War with a parade of interesting characters who all fancied themselves still playing the Game in the post-colonial era.

This is, of course, far from being an exhaustive list of the many historical facts related to the control of Central Asia which are covered in this book. The most important point is that while other books perceive the events mostly as being a power struggle between the British and the Russian empires, this book includes other global players of the Game including Germany, America and Indians (distinct from the Indians who served under the Raj).

One major attraction for Great Game enthusiasts is also the citation of a fairly large number of recently published facts about the Great Game cited in this book. Some published sources are as recent as 1999 (published the same year this book was).

The other major strength of this book is the detail of the research into the historical fact and a more in-depth analysis of the events than what has been previously attempted.

Sometimes the details can change your entire opinion: after reading so much about the daring exploits of Colonel Younghusband in Peter Hopkirk's book "The Great Game", I was quite disappointed to read his `Kit List' reproduced in this book uncovered by his biographer Patrick French. His kit included sixty-seven shirts as well as nineteen coats (a full dress coat, a morning coat, an Assam silk coat, two jaeger coats, a Chesterfield coat, a poshteen long coat, a Chinese fur coat, etc.) plus a shikar hat, a khaki helmet, a white panama, a thick solar topi, and the imperial cocked hat. This sartorial spendor along with tents, a bath, beds, rifles, swords, were crammed into twenty-nine containers and hauled by locally employed porters (most probably Indian) through `mountain passes, through forests and icy rivers, over dry plains where your eyeballs could freeze in the sockets'.

Other differences with Hopkirk's book are also telling. While the story of Stoddart and Connolly and the infamous Pit of Bokhara forms the centerpiece of Hopkirk's book, their story gets a small mention and more surprisingly in this book the motivations and thoughts behind the actions of the Emir of Bokhara get a larger analysis where others like Hopkirk usually explain the Emir's actions as those consistent with the stereotypical corrupt, evil and parochial Oriental potentate. This far more reasoned telling of this story while not as romantic is far more interesting.

%T Tournament of Shadows
%T :the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia
%A Karl E. Meyer
%A Shareen Blair Brysac
%I Washington D.C.: Counterpoint
%D 1999
%G ISBN: 1582430284 (hc)
%P 646
%K history

Date written: 2000/08/18

History of India by Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund

A serious single volume history of India that covers within 400 pages a time-span that includes the Indus Valley Civilization from 3000 BCE and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 is so ambitious that it is bound to fall short of expectations. Surprisingly, it succeeds in its primary mission to provide the grand sweep of Indian history. In particular, to highlight the large ancient empires and the various regional kingdoms in medieval India. These parts of Indian history get lost in most published books on the history of India which either concentrate on the later period of the Mughal or British empires or dwell only on pre-Buddhist India mostly for jingoistic rhetoric.

The book starts off strongly with two well-written chapters: `Early Civilizations of the Northwest' and `The Great Ancient Empires'. The first chapter discusses the Aryan migration into India, with a precise discussion of the evidence and why certain things are generally believed by contemporary historians about this topic. There is also a nuanced discussion of the Aryan `invasion' and a modern view on that topic.

The next two chapters on medieval India and the Middle Ages are more muddled, perhaps due the the confusing morass of the actual history of the period. The only interesting part was the discussion on the reasons for the spread of Indian religion and culture to Southeast Asia in this period.

While the Central Asian invasion of India and the subsequent Mughal empire in India are more familiar historical topics, the struggle for power between the various Indian parties during the fall of the Mughals are detailed here. Particularly interesting was the relationship between Shivaji and the sultan of Golconda, his Muslim ally, who supported his campaign in South India and the future negotiations between the chief minister (vezir) of the Mughal empire, Nizam-ul-Mulk and Baji Rao of the Marathas (Shivaji's grandson). Baji Rao, in the mid-1700s captured Delhi in a surprise cavalry attack, but left within a few days showing that while the Marathas could have defeated the Mughal empire, they were unable to hold it on their own.

The remainder of the book is a quick look at the colonial rule of the British and the subsequent formation of the Indian republic. This period has been the topic of many history books. The discussion of the Bombay Presidency and the Madras Presidency was a useful counterweight to the usual discussion of Oudh as an example of the rise of British influence in India. The overview of the politics of the freedom movement was particularly well represented even though many of the details were necessarily left out.

There are minor issues that were inconsistently represented in the book. For example, there is no discussion of India before the Aryans and Dravidians when there is ample linguistic evidence of such a previous people (there is book on the topic called "Pre-Aryan and pre-Dravidian in India" by Sylvain LÈvi). Also, the exclusion of the history of Pakistan, Bangladesh after the Partition except where they intersect with events in India was jarring but expedient.

Table of Contents:

1. Early Civilizations of the Northwest
   • Prehistory and the Indus Civilization
   • Immigration and settlement of the Indo-Aryans
2. The Great Ancient Empires
   • The rise of the Gangetic culture and the great empires of the east
   • The end of the Maurya empire and the northern invaders
   • The classical age of the Guptas
   • The rise of South India
3. The Regional Kingdoms of Early Medieval India
   • The rise and conflicts of regional kingdoms
   • Kings, princes and priests: the structure of Hindu realms
   • Gods, temples and poets: the growth of regional cultures
   • India's impact on Southeast Asia: causes and consequences
4. Religious Communities and Military Feudalism in the Late Middle Ages
   • The Islamic conquest of northern India and the sultanate of Delhi
   • The states of central and southern India in the period of the sultanate of Delhi
5. The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Empire
   • The Great Mughals and their adversaries
   • Indian landpower and European seapower
   • The struggle for supremacy in India
6. The Period of Colonial Rule
   • Company Bahadur: trader and ruler
   • Imperial structure and the regional impact
   • The pattern of constitutional reform
7. The Freedom Movement and the Partition of India
   • The Indian freedom movement
   • The partition of India
8. The Republic
   • Internal affairs: political and economic development
   • External affairs: global and regional dimensions

%T History of India
%A Hermann Kulke
%A Dietmar Rothermund
%I Routledge (first published in 1986 by Croom Helm: Australia)
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 0415154820 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0415154822 (hc)
%P 395
%K history

Date written: 2000/10/12

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

On November 19, 1835, a ship carrying 500 Maori armed with guns, clubs and axes arrived on the Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of New Zealand. The Moriori people who lived on those islands were brutally slaughtered over the next few weeks by the Maori.

Jared Diamond's claim in this book is that this outcome was entirely predictable. Not just in proximate terms: that the Moriori were a small, isolated group of hunter-gatherers, equipped with only the simplest technology and weapons, entirely inexperienced at war, and lacking a centralized leadership; while the Maori invaders (from New Zealand's North Island) came from a dense population of farmers, used to warring among themselves, with more advanced technology and weapons, and operating under a strong leadership. Jared Diamond's claim goes deeper: that the history of different peoples can be predicted to follow certain courses because of differences among peoples' environments. Crucially the answer does not lie in biological differences among peoples themselves.

He also states his motivation for answering this question as the final repudiation of the usual racist biological answer or the assumption of superiority of one culture/religion over another as an explanation for the dominance of certain human societies over others. Despite incontrovertible evidence presented by varying scientific fields, these kinds of explanations are most commonly held to be true by the general population and the non-scientific intelligentsia. In particular, cultural superiority is still supported as being a central explanation of dominance of one society over another by many reputed and clearly non-racist historians. Thus, Jared Diamond's teleological exercise in this book, if true, would mean that instead of an accidental or mysterious rise of certain human societies, their dominance can be explained by a hidden (and inexorable) design.

This is a history book, but unlike one you have read before. It examines history's broad patterns unfolding on each continent in the world over the last 13,000 years. It's contention is that in order to explain the conquest of the Americas by European powers in 1492 AD requires us to examine how societies everywhere evolved from their common preliterate hunter-gatherer backgrounds since 11,000 BC. Jared Diamond presents a breathtaking view of this kind of history with help from fields considered mundane and boring such as agriculture, animal domestication and simple geography. He also uses as evidence facts from the more traditional fields of archeology and historical linguistics. Each chapter deading with a different continent systematically goes through facts from each of these fields to support the book's eventual conclusions.

In other words, whether you ultimately accept the conclusions of this book or not, if you are remotely interested in human history, you have to read this book. In my opinion, the approach taken in this book was utterly compelling. There are literally so many facts stated in this book that even without the over-arching goal of the book, reading this book for just the facts is rewarding enough. Parts 3 and 4 of this book are the best non-fiction chapters I have read in a long time. They reveal so many surprising and new facts that it is a damning indictment of the usual histories that are peddled in schools and colleges. Particularly compelling are the parts about the history of the Pacific Ocean islands which were colonized by the inhabitants of South China without ever colonizing New Guinea and Australia. Also interesting was the history of Bantu agricultural societes replacing Khosian hunter-gatherers in Africa.

This is not to say that this book will provide you with *all* the answers to questions in human history. It would be pointless to attempt that goal. The book concentrates on particular cases which bolster the main thesis but does not talk about the more difficult cases. For example, the Mongol invasion of Eurasia which started from several nomadic bands and chiefdoms going on to conquer several established agricultural societies (see "The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757" by Thomas J. Barfield for more on the complex interaction between agricultural and nomadic societies of China and the Mongols). Also curious is the exact nature of the Indo-European expansion into India which as far as we know is a similar case of a nomadic peoples replacing an established agricultural society that flourished along the Saraswati River forming the so-called Indus Valley civilization. Also issues about over-population and similar Malthusian factors on human society are not considered. An attractive idea for a sequel to this book would be a discussion of such issues.

The main problem I had with the tone of the writing was that it seemed to want some kind of Kuhnian revolution in the field of history (Thomas Kuhn might have changed the tone of all scientific writing because of his book). This is problematic for two reasons. The first is that Jared Diamond does not actively participate in the fields which form the backbone of this book and he uses existing research to make many of this points and so it seems that his popularization of these discoveries can be been as a hijacking of ideas from those fields which he then wants to reform. The second is that many competent historians already practice what Jared Diamond is preaching in his Epilogue. Read some representative books on history like "History of India" by Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund to see that the revolution argued for in this book has already happened (even if it is unevenly distributed).

Those familiar to the world of computer gaming will know that the most popular turn-based or real-time strategy games are the so-called 'God games', where you direct a small band of people into a state and subsequently into an empire. Jared Diamond's theory of the growth of human society from hunter-gatherer bands to chiefdoms to states and then to empires is enough inspire a talented game programmer to incorporate these ideas (especially see Chapter 14 'From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy') into a radically expressive and realistic real-time strategy game. I await the development of such a game with suspended excitement.

Such a game will also serve a serious purpose of providing a computational model of the growth of human societies which will go a long way in fleshing out the kind of `historical science' that Jared Diamond proposes in the last chapter of this book (Epilogue 'The Future of Human History as a Science'). Just as the relatively new field of cognitive sciences which includes as sub-fields neuroscience, linguistics and psychology also includes a computational component in artificial intelligence, this new field of viewing human history as a science should also include computational modeling of societal evolution in conjunction with the sub-fields of biogeography, crop cytogenetics, microbial evolution, animal behaviour, archeology and historical linguistics.

Search the archives of the New York Review of Books web site for William H. McNeill's (mostly complimentary but grumbling) review of this book (May 15, 1997) and Jared Diamond's subsequent answer (June 26, 1997) to the issues raised in that review and a follow-up response by McNeill.

Update (2005-07-26): This book has been adapted for television as a 3 episode documentary series. The series aired on PBS during July 2005. I haven't had a chance to watch it but here is a review of the Guns, Germs and Steel television series by Michael Balter.

%T Guns, Germs and Steel
%T :the Fates of Human Societies
%A Jared Diamond
%I New York: W. W. Norton
%D 1997
%G ISBN: 0393317552 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0393038912 (hc)
%P 480
%K history, science

Date written: 2000/07/17

America's War in Vietnam by Larry H. Addington

In his review of twelve books about the Vietnam War, Jonathan Mirsky says about this book,

If there is such a thing as an objective account, this is it. ... If you want to read one book about Vietnam, read this one.

("The Never-Ending War" by Jonathan Mirsky. New York Review of Books. May 25, 2000)

From my (admittedly limited) perspective, this is indeed a remarkable book. Its contents are distilled from the author's classes on America's war in Vietnam that he taught for many years before his retirement from The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. The narrative inexorably presents fact after fact about the war in Vietnam. The text never bogs down under an analysis of any particular incident.

Addington starts his book with a description of French colonial rule in Vietnam, where even by the standards of other European colonies before 1939, Vietnam was known as the "Colony of Cruelty". He gives particular attention to the resistance of the Vietnamese even at that time to a division of their country and their armed resistance against any such intentions by foreigners.

On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh's speech to his countrymen in Hanoi started with a citation of the American Declaration of Independence. But American attitudes at the time were concentrated on bolstering the French economy and ironically under the Truman Doctrine which was meant to "assist free peoples to work out their own destinies" money from the Marshall Plan was used by the French to purchase arms and equipment to subjugate once again their colonies in Indochina including Vietnam. The French (and consequently the Americans) backed unpopular dictators to retain their influence in the region. Addington points out that while this is the first misstep that America took on its long road to war in Vietnam, it was an inevitable step given how the world was perceived by America after the Second World War.

Particular prominence is given in this book to the description of the Gulf of Tonkin incident which was manipulated by Lyndon Johnson in order to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through the Congress. The same resolution was lated used to justify the increase of American intervention in Vietnam. Addington also describes the pre-war construction of the Diem regime in South Vietnam as a matter of American policy and then the inevitable support of each new general that succeeded Diem -- the result of the many coups that followed his regime.

Enthusiasts of military history should be more than satisfied with Addington's lucid descriptions of the various military operations that were undertaken throughout the Vietnam war by both sides. The aftermath of the war not only in Vietnam but also in the other countries involved, especially Cambodia, is also carefully considered. A book worth reading, indeed.

America seems to have learnt something from its military experience in Vietnam. This is evidenced in the use of reserves in Operation Desert Storm by George Bush, and also a narrow escape from a repetition of the mistakes made in Operation Rolling Thunder when America bombed Serbia in order to make them negotiate with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Unfortunately, American foreign policy so far has been ineffectual in replacing conflict with diplomacy when dealing with so-called "rogue states".

Contents

1. The geography of Vietnam and its history to World War Two
2. The career of Ho Chi Minh to 1939
3. World War Two and America's collaboration with Ho
4. America and the Indochina War, 1946-1954
5. Eisenhower and the road to America's war in Vietnam, 1954-1960
6. Kennedy's war: Counter-insurgency and the fall of Diem, 1961-1963
7. Johnson's war, I: To the brink, 1964
8. Johnson's war, II: The year of the plunge, 1965
9. Johnson's war, III: Moving towards defeat, 1966-1967
10. Johnson's war, IV: The turning year, 1968
11. Nixon's war, I: The strategy of withdrawal, 1969-1970
12. Nixon's war, II: The final round, 1971-1972
13. The Paris peace accords and the fall of Indochina, 1973-1975
14. Aftermath and summing up

%T America's War in Vietnam
%T :a short narrative history
%A Larry H. Addington
%I Indiana University Press
%D 2000
%G ISBN: 0253336910 (pb)
%P 191
%K history

Date written: 2000/06/20

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

First of all, this book is very long (update: dwarfed, however, by Stephenson's more recent offerings). At over 900 pages, it will be quite an investment of time. It does have some pages that could have been easily edited out, but considering the size of this tome, the signal to noise ratio is high enough to recommend this book.

Stephenson makes a strong departure from his previous novels like "Snow Crash". This is his first supposedly `serious' novel. However, the strength of this novel is the same as that of his earlier novels: his inspired descriptions of technology. It does not matter that in this novel the technology described is either contemporary or dating back to the Second World War.

This book has been described and promoted as a historical novel and not really as a science-fiction novel. In my view it is really an alternative history novel which is similar, at least in spirit, to some of the novels written by Connie Willis and others by Philip K. Dick, both of whom have both feet firmly planted in the sci-fi genre.

As the book eventually makes clear, there are good guys and bad guys in this book and they are categorized as such. This would be fine if the bad guys were not uniformly ill-defined, unmotivated and permanently hidden from view. The villains provide most of the impetus for the action but little is known about any of them; from General Wing (corrupt PRC honcho) to Andrew Loeb (a lawyer, no less). Some villains (like The Dentist) appear and then vanish without purpose.

But the book makes up for this by providing the most interesting heroes to populate the pages of a thriller: a bunch of nerds including Randy Waterhouse in a high-tech startup to build a data haven to keep governments off of encryption and privacy software while at the same time introducing their own currency; a group of cryptographers including Alan Turing and Randy's grandfather cracking codes in the Second World War and a conspiracy (implausibly) forged in the chaos of that war.

The ending is hopelessly inadequate but the book remains interesting right until the last page. In this sense, this book reminds me of Neal Stephenson's earlier books. The detailed depiction of each sub-culture and craft and the style of presentation is so engaging that it does not matter that the big picture in the background is plainly kooky.

For example, Stephenson is most lyrical when describing the details behind 'van Eck phreaking' (first proposed by Wim van Eck, van Eck's paper). Eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch; connecting countries by laying fibre-optics on the ocean floor; and the distribution of family heirlooms by solving a generalization of the Knapsack problem are some of the other things examined under the Stephenson's microscope.

Stephenson, however, sometimes loses control of his writing style. In some places the prose reads like a Unix man page. But the strangest part has to be when Admiral Yamamoto's thoughts use a language that one would expect to hear from an American teenager.

Some parts are less than original. Neal Stephenson's theory about the universal nature of the Hacker character is filched from his earlier book "The Diamond Age". It wasn't compelling then, and it remains a bit strained even now.

More information:

• More details on the engineering behind laying fibre-optic cables onto the ocean floor can be found in Neal Stephenson's Wired article: Mother Earth Mother Board.
• Also, Neal Stephenson's Wired article about the growth of the internet in China: In the Kingdom of Mao Bell.
• About Rudy:

  Rudy (Rudolf von Hacklheber, a German mathematician in the WWII storyline) was not a real character, he is totally made up, but I think that he is a reasonably realistic sample of the kind of guy you might have seen running around Princeton at the time Turing was there, immediately before the war.

  Neal Stephenson, irc interview. Apr 29, 1999

• Stephenson also states that Alan Turing spent some time during the war in Greenwich Village (New York City) working on voice encryption for Bell Labs. Later in the novel, Stephenson describes Turing using such a device which combines speech with white noise from a accompanying phonograph which is cancelled out at the receiver's end who has an identical phonograph playing.

%T Cryptonomicon
%A Neal Stephenson
%I London: Arrow Books
%D 1999
%G ISBN: 0099410672 (pb)
%P 918
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2000/08/26

Mughal India and Central Asia by Richard C. Foltz

The Mughal dynasty ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 1526 upto 1857. There are not many historical studies available that concentrate on their Central Asian roots and their later interactions with their homeland. The British tradition treats the Mughals as an Indian Muslim dynasty, while the Russian and Soviet tradition has predominantly looked at Central Asian history.

Richard Foltz's thesis in this book is that the Mughals had, since the time of Babur, longed to return to their Central Asian roots. He points out the various places in many historical documents where the (usually sentimental) nostalgia for Central Asia is evident. The documents cited in this book come from many sources: the Mughals themselves and also by the many Central Asian holy men, artisans, soldiers and artists who used to travel to India for financial gain.

After the Uzbek takeover of their ancestral homes including the prominent Chaghatai cities like Samarqand, the Mughals expanded into North India and rule this land as their new home.

Richard Foltz makes the case that the Mughals always intended to return to their homelands in Central Asia and were repeatedly unable to do so due to many problematic circumstances. He catalogs the active cultural and political traffic that existed between the Mughals, the Safavids who inhabited modern-day Iran and Afghanistan and the Uzbeks in modern-day Uzbekistan.

A lot has changed, it seems, as it is safe to say that no significant percentage of the Muslim populations of India and Pakistan considers a significant kinship with Central Asia. This is inspite of the fact that Mughal culture has remained a strong influence for all the inhabitants of North India and Pakistan.

Be aware that this is the author's PhD dissertation in revised form, and so is not written for the layman. It is prone to several pedantic interludes and you need at least a rudimentary knowledge of the history of the region to begin reading this book. You need to know, for instance, who the Safavids were (as opposed to the Sassanids and the Saffarids) since such `basics' are never explicitly mentioned (the web is very helpful here). But overall, it is one of the most entertaining books on history I have read -- mainly due to the several quotes taken from historical sources.

%T Mughal India and Central Asia
%A Richard C. Foltz
%I Karachi: Oxford University Press
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 0195777824 (hc)
%P 190
%K history

Date written: 2000/05/23

Trespassers on the roof of the world by Peter Hopkirk

... Lurgan's impassive face changed. He considered the years to come when Kim would have been entered and made to the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India. He foresaw honour and credit in the mouths of a chosen few, coming to him from his pupil. Lurgan Sahib had made E23 what E23 was, out of a bewildered, impertinent, lying, little North-West Province man.

"Kim", Rudyard Kipling

Tibet is geographically isolated, especially from the West. Part of the appeal of this kingdom has been this isolation. In fact, some people have conferred utopian ideals onto this land simply because of this isolation: the famous misnomer of `Shangri-La' invented by James Hilton.

This book chronicles each attempt by spies and explorers to pry open the mysteries of Tibet. The most compelling of these were the Indian spies who mapped large parts of Tibet working under Captain Montgomerie. People like Kishen Singh (code name 'A.K.'), Nain Singh and Sarat Chandra Das collected unparalled amounts of geographical material about Tibet. Sarat Chandra Das was incorporated by Rudyard Kipling into his novel "Kim" as the intrepid Hurree Chunder Mookherjee (sic).

While their exploits were published in the Royal Geographical Society, they were never officially acknowledged either by the British or subsequently by the Indian goverment. Their stories are amazing and even though only part of this book is devoted to them, this was reason enough for me to read this book. The question remains: why did these people perform these heroic deeds so far above the call of duty for the benefit of their British rulers? I suspect the answer is not a simple one: neither monetary incentives or loyalty to the British or an utopian ideal seem to be an answer. Their motivations were, I suspect, not very different from the other explorers from the West. The contributions of these Indian spies and explorers, in terms of maps and local information, were quantitatively greater than most of the other explorers in Tibet but their stories remain largely unknown to this day.

A more exhaustive history of these Pundit explorers in the pay of the British Empire is in the book "Pundits : British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia" by Derek Waller (University Press of Kentucky, 1990).

This book is as exhaustive as possible about the various explorers who tried to storm Lhasa in their own ways and for their particular motivations. There is an amazing variety of them:

• Annie Royle Taylor who wanted to convert the Dalai Lama to Presbyterianism,
• Henry Savage Landor who was captured by the Tibetans and tortured for several days along with his two Indian servants Chanden Singh and Man Singh (who was a leper). They were released at the Tibetan border probably as a warning against further intrusions into Tibet.
• Ekai Kawaguchi, who not only reached Lhasa, but lived there for more than a year in disguise. He was presumed to be in touch with his teacher and one-time British spy - Sarat Chandra Das
• the Canadian Susie Rijnhart who returned from her ill-fated expedition to Tibet without her Dutch husband Petrus Rijnhart and her infant son Charles.
• the Russian Colonel Nikolai Prejevalsky who was turned away from the gates of Lhasa by Tibetan warrior monks.
• the US Air Force cargo plane that crash landed near Lhasa and whose crew were nearly lynched.

There are many such stories in this book. Many of them document stories of torture designed to deter further intrusions into Tibet but also about torture on the citizens of Tibet by the ruling theocracy. These stories, which are almost certainly true due to the multiple sources that report it, were then used by the British and the Chinese as a convenient excuse to invade Tibet. The reasoning provided then is exactly the same as in other colonial "interventions" in history: a double-barreled combination of (a) revenge for real or perceived slights by the ruling power and (b) the liberation of the oppressed populace.

The story of Heinrich Harrer which got a lot of attention from Hollywood (including the movie "Seven Years in Tibet") does not get much attention by Peter Hopkirk and Harrer is dismissed as a footnote in this history and appropriately so.

Most people know of the Chinese invasion of Tibet on November 7, 1950. However, not many historical sources point out the previous history of relations between Tibet and China and especially the role of the British and the Russians. This book is one of the few places which details this history. Since this is so rarely mentioned anywhere, I've included the full account below:

After the British invasion of Tibet in 1904 under the command of Col. Younghusband, the British enforced certain trade treaties with Lhasa and installed Captain O'Connor as the British trade commissioner in Gyantse. The British presence irked the Chinese who were used to having a permanent consul (called the amban) in Lhasa and whose influence was now displaced by that of the British. However, the British were not very comfortable with their position in Tibet and wished to pull out. The British Campbell-Bannerman government signed a treaty with China in April 1906 restoring Britain's recognition of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. The British never consulted with the Tibetans on this matter. The following year, the Chinese signed a treaty with the other power in the region, the Russians granting the Chinese `suzerain rights' over Tibet. Again, the Tibetans were never consulted. Soon thereafter, the Chinese advanced into Tibet leaving a trail of slaughtered monks. In February 1910, two thousand Chinese troops seized Lhasa. The Dalai-Lama escaped to Sikkim in British India. After the October 1911 revolution in China, the Chinese garrison in Lhasa mutinied and the Tibetans took advantage of this and started a guerilla war against the Chinese. On January 6, 1913, the last of the Chinese marched out of Lhasa and the Dalai Lama returned to his capital. The Chinese invasion of 1950 cannot be divorced from this history thirty-seven years before and the politics of the powers in the region: Chinese, Russian and British.

It is important to note that most of the explorers mentioned in this book have written books of their own in which they detail their adventures. In fact, it was common for these `explorers' to finance their expeditions in this way. There is a veritable glut of these portraits of Tibet which are in direct contrast with the contemporary portrayal of Tibet in the media. For example, a useful book to read after this one is "Lhasa and its Mysteries" by Col. Austine Waddell (1905) which despite its title demystifies Tibet entirely. Waddell's book is particularly unsympathetic towards the Lhasa theocracy, which is not surprising since he chronicles the 1904 invasion of Tibet by the British. However, his cold prose is an effective counterbalance to the unabashed mysticism usually associated with any current writing about Tibet.

The British and Russian tug-of-war over India that was fought out over Central Asia is documented in "The Great Game" also written by Peter Hopkirk and in "Tournament of Shadows" by K. E. Meyer and S. B. Brysac.

More books on Tibet:

• "The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947" by Tsering Shakya (Columbia University Press, 1999). Recommended by Ian Buruma in his NY Review of Books article "Found Horizon" which reviews the books by Schell and Hilton (see below).
• "Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood" by Orville Schell (Metropolitan Books, 2000)
• "The Search for the Panchen Lama" by Isabel Hilton (Norton, 2000)

%T Trespassers on the roof of the world
%T :the race for Lhasa
%A Peter Hopkirk
%I J. Murray
%D 1982
%G ISBN: 0719539382
%P 274
%K history

Date written: 2000/06/14

The Great Game: the struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk

Now I shall go far and far into the North, playing the Great Game.

"Kim", Rudyard Kipling

The mention of the words `cold war' brings to mind the mostly latent conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union which involved many other countries in its wake. That, however, can be considered to be history repeating itself. The original cold war was fought throughout the 19th century including the early part of the 20th in Central Asia between the British Empire and the Russian Tsarist government. The effects of this imperialist struggle are still around today even after the fall of the British Empire and the Soviet Union. This book is a chronicle of that period of history.

`The Great Game' was a term first used by one its protagonists: Captain Arthur Conolly but it only became famous as a term describing the cold war in Central Asia after it was used by Rudyard Kipling in his novel "Kim". I highly recommend reading (or re-reading) "Kim" after reading this book.

It amazes me that India was the land that ignited the entire conspiracy of the Great Game with both the British and the Russians trying to control the `immense riches' of India. A changing economy and a few hundred years of British rule have taken care of that particular tempation towards colonialism and completely changed the image of India in the world.

The time covered by the Great Game is expansive, starting with the treaty between Napolean and the Russians in 1807 all the way to the British invasion of Tibet in 1904. The cast of characters is similarly numerous, but this is not much of a problem as the Game is divided into many individual acts with their own protagonists. The stories themselves are compelling:

• Stoddart and Conolly's internment in the infamous Pit by the Emir of Bokhara;
• the various missions by the many British and Russian spies trying to infiltrate khanates like Khiva, Bokhara and Merv in disguise;
• the `foreign devils' like Aurel Stein stealing treasures on the Silk Road;
• the Russian annexation of Merv which eventually resulted years later in the Russian expansion into the rest of Central Asia;
• the British invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent struggle for power in Central Asia against the Russians;
• the massacre of Tibetan soldiers by the British at Guru during the attack on Gyantse.

The books reads like a contemporary political thriller with spies, treachery, rabble rousing, lies, the politics of greed and all the other good stuff.

Despite his claim earlier in the book that `I have tried, when describing the deeds of both Britons and Russians, to remain as neutral as possible', Peter Hopkirk's sympathies clearly lie with the British and he often apologizes for their actions while condemning equally reprehensible acts by the Russians. However the bias is overt and easily discounted by the aware reader.

Until recently, this book was the most comprehensive chronicle of the Great Game and along with Peter Hopkirk's other books was a comprehensive history of the times. A new book has appeared which covers the same period of history with a broader scope: "Tournament of Shadows" by K. E. Meyer and S. B. Brysac.

"Trespassers on the roof of the world" also written by Peter Hopkirk is a chronicle of various explorers and spies that have tried to infiltrate Tibet which also featured in the Great Game but to a lesser extent and as such was mostly left out of this book.

%T The Great Game
%T :the struggle for Empire in Central Asia
%A Peter Hopkirk
%I Kodansha International
%D 1994
%G ISBN: 1568360223 (pb)
%P 565
%K history

Date written: 2000/04/30

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William E. Burrows

William Burrows does not explain exactly what he means by "The First Space Age" until the last chapter of the book. He is referring to the militaristic space race between the two cold-war rivals: America and the Soviet Union. Even pure scientific endeavours had to be funded by exploiting politicians who feared that the other side would do it first. That history still colors most of space research today and this long arc of time is the main focus of this book.

The main appeal of reading a detailed history of spaceflight is that you get at least a glimpse at the thousands of people other than the astronauts who were behind the scenes in the many missions to space undertaken around the world. It takes a book like this to help us appreciate the real scale of each effort in spaceflight.

Despite the relatively short time that humans have had spaceflight, there are far too many historical details for even a 700 page book to cover exhaustively. Fortunately, where some of the details are lost in this book (for example, the Apollo missions after Apollo-11) there are entire books that deal with these subjects. Hence, despite its length, this book serves only as an essential introduction to the history of spaceflight. Don't read this book if you want a detailed description of any particular mission to space. However, by sacrificing details of particular missions Burrows makes room for a more comprehensive description of human endeavours in space -- not just concentrating on the more glamorous manned missions, but also describing in deserving detail the unmanned missions. Burrows also is careful enough to present the stories of many of the engineers and managers without whom no space program would exist.

If you consider yourself an enthusiast of space exploration this book is a must-read. You are likely to find many new facts here including many surprising ones. However, it is not just for the facts that one should read this book. Burrows also tackles the philosophical issues involved in the rationale for spaceflight. Burrows is careful not to dismiss out of hand those voices that were opposed to space exploration (mainly because of the costs involved). Rather, Burrows gives voice to the many scientists who have argued for the importance of space as a human endeavour. These arguments, both pro and con, are spread throughout the book and helped to sharpen my own opinion about the reasons for space exploration.

Apart from the engineering and science history, Burrows also tries to document the politics behind the thrust into space by the United States and the Soviet Union. The now infamous military-industrial nexus that drove space research in both of the superpowers is documented and discussed in great detail. Personally, I found this to be less interesting than the science history.

Burrows' writing is at its best when he tries to convey the amazing feat of flinging manmade objects out into space. However, there are also quite a few annoying aspects in the writing. In many places, only the last name of a person is mentioned and one is forced to go through the index to find the full name and description of this person. This happens far too often and should not have overlooked by the editors. Also, there is some repetition of facts, but that is to be expected in a book of this scope.

Due to the focus of Burrows' books, there is very little discussion about the space programs of countries other than the US and Russia. Apart from a few references in Chapter 17 ("The Second Space Age"), there is no information about whether or not countries other than the superpowers could develop a viable space program in the future. Such information would have been fitting in a book that has such a wide breadth about space exploration.

Another book that seems to tread the same ground is "Countdown: A History of Space Flight" by T. A. Heppenheimer. Unfortunately, I haven't read it and so am unable to compare their content.

%T This New Ocean
%T :The Story of the First Space Age
%A William E. Burrows
%I Modern Library Paperback Edition
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 0375754857 (pb)
%P 723
%K history, space exploration

Date written: 2000/04/10

Science in Medieval Islam by Howard R. Turner

This is one of the few popular history books that I could find about the contributions of scientists who lived in the so-called Golden Age of Islamic culture from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries A.D. The books manages to give a fairly effective overview of a long and important historical period. While almost any scientific history published in the West will mention Aristarchus, for instance, very few bother to mention any of the major Islamic scientists who not only preserved the Greek scientific tradition but extended and improved on it.

In the rare cases when the ancient Islamic scientists' contribution is mentioned they are portrayed as caretakers of previous scientific knowledge which they transmitted back to Europe just in time for the Renaissance. The truth, of course, is much more interesting. This book is a lightweight introduction to this interesting and ignored time. It is an illustrated introduction and is a quick read with a lot of accompanying pictorial excerpts from the original scientific texts.

For me personally, the most interesting scientists mentioned in this book were:

• Ibn al-Shatir's 14th century manuscript illustrating his concept of planetary motion. According to Turner, a diagram in Copernicus' Commentariolus (ca. AD 1530) bears remarkable resemblance to Ibn al-Shatir's schematic.
• al-Jazari's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (from the 13th century).
• Ibn al-Haytham's 11th century text: Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) and his theory of vision.

Turner makes some silly statements about the Arabic language being `more suited' than others for scientific pursuits, but apart from such minor failings the level of scholarship is very high.

Turner is also a bit jingoistic at times, but that is understandable since he has to counter the weight of all those stern Western Tradition professors who obsessively promote Greek contributions to Western culture at the cost of all else. With more books like this one perhaps historical teaching will be able to impart a more realistic tradition to students: that partnership between cultures and scientific interchange is not as modern as it seems.

%T Science in Medieval Islam
%T :an illustrated introduction
%A Howard R. Turner
%I University of Texas Press, Austin
%D 1995
%G ISBN: 0292781490 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0292781474 (hc)
%P 262
%K history, science

Review written: 2000/01/20

The Persian Expedition by Xenophon

Xenophon lived around the 4th century B.C. and this particular story is a fascinating insight into the military history of that time. He has written other books ranging from a treatise on Socrates to a history of his time. In this book he tells his own story of a doomed military expedition.

From the beginning, Xenophon is full of apparent contradictions: he clearly thinks that the Spartan way of life is superior to that of his native Athenians, despite or perhaps because of the fact that at the time the Spartans had dominion over Athens. He joins a mercenary army to fight in Persia for Cyrus who wants to take over the rule of Persia from his brother. Xenophon does this not because of the lucrative possibilities of plunder in a hostile land, but because he considers Cyrus to be the epitome of the ideal ruler: noble and brave in battle, yet gracious and generous to his friends.

Things fall apart quickly and Xenophon finds himself promoted up the chain of command responsible for thousands of Greek troops in the middle of Persia deep inside hostile territory faced with the problem of retreating to more friendly lands. This book is the story of this journey. For me, the story retained interest until the last few chapters where the problems Xenophon faces became repetitive. The last chapter (which ends the saga quite abruptly) tells us of the fall of a noble mercenary to common thievery.

%T The Persian Expedition
%A Xenophon
%I Penguin Books
%D 1949 (this edition)
%P 301
%K non-fiction, history

Review written: 1999/10/27

John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: from Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death by Steve Heims

On the face of it, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener have little to do with each other. They did not collaborate in their professional careers and did not know each other very well. But the subtitle to the book is the key to Steve Heims intentions in putting the biographies of these two men into one book. He wants to discover what in the background of a scientist is responsible for such brilliant minds to collaborate in the construction of weapons of mass destruction and policies of mutually assured destruction.

John von Neumann was aggresively brilliant and made several contributions to mathematics and physics. He was also a key technical adviser and proponent of the nuclear proliferation conducted by the United States in order to target the Soviet Union. Norbert Wiener was arguably equally brilliant but sacrificed several aspects of his career as a scientist because he refused to create anything that could be misused to a destructive end. He practised an applied moral and social philosophy in his attitude towards technology. This is the juxtaposition that Heims offers in this book. A story of two men and their research programs.

What Heims seems to be after is the moral or ethical core of any scientist. Should you fund your research if you know that it will lead to an eventual misuse of it antithetical to your moral values (although von Neumann seemed to truly hate the Soviet Union enough to consider mutually assured destruction a valid option for the greater good). Heims gives us a crucial insight into this question. It is even more to his credit that Heims follows this objective without sacrificing any details in the biographical details of these scientists.

Those interested in these issues should also read "The First Circle" by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, where issues of ethics in research are covered in a fictional setting in a research station gulag in Stalinist Russia.

%T John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener
%T :from Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death
%A Steve Heims
%I MIT Press
%D 1980
%G ISBN: 026258056X (pb)
%G ISBN: 0262081059 (hc)
%P 547
%K science, biography

Review written: 1999/08/15

News from Tartary: a Journey from Peking to Kashmir by Peter Fleming

This book describes a trip made in 1935 by the author from Peking to Kashmir through Xinjiang or Chinese Turkistan (what used to be called Tartary). This is a book for those interested in `Great Game' history where Central Asia was the place of intrigue between Russia and the British Empire. There is some interesting political information, often missing from history books, embedded in this travelogue. The uneven writing can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Peter Fleming had to fund his trip by sending regular dispatches to newspapers in London.

Circumstances early on dictate that he has to travel with Ella 'Kini' Maillart, a young Swiss journalist. Kini's addition makes the story more interesting, not only because neither of them wished a travel companion preferring their own company, but also because she was a woman traveler and journalist in a time and place when this was not common. One desire I was left with after reading this book was to read her account of the same trip (published in 1937 as "Forbidden journey: from Peking to Kashmir"; Translated from the French by Thomas McGreevy).

Most of the early part of the book is spent describing the struggle with the `inscrutable oriental' bureaucracy. Since their trip was contingent on the deception of the authorities it wasn't clear to me that the obstacles the various Chinese officials placed in their way was of healthy spite or knowledge of their deception which they could hardly be happy about.

Peter Fleming when he is successful at his writing reminds me strongly of authors like P. G. Wodehouse (who he mentions favorably in this book). Here is an example:

I have travelled fairly widely in `Communist Russia' (where they supplied me with the inverted commas): and I have seen a good deal of Japanese Imperialism on the Asiatic mainland. I like the Russians and the Japanese enormously; and I have been equally rude to both. I say this because I know that to read a propagandist, a man with vested intellectual interests, is as dull as dining with a vegetarian.

Despite his protests to the contrary, Fleming is anti-Russian (a common British sentiment at the time) and shows naive surprise that some of the natives treat the British along with the Russians and the Japanese as equal imperialist threats. In my view, there is little to distinguish British aggression from Russian in this region, although transgressions by the Russians have been more faithfully recorded by historians. He is also virulently abusive to his Uighur guides complete with a great deal of racist invective which is quite jarring with his otherwise debonair attitude.

Peter Fleming is Ian Fleming's older brother; less famous than Ian now ever since the James Bond movie franchise took off, but considerably more famous than Ian when he wrote this book. For more on Ian and Peter Fleming, read Ian Fleming's biography.

For more information about Ella (Kini) Maillart

%T News from Tartary
%T :a Journey from Peking to Kashmir
%A Peter Fleming
%I The Marlboro Press/Northwestern
%D 1999
%D :originally published 1936 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
%G ISBN: 0810160714 (pb)
%P 384
%K travel

Review written: 2000/01/02

1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies

In case you are planning on picking up this book: 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies, you might want to read Bill Poser's blog post discussing 1421, in particular about some of the linguistic facts and dubious research methods used in this book.

In case you are too lazy to click on the above link, I am quoting below from Bill Poser's post about 1421 the parts I found to be the most entertaining (maybe reading this will encourage you to read the entire post that is linked above):

The first linguistic point raised in the book (p. 104) concerns an inscription found in the Cape Verde islands off the West coast of Africa, which Menzies attributes to Zheng He. Unable to identify the writing system, he wonders whether it is an Indian writing system and faxes a query to the Bank of India, which informs him that it is Malayalam. Unfamiliar with Malayalam, he asks where it was spoken and whether it was in use in the 15th century. According to Menzies, the Bank of India responded as follows:

Yes, it had been in common use since the ninth century. It has largely ceased to be spoken today, though it is still used in a few outlying coastal districts on the Malabar coast.

In fact, Malayalam is spoken by over 35 million people. It doesn't seem likely that the Bank of India was unaware of the principal language of Kerala State, one of the national languages specified in Schedule Eight of the Constitution of India. Maybe they were pulling Menzies' leg, or maybe he just can't get his facts straight.

Assuming that there is an inscription in Malayalam in the Cape Verde Islands, what does this tell us about Zheng He's voyage? Is there evidence that it dates to the 1420s? Whenever it was made, isn't the most likely hypothesis that an Indian made it? The content of the inscription might shed light on this, but although much is made of the writing system, we never find out what it says!

...

Menzies continues:

There is also linguistic evidence of Chinese visits to South America. A sailing ship is chamban in Colombia, sampan in China; a raft, balsa in South America and palso in China; a log raft, jangada in Brazil, ziangada in Tamil.

We aren't told which of the 98 languages of Colombia, the 234 languages of Brazil, or the roughly 700 of South America as a whole, these words come from. In any case, isolated similarities like these are meaningless; it is easy to find a few words similar in sound and meaning in any two languages. At least two of the three examples here are wrong. You'd think that a Royal Navy man would know that a sampan is not a sailing ship; it is a small boat usually propelled by two oars. There is no Chinese word palso meaning "raft"; no Chinese syllable ends in /l/. And even if the pair of words for "log raft" are correct and their resemblance is not accidental, how would this prove contact between China and Brazil? Menzies is apparently assuming that the only way a Tamil word could get to Brazil is via Zheng He's fleet, and that it is likely that Brazilians would borrow a word for something with which they were no doubt already familiar from the tiny minority of Tamil speakers who might have accompanied the Chinese fleet.

...

Menzies gives further evidence of contact between China and the New World on p. 414:

Like the Waldseemüller chart, another map of Vancouver Island, called `colonie chinois' by its Venetian cartographer, Antonio Zatta, was published before Vancouver or Cook `discovered' the island. The Squamish Indians there have more than forty words in common with Chinese, including tsil (wet), also tsil in Chinese; chi (wood), which is chin in Chinese; and tsu (grandmother), which is etsu.

Menzies does not give the other 37 putatively similar words in Chinese and Squamish, nor does he cite sources for the Chinese and Squamish words. The fact that he is wrong about where the Squamish live (their territory is on the mainland of British Columbia, just north of the city of Vancouver, not on Vancouver Island) does not give confidence in his data. In any case, the examples that he does provide are dubious. Not one of the three words claimed to be Chinese is identifiable as Chinese.

Good stuff. For more read Bill's original post.

"Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade" by Mamoru Oshii

Jin-Roh is a deceptively simple drama: a look at a resistance movement against a repressive government told through the lens of the Red Riding Hood fable. Written by Mamoru Oshii (a well-known director of famous anime, "Patlabor", "Avalon", among others), directed by Hiroyuki Okiura and produced by Production I.G.; as Oshii says, "the only way to do this was in animation".

Showa 30's, the name for the alternate history that covers the period between the end of WWII and the Tokyo olympics, as stated by Oshii, a different Japan than after the olympics. This is the setting used in Jin-Roh and it also appears in "The Red Spectacles" (Jigoku no banken: Akai megane) and "Kerberos", both earlier movies by Oshii (recently released as part of a DVD boxed set with three early Oshii movies). This period also covers the social unrest of the 60s. Jin-Roh was also in some sense an adaptation of Oshii's graphic novel "Hellhounds: Panzer Corps" (Kenrou Densetsu).

Here's a slightly edited excerpt from the essay "History's Unquiet Spirit: Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade" by Carl Gustav Horn

In [his] review of Jin-Roh, ... Mark Mays wrote for the Nashville Scene, "The forces of modernization have always tried to eliminate the bestial nature of man ... Oshii suggests that this only works if our fellow beasts will agree to that proposition. The beasts in the alternate reality of Jin-Roh believe that they can never be eliminated."

... Jin-Roh is a dark pool reflecting those very years -- more than forty years past -- that were, according to the received critical wisdom, a height to which Japanese film has never returned. But what Jin-Roh is conjuring through a chill distorted glass is what was really going on in Japan in those days -- the reality never seen in the samurai films that were winning Academy Awards.

Oshii describes Jin-Roh's alternate history as being set somewhere within the "thirties" of the long reign of the late Showa Emperor, Hirohito -- that is, between 1955 and 1965. Japan was then still a largely working-class society, and even as contemporary America by and large enjoyed the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower, Japan was rocked by social upheaval.

Left-wing parties often made use of the pressure of strikes and massive demonstrations, among whose ranks marched a young university student someday to be known as the brilliant director of Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki. A picture survives of Miyazaki with a (naturally) hand-drawn protest sign showing a woman smacking riot police with a hammer. In Jin-Roh, as Fuse and Kei read Rotkäppchen to each other, and the camera passes over the streets outside, we see a shot of an elementary-school kid in a baseball cap. He would have been just the age of Mamoru Oshii in 1960 -- and he gazes in fascination as a protest march walks by.

But the Left faced a quick and sometimes ruthless response. That very year Oshii was a boy, perhaps cheering for the Nankai Hawks, a young neo-Nazi assassinated the head of the opposition Japanese Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma, on live television. Many would have said that the far right had allies in high places: the highest, even -- Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic party was led in 1960 by a convicted war criminal, Prime Minister Nobosuke Kishi, who, once back in power, had tried to give the national police the right of arbitrary arrest.

David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro have documented how Prime Minister Kishi even proposed to mobilize in secret, with the support of Japanese organized crime, an irregular right-wing army of 30,000 counter-demonstrators to be supported with Japanese Self-Defense Force helicopters and aircraft. With all that in mind, Oshii's script, and Jin-Roh's opening sequence of street riots, bombings, and terrorists cut down by the machine guns of the government's secret death squad, the Capital Police and their Special Unit, seems not too far from real history -- or from an unresolved past.