The Quiet Before

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas
Gal Beckerman
Crown (February 15, 2022), 447 pages
Kindle edition $13.99, Amazon hardcover $20.99

The subtitle of this book is misleading. The Quiet Before is much more about the variety of ways in which ideas have been communicated than it is about their origins. And certainly not all the ideas Beckerman discusses are radical. Nor are the chapter titles helpful. Given that, I kept my own notes about the means of communication he discusses in each chapter. I also don’t see a “quiet before” in his various narratives. Nonetheless, Beckerman has an intriguing thesis and he delivers some interesting material.

After an introduction in which he makes a cogent argument as to how social media is not conducive to civil and productive discourse, his first chapter discusses the power of the old-fashioned letter. Beckerman describes how Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc used the letter in the seventeenth century to pursue his scientific ends. His goal was to make the measurement of longitude more accurate. To do so he needed multiple people in a variety of locations to take measurements of a lunar eclipse. He wrote letters to encourage various individuals to make those observations, and his efforts did largely make the measurement of longitude far more accurate.

Beckerman goes on to discuss the petition. An activist named Feargus O’Connor in the nineteenth century tried to use petitions, mostly without success, to convince the British Parliament to enact laws to ease the burden on laborers. In the early twentieth century a woman named Mina Loy involved herself with a group of thinkers who called themselves “futurists.” They used the manifesto to express their ideas, and sometimes developed competing manifestos. In West Africa locals opposed to how the British were treating the natives set up newspapers to express their ideas. In the former Soviet Union dissidents employed a methodology known as “samizdat.” Beckerman says that this was a contraction of the words “self” and “publishing.” This was a means of distributing censored material, usually with typewriter and carbon paper. The author then moves on to the late 1980s when young women started creating ‘zines with scissors and glue sticks. They copied them on photocopiers and distributed them by postal mail.

The author then inserts a section entitled “Interlude” in which he discusses Stewart Brand’s creation of the WELL: the Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, one of the first computer bulletin boards. Those were the days in which you had to own a modem and dial in to the WELL’s servers.

From here Beckerman moves into the computer age, discussing how protesters created Facebook pages to promote their movement and how members of the alt-right used chat rooms on various platforms to further their agenda. He describes how a virologist named Eva Lee was at the center of an ongoing discussion made up of doctors, scientists, and healthcare professionals during the early days of the COVID pandemic. They continued their conversions via email and a Twitter Direct Message (DM) group while the occupant of the White House at the time downplayed the whole matter. Finally, Beckerman discusses how activists use hashtags to promote social causes.

The tale does not promise us a happy ending. As Beckerman told us from the start, social media is not conducive to productive discussion or lasting change. But perhaps in knowing that we can find workable solutions.

Around the World in 80 Books

Around the World in 80 Books
David Damrosch
Penguin Press (November 16, 2021), 432 pages
Kindle edition $15.99, Amazon hardcover $21.78

David Damrosch had big plans for this book. In the tradition of Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s fictional hero in the novel Around the World in 80 Days, Damrosch planned to make a world tour, giving lectures and meeting people, basing the trip on eighty books. Then the pandemic hit. Conferences were canceled and travel was restricted. So instead he set up a web site where he discussed a different book each day, five days a week. The web site became this book.

To Damrosch’s credit he does not purport to be offering any sort of canon. He makes clear that the selections are his own, and that someone else would have made a different set of choices.

Like Phileas Fogg, Damrosch starts in London, and like Fogg he travels east to west. In London he discusses Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Interestingly, his selection for Doyle is The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I still have the copy of that two-volume set that I got when I was a youngster.

From London he travels, as it were, to Paris and then to Kraków, Poland. From there he visits Venice, where he offers an interesting selection: the writing of Marco Polo, Dante with his Divine Comedy, and Boccaccio’s Decameron (a book that has resonance for today with its tales told in a plague world). He also writes about Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, but before that discusses By Its Cover written by contemporary expatriate mystery writer Donna Leon.

I won’t mention all of his other stops, but Damrosch covers the Middle East, Africa, China, and Japan. From Japan he moves on to South America, where he interestingly writes about Candide by Voltaire and Utopia by Thomas More, two European authors. His rationale is that the action in these two books took place in South America. In his discussion of Candide, Damrosch oddly fails to mention Dr. Pangloss, whose optimistic philosophy is central to the book’s theme. At the book’s end, where the characters choose to settle down in their own corner of the world, they say, you will recall, “We must cultivate our garden.” Damrosch italicizes “our,” saying “Our life’s path… is a social rather than an individualistic imperative.” I haven’t read Candide since high school, but I have always clearly taken that phrase to say that we should stop trying to fix the larger world and do what we can with our own small space. It is an individual, nuclear family, or small group endeavor, not a social expectation.

Damrosch then goes on to Mexico and the Antilles in the Caribbean. From there he makes a big jump to Bar Harbor, Maine where he spent his earliest years and then to New York City where his family moved while he was still in elementary school.

In the New York chapter he writes about one of my favorite childhood books, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Damrosch describes how L’Engle was living in New York at the time and he not only met her, but she personally gave him a copy of the book. Damrosch and I are the same age and I admit to being jealous.

Although he includes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in the New York section, Damrosch writes, “Our own imagined journey reaches its end, as we return to England with our eightieth book.” A good place to finish the journey, indeed.

There are omissions in Damrosch’s list from my perspective. He completely ignores California, the Midwest, and the American South. There are certainly many West Coast authors he could have included, and what about Mark Twain in the Midwest (I still have The Complete Novels of Mark Twain from my childhood) and Faulkner for the South?

Still, Damrosch delivers an engaging survey and many of his eighty books are no doubt well worth reading or re-reading.

Life Between the Tides

Life Between the Tides
Adam Nicolson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 22, 2022), 373 pages
Kindle edition $14.99, Amazon hardcover $27.00

I have known about tide pools since I was in elementary school. They showed up in films we watched in class, in books, and probably on television. But growing up in Southern California there are few places where a youngster can experience a tide pool. It was only as an adult that I got to see tide pools up close when I visited Anchor Bay on the Northern California coast. I loved having the opportunity to wander among the tide pools and observe the sea creatures. (And I did bring home a starfish on more than one occasion.)

Loren Eiseley wrote about life in nature and about starfish. I suppose I was looking for a Loren Eiseley-esque experience in reading this book, and I suppose I should have read the description of the book more carefully. Though there were some Eiseley moments, that really isn’t what the book is about.

Nicolson, who is known more for writing about human history than about natural history, owns property on the coast of Scotland and got permission from the appropriate authorities to dig tide pools where none were before. He writes about the prawns he found in his tide pool and discusses how prawns cope with threats. He then discusses the crabs he found and delves in detail into the mating habits of crabs. There’s some real crab porn here.

From here he reviews the work of a naturalist named Robert Treat Paine III. This is of interest because Robert Paine is a descendant of Thomas Paine of Revolutionary War fame. Another scientist, Thomas O. Paine was also a descendant of the original Thomas Paine and was administrator of NASA when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I mention this because I shared an apartment with his son George during my Claremont cockroach days after graduating from Pitzer College. But I digress.

Nicholson discusses Robert Paine’s work in demonstrating the huge effect removing a single species has on the ecology of a tidal environment. From here Nicholson goes on to discuss geology, then folklore, then philosophy. He ends the book by describing digging a final tidepool.

There were some interesting passages in Life Between the Tides, but it was not the book I was hoping to read.