A delightful hodge-podge of social history.
An inventory of daily life in London circa 1755, when Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language.
Amateur historian Picard (Restoration London, 1998) has compiled an enormous collection of factoids about 18th-century London, an era depicted in William Hogarth’s prints “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street.” The author writes page-long briefs on subjects ranging from hats to poorhouses to the king’s budget. The cumulative effect of these briefs is powerful. In a chapter devoted to amusements, we first read that in London the poor drank 11,326,070 gallons of gin in one year. The next brief describes how the same people baited animals, setting dogs on bulls or pitting roosters against one another for fun and profit. Celebrities other than Johnson and Hogarth appear often. James Boswell, despite his repeated use of prophylactics, contracted gonorrhea several times, for example. His cure cost five guineas. Crucial to Picard’s research into the mundane were parish records, pamphlets, and such Fleet Street publications as The Gentleman’s Magazine. Joseph Massie’s analysis of family incomes also gave her a vivid picture of daily life: with Massie’s statistics she reconstructs the most private of experiences—finances. Whether or not a person begged for supper at a church, purchased it from a baker on the street, or dined at home said much about where that same person would be buried years later—in a mass grave or in a Chippendale casket. Perhaps the most extraordinary subject here is that of the water pipes under London’s streets. The miles of wooden pipes burst constantly, delivered water to houses sometimes only once or twice a week, and served as habitation for eels and fish. Readers may feel inclined to create their own narratives out of Picard’s strands: Imagine a broken water main drenching a sailor walking home from a cockfight where he won a few shillings, money he’ll use to pay for a loaf of bread.
A delightful hodge-podge of social history.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27665-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her...
The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture.
“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes the author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust." In between, she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life, one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out of a world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into a radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865, Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson, who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler, Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne….
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4813-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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