A provocative examination of the history of exploration as a quest for new and improved ways to change our minds.
Everybody must get stoned: That’s the great lesson of history, driven home by this elucidating survey.
According to Breen (History/Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), the quest for drugs has been a constant of human history, propelling the rise of empires in the modern era. By “drug,” he adds by way of qualification, the author includes a wide variety of substances both recreational and medicinal, some of them quite dubious: “Eating the powdered flesh of an Egyptian mummy may cure the plague….Possessing an enemy’s toenail clippings may allow you to kill them.” Between-the-lines reading offers intriguing possibilities: It’s not hard to liken the doings of the Portuguese Empire, by far the most effective of all drug-seeking powers, and the British Empire that overtook it as rival drug cartels. What is certain, argues Breen, is that the Portuguese “spent much of their first decades in the Americas stumbling in the dark, trying and usually failing to make sense of the hallucinogens, poisons, stimulants, and remedies that surrounded them.” Apply science to a recreational substance, and you often get medicine, from CBD oil to morphine, with the “pristine sterility of the pharmacy” replacing the dusty shelves of the antiquarian; apply it to a remedy, as with quinine, and you get a lucrative patent, giving rise to the modern pharmaceutical industry. All reason enough to chase after drugs, a bewildering variety of which marched into European markets following the Columbian exchange: Samuel Johnson’s dictionary includes definitions for many of these novelties, including agaric (“a drug of use in physick, and the dying trade”) and nepenthe (“a drug that drives away all pains”). Breen makes a fine case for his title, which he suggests is more appropriate than the Age of Reason—and for reasons good and true.
A provocative examination of the history of exploration as a quest for new and improved ways to change our minds.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8122-5178-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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