Mathematics in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art: Content, Form, Meaning by Robert Tubbs

Case studies of math’s influence on the arts, some more pertinent than others

The late Robert Tubbs was a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado. In his book Mathematics in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, published in 2014, Tubbs explores instances where math and art intersect. Although the book delves into some complex mathematical concepts, the text is accessible to a general reader with an interest in math, the arts, or both.

This book consists of ten chapters, each of which follows a similar structure: (1) Tubbs opens with a simple, obvious example of how mathematical concepts were employed in the creation of a work of art or literature. Kazimir Malevich made paintings of geometric shapes, for example. Jasper Johns used numbers in his paintings. Poet André Breton included mathematical imagery in some of his surrealist writings. In these examples, the artistic connections to mathematical concepts often seem tenuous at best and leave the reader thinking, “Well, duh!” (2) Tubbs, proceeds, however, to discuss the work of a particular mathematician and explain his concepts and theories to the reader, such as David Hilbert’s explorations into non-Euclidean geometry, Gotlieb Frege’s use of set theory to define what a number is, Eduard Zeckendorf’s theorem involving Fibonacci numbers, and Charles Howard Hinton’s books on the fourth dimension. (3) Finally, Tubbs then caps the chapter off by presenting a work of art or literature with a more complex relationship to the mathematical concept at hand. These examples are often by a lesser-known artist, for example painter Alfred Jensen, writer Albert Wachtel, or poet Paul Braffort. These works, however, bear a more integral relationship to math than the more obvious examples covered earlier in the chapter. Tubbs frequently draws upon works by dada and surrealist artists. The experimental musical compositions of John Cage are also discussed. In the literature category, many of the works covered are by members of the Oulipo group, a French movement whose members often employ mathematical structures in their work.

In considering this tripartite division of each chapter, the third portion was really what I expected when I purchased the book, and the second part of each chapter taught me much about mathematics. In the opening portions of each chapter, however, the loose connections between the art discussed and mathematics often felt forced and sometimes pointless (e.g. Are Johns’s number paintings really math?). In his preface, Tubbs states that he hopes “this book will appeal to non-mathematicians interested in literature or the arts who are curious about twentieth-century trends and the occasional glimpses of mathematical ideas in those trends.” That would be me. My education was in art, not in math, so naturally I learned more about math from this book than I did about art. Tubbs does a commendable job of explaining higher-level mathematical concepts and theories to lay readers. The beginnings of chapters at times feel too elementary because Tubbs is starting at square one for the general reader, but by the end of the chapter some intellectual heavy lifting may be required. I will confess I found the math confusing in a couple passages, but not so much that I lost my bearings as to what Tubbs was saying about the art.

This book is not so much a comprehensive history of the use of mathematics in art but rather a collection of interesting case studies. The ten chapters somewhat call to mind Martin Gardner’s old Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American, but with a focus on the arts. Like “mental floss” for Mensa candidates, Tubbs draws the reader’s attention to artistic and literary curiosities and trivia while teaching them complicated mathematics along the way. The coverage has more breadth than depth, but Tubbs brings up a lot of intriguing works that artists and writers seriously interested in this topic will want to track down for further investigation.

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Showcase Presents The Witching Hour by Alex Toth, et al.

Great art, terrible writing

Showcase Presents is DC Comics’ line of trade paperbacks for classic comic reprints, similar to Marvel’s Essentials series. Showcase is the title of a DC anthology series that featured different characters in every issue. The Showcase Presents books, however, don’t necessarily have anything to do with that series. Showcase Presents The Witching Hour was published in 2013. It reprints issues #1 to 19 of DC’s old horror anthology series The Witching Hour. These issues were originally released from February 1969 to March 1972.

Just as EC Comics’ Tales of the Crypt had its Crypt-Keeper as host or MC, The Witching Hour has its own trio of hostesses in the form of three witches named Mildred, Mordred, and Cynthia. The first two are traditional ugly old-crone witches, while their step-sister Cynthia is a hot modern witch. In each issue they have a contest to see who can tell the best stories. This doesn’t really work to the series’s advantage, however, since three to five pages of each issue are wasted on this filler material. The witches frequently bash each other’s stories, complaining about how terrible they are, which unfortunately rings often far too true. The only bright side to these interludes is that they are often drawn by Alex Toth.

As one would expect from this genre, every story ends with a “surprise twist.” In almost all cases, however, the twists are clumsy and disappointing. It’s kind of like when a comedian spends a fair amount of time setting up a joke and then flubs the punchline. And for the better part of the book, every story is like that! You would think from the law of averages that they couldn’t be all bad, but in the first 17 issues there isn’t a single story that deserves to be singled out as impressive from a writing standpoint. Only in issues 18 and 19 does the level of quality start to pick up a little.

The art, on the other hand, is fabulous. I assume The Witching Hour was originally printed in color, but the Showcase Presents series only reproduces the black and white art. Here, however, that’s great, because these stories look beautiful in black and white, and the film-noir feel is appropriate to the genre. This is ‘60s and ‘70s comic art at its best, with old-school masters like Alex Toth, Jack Sparling, Gray Morrow, and Jerry Grandinetti making frequent appearances. Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson show up a couple times, and Wally Wood once. Not every artist in the volume is a genius, but the majority of the stories are very well illustrated, and even the worst artists in this book are a cut above the average Curt Swan-ish DC style of this era.

I’m not a fan of DC’s superhero universe, but I do enjoy their old comics in other genres, such as their science fiction stories in Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. (Strange Adventures has two volumes in the Showcase Presents series, Mystery in Space has none.) I thought I would give this horror anthology a try, but I found the quality of stories vastly inferior to the old EC Comics from the 1950s. I really did enjoy the art in these Witching Hour stories though. DC has also published Showcase Presents volumes of their horror titles House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and Tales of the Unexpected. Perhaps one of those books contains more compelling stories than this one.

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Odd John by Olaf Stapledon

An X-Men precursor from the 1930s

British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is far from a household name these days, even among habitual readers of science fiction. Though an inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, he is one of those figures who has faded into obscurity over time, even though he had a profound influence on subsequent authors in the genre. His writings have been acclaimed by literary figures as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, and Winston Churchill. Stapledon also wrote several nonfiction books of philosophy. His novel Odd John was published in 1935.

Odd John is based on the same premise as J. D. Beresford’s 1911 novel The Hampdenshire Wonder. Both novels are about a strange child born with superhuman intelligence. The narrator of Odd John mentions The Hampdenshire Wonder as if it were historical fact. Stapledon takes the idea much farther than Beresford, however. As a child, John Wainwright, the Odd John of the title, exhibits slow physical development but extremely rapid intellectual development. It soon becomes apparent that his mental abilities far surpass anyone he encounters, even some of the so-called great minds of England. John considers himself superior to, and in fact “more human,” than Homo sapiens. His unnatural intelligence also comes with strange behavior. John exhibits a stoic lack of emotion and a pronounced amorality. Stapledon even delves into John’s kinky sex life with Freudian gusto. John does not consider himself bound by the moral code of regular humans and looks at Homo sapiens more as cattle than as people. The one normal human he befriends is the narrator, a journalist and friend of the family. Beyond this one relationship, John finds normal human society disappointing and alienating, and he begins seeking out others of his kind.

Odd John reminded me a lot of Marvel Comics’ Uncanny X-Men, even to the point where it makes you wonder if Stan Lee or Jack Kirby read this novel. John’s manner of speech immediately called to mind the villain Magneto, especially his use of the term “Homo superior” to describe mutantkind. Both characters also have white hair. As more “supernormals”are discovered, they are of various races and with various enhanced skill sets—mind-reading, time travel, predicting the future, etc., calling to mind the “psionic”-powered mutants of Marvel Comics. Telekinesis—moving objects with the mind—is only hinted at in one scene. Almost all of Odd John’s fellow mutants are juveniles, and when they come together, the older adolescents instruct the younger children, much like at Professor Xavier’s Academy. They found an independent mutant republic reminiscent of the X-Men’s island nation of Genosha. Mankind is frightened of these young mutants, seeing them as the next step in evolution bound to render our kind obsolete and extinct, much like Homo sapiens eclipsed the Neanderthal.

What bothered me about Odd John is that Stapledon’s writing is just so long-winded. He gets so involved in his psychoanalyses of these characters that there is little room left for any actual action to take place. Everything is overexplained, to the point where it seems like Stapledon makes the same point five or six times in a chapter. While I admired the ambitiousness of his futuristic ideas, his lethargic storytelling was a chore to endure. I frequently found it difficult to stay awake while reading this novel. I do think, however, that Stapledon’s sci-fi vision shows enough promise to make me want to investigate more of his work. Considering the science fiction greats who cite him among their influences, he’s bound to have a few good novels in his body of work.

Star Trek Memories by William Shatner with Chris Kreski

More of a TV production history than a personal memoir

Star Trek Memories was published in 1993, after the completion of the sixth Star Trek motion picture, the last to focus exclusively on the original Star Trek cast. Seeing his career as Captain Kirk coming to an end, Shatner felt inclined to wax nostalgic by publishing his recollections of the making of the original Star Trek television series. A sequel published the following year, Star Trek Movie Memories, covers the making of the film franchise. I’m not a Trekkie who obsesses over all the trivia on each episode, but I do enjoy the show, and I like Shatner.

Star Trek Memories is packaged like a Shatner memoir, but that’s not really what it is. This is a behind-the-scenes history of the production of the first Star Trek television series. It begins with Gene Roddenberry’s childhood, and ends in 1968 with Star Trek’s cancellation after three seasons. Shatner doesn’t even get involved with the series until a quarter of the way through the book. Although there are plenty of first-person interjections, this doesn’t really read like it was written in Shatner’s voice. One suspects coauthor Chris Kreski had a heavy hand in this. If you are expecting a lot of secrets and gossip about the cast of the show, you’re not going to find much here. The crew actually gets more coverage than the cast. You learn more about the set decorator and the script editor than you do about any of the actors, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy. He gets a fair amount of ink, even more than Shatner himself. The rest of the cast members pretty much get one good anecdote each. There are several tales of practical jokes among the cast and crew that strike the reader as being surprisingly unfunny, and in some cases just mean.

The refreshing thing about this TV memoir is that it’s not just a relentlessly positive lovefest for the show or a pat-on-the-back “look what we accomplished” story. There is a surprising amount of negative criticism of the show and the people involved with it, including some directed towards Shatner himself. It is forthrightly acknowledged that while some of the Star Trek episodes are masterpieces, quite a few are terrible schlock. The book recounts the constant struggles between the Star Trek production team and its parent studio, who demanded that this ambitious science fiction program be made under a paltry budget. The network also often interfered in the creative direction of the show by censoring stories, pushing for dumbed-down content, and trying to shape the characters to their liking. At the beginning of the book, Gene Roddenberry is portrayed as a veritable saint, but by the end of the narrative he has morphed into a sort of villain. His widow was still alive when the book was published, however, so one gets the idea that Shatner and Kreski had to hold back on any unflattering revelations of the Star Trek creator.

This book is kind of like reading a rock and roll autobiography where the star doesn’t talk much about his famous bandmates but instead says more about his manager, publicist, lawyer, and accountant (I’m looking at you, Pete Townshend). This book wasn’t quite what I expected, but I found it all very interesting nonetheless. Star Trek was first broadcast shortly before I was born, but I did grow up on old-school television, back when there were only three networks. This book gave me a good idea of how shows were made in those days, for better or for worse.  

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Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John Lloyd Stephens

Dueling presidents and Mayan ruins

John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an American diplomat and travel writer. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren appointed him Ambassador to Central America. Soon after, he traveled to Central America to assume his new post. It’s unclear what exactly his mission was, however, since Stephens just seems to travel around doing whatever he wants. Stephens’s journey lasted several months, during which time he also ventured into Mexico. His account of his expedition, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán was published in two volumes in 1841. This book should not be confused with his 1843 publication Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, which covers a second trip Stephens made to Mexico.

In 1839, the several nations of Central America were united under one government, the Federal Republic of Central America. When Stephens arrived in Central America, however, the presidency of that government was in dispute between two warring generals, Rafael Carrera and José Francisco Morazán. Stephens doesn’t seem to favor either would-be presidente but rather curries the favor of whichever he happens to be facing at the time. Stephens spends much of the book chronicling the political and military conflict between these two figures. He met with both generals and witnessed some battles fought and atrocities committed by both parties. Although borders may have been different back then, I believe Stephens’s travels took him through every country in Central America except maybe Panama. He doesn’t venture into Mexico until halfway through Volume 2.

Stephens also explored the ruins of several Mayan cities, three of which are discussed at some length: Copán in Guatemala, Palenque in Chiapas, and Uxmal in the Yucatán. Accompanying him on these explorations was the artist Frederick Catherwood, who documented the sites in drawings and paintings. Stephens had no archaeological training, so his discussions of the Maya don’t really hold up to today’s standards. Catherwood, on the other hand, is the real deal. His illustrations of Mayan ruins are quite remarkable in their attention to detail, particularly when you consider he had almost no precedent to build upon. This book contains dozens of engravings of Catherwood’s drawings, but he also published his own book Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan with color lithographs. I don’t want to overemphasize the archaeological content of the book, however, because it’s really only a small portion of the text. The bulk of the two volumes deals with the politics and military matters of Central America, which will likely be of interest mostly to historians of Latin America.

There’s also quite a bit of complaining about unsavory accommodations, incessant mosquitos, and unsatisfactory hired hands. Stephens is more interested in getting to know wealthy Spaniards than the poor Indigenous population, because the former can offer him better lodgings and dinners than the latter. As an explorer and travel writer, Stephens is no Alexander von Humboldt. You’re not going to get a really liberal and enlightened account of Latin American culture and politics, but Stephens is at least a conscientious observer and chronicler of what he sees.

This book is valuable as an outsider’s historical account of what Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatán were like during this time period. Much of the information imparted, however, won’t hold much interest for today’s reader. Before reading this book, one really needs to consider if it will be worth roughly 24 hours of your reading time. For those only interested in the archaeological sites, just read the illustrated chapters on the Mayan cities.
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The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz

A very academic study of three Black Mountain faculty

Robert Rauschenberg is one of my favorite American artists, and I’ve done much reading on his life and artistic career. By association, I’ve also learned a fair amount about his colleagues John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. At one point circa 1950, they all converged at a mysterious institution in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. Though a small school in an obscure location, Black Mountain had a profound influence on American art. What the Bauhaus was to modern European art, Black Mountain could be thought of as the equivalent force in late-twentieth-century American art. I have always been rather fascinated by this nexus of creativity, but accounts I’ve read of the school have been rather vague and sketchy. I was happy, therefore, to stumble upon Eva Díaz’s 2015 book The Experimenters, hoping it would shed some insightful light on the goings-on at Black Mountain.

The Experimenters is not a comprehensive history of Black Mountain College. From what I gather from this book’s notes, that story may have already been written and published. This, rather, is a narrower monograph focusing on the ideas and careers of three members of Black Mountain’s faculty: Joseph Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. While their time at Black Mountain is emphasized, this study looks at their entire careers, including the time before and after their semesters at the North Carolina college. In this book, one doesn’t learn much about the students who studied under these teachers. Black Mountain alumni like Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Cy Twombly are mentioned briefly but not much delved into, save for a few quotes about their time at the school. One learns more about the influences of the three central figures of the book—Erik Satie as a precursor of Cage, for example, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as a colleague of Albers’s at the Bauhaus. Only on rare occasions does the reader really get an idea of what it would have been like to be a student at Black Mountain, attending one of Cage’s theatre productions, for instance, or assisting Fuller with the erection of one of his geodesic domes. Instead, the text focuses more on the intellectual development, artistic philosophies, and pedagogical techniques of the three protagonists, drawn largely from their own published writings and statements from prior interviews.

The writing of this book is very academic. That doesn’t mean you need a PhD to understand it, but you may need a PhD to enjoy it. It is written as if the intended audience were a dissertation committee or a tenure board, not a general reading audience. Díaz’s introduction is very jargon-heavy, to the point where you may find yourself wondering if you really want to go through with the rest of the book. She spends much time contemplating the meaning of the word “experiment.” The average art lover, however, probably couldn’t care less and just wants to know what went on at Black Mountain. Thankfully, the chapters that follow are less esoteric and more engaging as one learns about the work of these three featured artists. Still, the thesis is reiterated constantly throughout the book, and the same points are repeated again and again to support that thesis. One wonders how much more information could have been delivered without so much tedious repetition of the same conclusions.

An art historian might very well find this to be a five-star read. I certainly have no problems with Díaz’s scholarship, and I am not qualified to argue with her if I did. I merely offer the perspective of the general reader who’s interested in the history of American art, as I’m sure many of the people who read this review may, like myself, fall into that category.
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The One-Act Plays of Eugene O’Neill

Short sketches from a master playwright

Eugene O’Neill

One-act plays are the short stories of drama. These are brief stage plays lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his full-length plays like The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, and The Iceman Cometh, but he also wrote 21 one-act plays. I don’t know if any book has ever been devoted exclusively to these short plays, but they can be found in complete-works collections of O’Neill’s writings, or in the three volumes on O’Neill published by the Library of America. In O’Neill’s day, one-act plays would have been staged for theatre festivals and variety nights, which served as opportunities for up-and-coming playwrights to establish a reputation and perhaps win some awards. Nowadays, one-act plays seem relegated to high school and college students performing them in theatrical competitions. While you are unlikely to ever see most of these short plays performed on an actual stage, they are worth a read. O’Neill is one playwright whose works come across well on the printed page. His well-crafted dialogue and detailed and descriptive stage directions often read like prose fiction, calling to mind the works of novelist contemporaries like John Steinbeck or William Faulkner. 

With the exception of the final play on this list, Hughie, all of these works were written early in O’Neill’s career, before he achieved fame and critical acclaim with plays like Beyond the Horizon (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and The Emperor Jones. The first four plays listed below comprise a series with recurring characters, the crew of the ship Glencairn. Many of O’Neill’s early plays deal with nautical travel or the lives of sailors, either at sea or on shore. Seafaring tales were more popular in the early twentieth century than they are today, and the genre allowed O’Neill to deliver popular dramas to the audience while honing his craft towards more mature sailor plays like Anna Christie. In the later plays on this list, one can see the development of O’Neill’s interest in dysfunctional families and their psychological problems, which would lead to later, greater plays like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Through no fault of O’Neill’s, many of his one-act plays present scenes that will seem very familiar from films of the last hundred years, so familiar that they often come across as predictable and clichéd now. It’s hard to tell, however, how they would have been received by theatre audiences a century ago.

Bound East for Cardiff (1914) - 3.5 stars
The first of a series of four one-act plays set on the ship Glencairn. This one presents a death scene in the ship’s forecastle. One crewman lies dying, injured from a fall, while his shipmates converse around him.

In the Zone (1917) - 3 stars
Set during World War I, the ship Glencairn is carrying munitions and has entered “the war zone.” The crewmen are suspicious that one of their own, Smitty, may be a German spy. Not badly written, but utterly predictable to anyone who’s seen enough old war films.

The Long Voyage Home (1918) - 4 stars
Men from the Glencairn stop in a waterfront tavern in London, where the barkeep and his friends hope to shanghai an unsuspecting drunk into servitude on another vessel. This is a familiar scene from literature and film—such as the nautical writings of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example—but well done here.

Moon of the Caribbees (1918) - 2 stars
The Glencairn is docked in the West Indies. The crewmen wait for some Black women to show up bringing liquor and sex. Drinking and dancing ensues. The women represent the exotic temptations of the nautical life and wanderlust amid the tropics, but the depiction is racist and the plot is pointless for the most part.

A Wife for a Life (1913) - 2 stars
Two partners work a gold mine in Arizona. The younger of the two gets a telegram from an old sweetheart summoning him home. This leads to a conclusion that is not at all surprising. The dialogue is bogged down with a lot of clumsy explanation.

The Web (1913) - 3 stars
A New York prostitute with a child lives at the mercy of her abusive boyfriend/pimp. At first this reads almost like a piece of muckraking realism, but it gets very heavy-handedly melodramatic towards the end. Again, this is like a scene you’ve seen in countless movies.

Thirst (1913) - 3.5 stars
Three survivors on a life raft are dying of hunger and thirst and fighting off insanity. There’s some racism here, not uncommon for the era, but it is a decently written melodrama. This reads as if it were written for film because the set directions seem as if they would be impossible to execute on a stage.

Recklessness (1913) - 2 stars
An ugly marriage scene, perhaps foreshadowing O’Neill’s later dysfunctional family dramas but not very successfully. A rich older man with a lovely young wife finds out she is cheating on him with their chauffeur. The depiction of the woman is deliberately cruel, indicative of a woman-is-the-root-of-all-evil mindset that plagues some of O’Neill’s other plays.

Warnings (1913) - 3 stars
A telegraph operator for a steamship discovers that he is losing his hearing. He decides to sail on one last voyage, even though he knows his deafness might endanger the ship and its crew. This features a good family scene up front, worthy of O’Neill’s better efforts, but a pretty straightforward, expected ending.

Fog (1914) - 2.5 stars
Another lifeboat drama. Two men talk while a poor woman hugs her dead child. One of the men is a businessman and one a poet, and they carry with them all of the clichés that go along with those professions. This play is ambitious for its supernatural ending.

Abortion (1914) - 4.5 stars
A college baseball star cheats on his fiancée and gets another girl pregnant. His father helps him pay for an abortion. When the girl dies, her brother comes looking for revenge. Surprisingly dark and risqué subject matter for the time. 

The Movie Man (1914) - 2 stars
A comedy set in the Mexican Revolution. A movie director has a contract with a rebel general to film all of his battles. The general is a thinly veiled parody of Pancho Villa. The humor isn’t very funny, and the depiction of the Mexicans is a bit racist.

The Sniper (1915) - 4.5 stars
Set in Belgium during World War I, in a cottage destroyed by shells. A peasant mourns over his dead son, a soldier killed by the Prussians. The peasant vows vengeance against the Germans, but a priest tries to dissuade him from rash violence. Brief but powerful.

Before Breakfast (1916) - 2 stars
A trashy alcoholic shrew of a woman bitches at her husband, a poet (who is offstage, never seen). Reading as if it were written to punish some ex-girlfriend, this is another woman-as-the-root-of-all-evil story, yet it still might be provide a meaty monologue for some character actress.

Ile (1917) - 3.5 stars
In the arctic, a whaling boat is blocked by ice. The captain refuses to turn back until his ship is filled with whale oil (“the ile”). The crew, starving and overworked, threaten mutiny. The captain’s wife, also along for the ride, pleads with her husband to turn the ship back towards home as the voyage weighs on her sanity.

The Rope (1918) - 4 stars
A dysfunctional family drama, heavy on the white trash. A bitter old man is losing his sanity. He keeps a noose hung in his barn so that his estranged son can someday return and hang himself with it. Meanwhile, his daughter and her husband scheme to get the old man’s farm and money. A good surprise ending.

Shell Shock (1918) - 2.5 stars
A World War I hero suffers from PTSD after some horrific trench warfare, as evidenced by his compulsive obsession for hoarding cigarettes. This feels a bit like an after-school special with a rather simplistic take on its issue. It hints at a bleak and cynical ending that would have risen it above the mediocre but ultimately backs out in favor of a crowd-pleasing expression of patriotism.

The Dreamy Kid (1918) - 3 stars
A blaxploitation film in one-act play form. An elderly Black woman lies ill on her death bed. She waits for her grandson Dreamy to show up before she succumbs to death. Dreamy, however, is a hoodlum on the run from the law. The dialogue is penned in heavy Black accents, but otherwise this isn’t noticeably racist.

Where the Cross is Made (1918) - 3.5 stars
A former sea captain, obsessed with a buried treasure, is losing his sanity. He has built a replica of a ship’s cabin on the roof of his house and confined himself to it. His son wants to get him committed to a mental institution. 

Exorcism (1919) - 2 stars
Two roommates live a drunken existence in a squalid New York apartment. One is depressed over his impending divorce and considers suicide. It’s hard to see the point in this one.

Hughie (written in 1941, first performed in 1959) - 3 stars
A boisterous professional gambler lives in a run-down hotel in New York. In the wee hours of the morning, he accosts the new night clerk on duty and bombards him with conversation. Mostly, he regales the new kid with tales of his night clerk predecessor, the recently deceased Hughie. Written later in O’Neill’s career, this is a fine character study, but rather devoid of plot.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Everything you’d want to know about living in a cylinder

Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama was first published in 1973, and it won just about every major science fiction award for that year. It was Clarke’s first published novel after the book and film combo of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rendezvous with Rama is unrelated to the 2001 series, but it likewise tells a story of mankind’s first encounter with an alien intelligence.

The novel begins in the year 2131. By that time, mankind has established colonies on several planets and moons in the solar system. The government of Earth has also developed a system to track the trajectories of asteroids that may potentially impact with Earth or its colonies. (We now have the beginnings of such a warning system, but none existed when Clarke wrote the book in the ‘70s.) The Spaceguard system detects an unusual object heading toward the inner solar system. This celestial body is named Rama, after a Hindu deity. A calculation of Rama’s trajectory indicates that it has come from outside our solar system—a true interstellar visitor. Scientists deem Rama worthy of investigation and divert an existing unmanned space probe to perform a flyby. The first photos taken by the probe reveal that Rama is more than just an unusual asteroid. It is a rotating cylinder, fifty kilometers long and twenty kilometers in diameter, so geometrically perfect it could only have been created by an advanced intelligent civilization.

The nearest manned spacecraft, the Endeavour, is sent to investigate. The crew only has a short period of time to examine Rama before its course takes it out of our solar system. Landing on one of the flat ends of the cylinder, the crew finds an entrance to the spacecraft and proceeds to explore its interior. Though technologically advanced, Rama appears to be uninhabited, but the expedition nevertheless searches for archaeological evidence of the spacecraft’s creators.

The problem with Rendezvous with Rama is that it never really lives up to its philosophical potential. This isn’t really so much a novel about what it would be like to find evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. The bulk of the book is just Clarke describing what it would be like to live inside a giant rotating cylinder—the gravity, the climate, the atmosphere, the logistics of getting around, and so on. For example, there are three or four chapters devoted entirely to descriptions of staircases and the astronauts’ challenges in traversing them. Is that really necessary? And is that really what anyone is hoping for when they pick up a book like this? Clarke is so obsessed with the physics of this cylindrical spaceship that the idea of alien intelligence or extraterrestrial archaeology doesn’t seem to hold much interest for him.

Mankind underwent a Rendezvous with Rama moment in 2017, when an interstellar object with unusual characteristics, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in our solar system. Rather than a cylinder, it was shaped more like a pancake. This is not the year 2131, however, and we don’t have a surplus of spacecraft out studying the solar system, so we’ll never know for sure if ‘Oumuamua could have been our Rama. The opening chapters of Rendezvous with Rama provide a commendably realistic look at how the process of investigating an interstellar craft might actually proceed. As the novel goes on, however, it starts to dilute its realism by accumulating sci-fi novel cliches, like the captain’s space romance with a buxom female scientist and an act of war between feuding planets. Such tropes prevent the novel from being entirely satisfying, but there is still enough interesting, serious science in Rendezvous with Rama to make it well worth reading.
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United Nations: A History by Stanley Meisler

Engaging, balanced overview of the UN’s successes and failures

Stanley Meisler’s book United Nations: A History was first published in 1995. A revised edition was published in 2011 with additional material that continues the history of the UN through the first decade of the 21st century. Meisler was a foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for thirty years, and he published a biography of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2007. Meisler’s historical narrative of the United Nations begins with the initial conception of the organization at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944. From there, Meisler chronicles all the major diplomatic crises and peacekeeping missions in which the UN became embroiled, including Israel, Korea, the Congo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Somalia, the Gulf War, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and more. In addition, Meisler’s institutional history reveals the interior power struggles and personality conflicts behind every secretary-general election, many policy debates, and the occasional accusation of corruption.

From his preface to the book, you can tell that Meisler believes in the mission of the United Nations. He is not a conservative or isolationist naysayer. Even so, his hopes for the organization don’t prevent him from providing a balanced assessment of the UN’s accomplishments and failures. In fact, the way Meisler tells the story, it would seem that the failures outnumber the successes. As Meisler puts it, in summation, “Throughout its history, the United Nations has never fulfilled the hopes of its founders, but it accomplished a good deal nevertheless.” Meisler’s telling of the UN story is heavy on the American perspective, both because he is an American journalist and also because the United States has played such a large role in the UN. Since so much of the UN’s work is carried out in what used to be called “the third world,” however, the coverage extends far beyond New York and Washington. One ends up getting more recent history on developing nations than you are likely to find in many world history textbooks.

Because of its often bureaucratic subject matter, Meisler’s book isn’t always exciting, but it delivers everything I expected and more. At least half of the events covered in this book took place before my adult memory, and Meisler provided me with a thorough education filled with interesting details. As for the more recent events, I was due for a refresher course, and this book gave me one. In the United States, UN happenings often get page-three treatment behind the doings of our president and Congress. In this book, crucial moments of world politics, policy, and diplomacy are placed front and center to give the reader a broader perspective and understanding of what was happening throughout the rest of the world.

I enjoyed reading Meisler’s mini-biographies of the UN secretary-generals and other major players in the organization—figures like Dag Hammerskjöld, Ralph Bunche, and Kofi Annan. Also, through Meisner’s behind-the-scenes insights into the workings of the UN, I gained a better understanding of what it is that diplomats actually do. Out of necessity, Meisler had to heavily condense a great deal of history to fit the UN story into one volume. The entire Vietnam War, for example, is dispatched in about half a chapter. Nevertheless, I feel like I got a comprehensive, engaging, and well-written history of the first 65 years of the UN.
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