In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

The Copernicus of Antiquity: Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath

Very brief and awfully arcane

In his popular book and television series of 1980, Cosmos, astronomer and author Carl Sagan includes a chapter/episode on Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek scientist. In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus conceived the heliocentric model of our solar system, meaning the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. We know this because Archimedes informs us of Aristarchus’s accomplishment in one of his scientific publications written about a century later. Aristarchus was not able to convince many of his contemporaries, however, and, like much of ancient Greek scholarship, his work was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus established and mathematically proved the heliocentric model in his publication On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and the rest, as they say, is history. In Sagan’s summary of Aristarchus’s career, his heliocentric theory was only one of the ancient Greek’s precocious discoveries. In many ways he was a scientist way ahead of his time.

A desire to learn more about this interesting character led me to The Copernicus of Antiquity, published in 1920, a brief biography of Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath. This book is only about 60 pages long, and the biography is further shortened by the fact that only the second half of the book is actually about Aristarchus. The first half of the book is a brief recap of earlier Greek astronomers and their discoveries, including such ancient cosmographers as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and roughly a dozen others.

The Copernicus of Antiquity was published in a series of books entitled Pioneers of Progress: Men of Science, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. It was likely adapted from an earlier, more extensive book by Heath from 1913. I would assume the Men of Science series was intended for a general non-academic reading audience, but this book certainly isn’t written that way. A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader. Heath writes as if he expects his audience to have read much ancient scientific literature in the original Greek. He also expects the reader to have memorized all of the mathematical operations in The Elements, Euclid’s classic book on geometry. Granted, many college students of 1920 would have studied Greek, but most were neither professional classicists nor mathematicians. While it’s a well-known fact these days that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, few, if asked, could conjure up the angle at which the Sun subtends the zodiac circle, but Heath writes as if this and many similar astronomical measurements were common knowledge. The book is full of complex mathematical computations that will be over the head of curious casual readers.

Of course, the fault is probably not with Heath but rather with whoever edited the Pioneers of Progress series. They took a full-length scholarly monograph intended for classical philologists and mathematicians and condensed it down to a pamphlet size, but they didn’t adjust the content for a pamphlet audience. I learned much more about Aristarchus from Sagan’s chapter in Cosmos than I did from this book by Heath. With the exception of a few facts here and there, I found it a waste of time. If an overview of ancient Greek astronomy is what you’re looking for, undoubtedly better texts exist than this.

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

A quarter millennium of rich intellectual history reassessed

British historian, novelist, and journalist Peter Watson has published over two dozen books over the past 50 years. He is best known for his nonfiction books on intellectual history or the history of ideas. Rather than tell the history of the world through its wars, dynasties, and diplomacy, Watson examines world history through the arts, sciences, literature, and social sciences. In his 2010 book The German Genius, Watson explores the prodigious intellectual achievements of Germanic Europe, a realm that includes not just Germany but other German-speaking lands, including Prussia, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and more. The book covers a time span from 1750 to the present. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany (collectively speaking) led the world in a vast assortment of scholarly disciplines: philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and music to name a few. Germany’s intellectual profile took the ultimate turn for the worst in the 20th century, however, with the Nazi atrocities of World War II and the persecution of academics under that authoritarian regime. Watson examines how this nation stacked with geniuses fell from the zenith to the nadir of intellectualism, and how that fall has affected Germany’s intellectual legacy.

I had previously read Watson’s 2022 book The French Mind, in which he gives a similarly comprehensive, centuries-spanning overview of French thought and culture. I would assume his latest book, The British Imagination, does the same for the UK, but I haven’t yet read it. The German Genius is a better book than The French Mind, which tried too hard to advance a specific thesis and was only partially successful. The German Genius mostly just lets the Germans’ achievements speak for themselves. While The French Mind pushed a very feminist argument, feminists will not be happy at all with The German Genius, where maybe five women are mentioned for every thousand males. In both his French and German studies, Watson makes the convincing case that Britain and the United States could learn a thing or two from the way these cultures view the world.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Third Reich. Watson doesn’t excuse or deny in any way the evils perpetrated by the Nazis or the horrors of the Holocaust. He calls out many scholars and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. The question Watson grapples with in this book is to what extent should the Nazis’ wrongs negate German achievements before and after the Third Reich. He traces a continuum of intellectual cause and effect from Immanuel Kant to the present day. Romanticism led to inwardness, which led to cultural pessimism. Social Darwinism led to nationalism and antiSemitism. The horrors of the Nazi years are a part of this continuum, not removed from it, but how much of this spectrum of thought should be darkened by that black mark, and where exactly is the line of demarcation? Friedrich Nietzsche’s work had philosophical value, for example, but was co-opted and misconstrued by the Nazis, thus tainting his name. Martin Heidigger, on the other hand, was a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Does that render his philosophy totally invalid?

Watson asserts that, because of animosity generated by the World Wars, many Germans who made important contributions to knowledge and society have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. He even includes an appendix on 35 semi-forgotten Germans we should all know better. Watson also points out the important contributions to American and British science, arts, and culture made by German immigrants who fled the Nazi regime.

Watson is really great at writing these sweeping historical syntheses. He summarizes vast quantities of information and explains complex concepts in engaging and accessible prose, all the while pointing out interesting connections and drawing insightful conclusions. I come away from each of his books with a long list of interesting people, ideas, and books to explore further. I enjoy Watson’s books so much, I purposefully read them slowly too make them last longer. I would suggest starting with his worldwide histories Ideas and The Modern Mind before venturing into his regional studies like The German Genius and The French Mind.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

A long haul through 18th-century Polish Jewish history

The Books of Jacob is a novel by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a historical novel of deliberately epic proportions (about 1,000 pages), based on real lives and events. The novel opens in the 1750s. The story jumps back and forth quite a bit between Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), and Germany (the Habsburg Monarchy). At that time, all of those political units were larger in land area and shared common borders with each other.

Jacob Frank (1726–1791) is Polish-born but seems to have been raised as a Turk within the Ottoman Empire. He is discovered by a group of Polish Jews, including some of his relatives, who think he is a new messiah for the Jewish people—a mantle that Jacob is ready and willing to adopt. His sect of followers—known as Sabbatians, anti-Talmudists, or Frankists—breaks from the orthodox beliefs of Judaism. They practice mysterious rites, some of them sexual, that just about everyone else finds sacrilegious. Jacob has heretical ideas of a holy trinity that includes himself. For their unorthodox views, the Frankists are violently persecuted by orthodox Jews and driven from town to town, country to country. To ensure their own safety, they court the protection of the Catholic Church, essentially striking a deal that they will all convert to Christianity (a big baptism bonanza for the Catholics) in exchange for the ability to settle and live peacefully. This provides a bit of a respite from their troubles, but not an end. (It’s a complicated history, and my summary is unavoidably an oversimplification for brevity’s sake.)

With historical novels, there is such a thing as being too faithful to real life. Tokarczuk goes into far more detail than necessary and drags this story out much longer than called for. She has obviously done much research, and perhaps in doing so she felt the need to cram every name, date, and note of correspondence she encountered into this book, when really some abridgment would have been welcome. Much of the plot is meeting after meeting and meal after meal with these characters, who talk about the same things over and over again, or write letters arguing the same points repeatedly. If ever a novel needed one of those cast-of-characters lists, it’s this one. New characters are constantly introduced who don’t seem to serve much purpose in the story. Other than three or four main characters, everyone else is difficult to tell apart. They all have at least two names, a Jewish name and a Christian name, and it’s hard to keep track of just how everyone is related.

I don’t know Tokarczuk’s religious views, but she is clearly fascinated by the history of this unusual religious sect. As a nonbeliever in any of the big-three theisms, however, I really couldn’t see why anyone considered Jacob a messiah in the first place. He has a natural charisma but doesn’t come across as particularly holy, miraculous, or even good. He reminds one of David Koresh. As messiah, he grants himself the right to take his followers’ wives, daughters, and in some cases sons, for his own pleasure. I kept hoping the congregation would wake up and realize Jacob’s a huckster and a rapist and take their revenge on him.

I do have an interest in Polish history and culture. I’ve read quite a bit of Polish literature and history books on Poland. I would have enjoyed a textbook chapter on Jacob Frank, however, more than I enjoyed Tokarczuk’s tedious rendering of this story. If you read a page at random, you’d find the writing quite adept and beautiful, but as a whole, this novel numbs the mind with hundreds of pages in which not much happens. The last 25% of the book, to be fair, is quite a bit more interesting and eventful than the three quarters that preceded it. In the end, however, I couldn’t help thinking I wasted an inordinate amount of time on a book that kept asking me to sympathize with a self-serving Tartuffe and his gullible disciples. I’ve previously read Tokarczuk’s Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; both are better than this. 

Logic Machines and Diagrams by Martin Gardner

Early graphic representations of mathematical reasoning

For almost a quarter of a century, Martin Gardner (1914–2010) wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he would present all sorts of math curiosities, puzzles, and brain teasers. These columns were assembled into many collected volumes that were popular with general math-curious readers. He also wrote plenty of books outside of that series on topics concerning math, science, and magic (card tricks and other forms of prestidigitation). Logic Machines and Diagrams, published in 1958, is one of Gardner’s earlier works, written when he had just started with Scientific American. In regards to its particular subject, the book has a sort of master’s-thesis feel to it, but it is still written very accessibly for curious non-mathematicians.

A logic diagram is a graph or chart that helps illustrate or prove the veracity and validity of a series of logical propositions. The most obvious and commonly known example of a logic diagram is the Venn diagram composed of interlocking circles, introduced by English mathematician John Venn in the 1880s. Gardner covers these as well as more complicated forms of logic diagrams. If one takes such diagrams and converts them into a three-dimensional analog—with levers and gears, for instance—then you have a logic machine. The structure of logical propositions can also be translated into electronic circuitry, thus creating an electric logic machine. From there, one naturally progresses to digital logic machines like the precursors to today’s computers. (In 1958 personal computers as we know them today did not exist, but there were giant industrial and military computers like ENIAC.) To solve problems and learn, the “AI” systems that we use today employ the same laws of logic that were explicated by Aristotle, George Boole, and others, just as human brains constantly use these same logical laws without consciously thinking about them.

Perhaps because I’m a graphic designer, the diagrams interested me far more than the machines. I found the first few chapters of this book really fascinating. First, Gardner introduces us to Ramón Lull (or Llull), a 13th century Spanish philosopher who devised a series of complicated diagrams with moving parts in the form of rotating paper wheels. These weren’t so useful for logic, as Gardner points out, but rather they amounted to a sort of Western European I Ching used to inspire philosophical contemplation and intellectual creativity. In Chapter 2, Gardner discusses Venn and other logical diagrammists like him, including the author/mathematician Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame. In Chapter 3, Gardner presents his own system of logical diagrams designed to move beyond the computational capabilities of Venn diagrams.

At about the halfway point of the book, Gardner turns his attention to logic machines—mechanical, electronic, and digital. He ends up admitting, however, that none of these machines were as effective as a decent diagramming system, and they amounted to little more than experimental novelties perhaps useful as classroom learning tools. In his final chapter, Gardner speculates about the future of logic machines. Much of what he predicts about computing are things that we now take for granted every day with our desktop computers, tablets, smart phones, and other electronic devices.

For over half a century, Gardner was mathematics’ most charming and prolific ambassador to the general public. The subject matter of Logic Machines and Diagrams isn’t as deliberately fun as Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns, but it will still appeal to the same audience—anyone interested in mathematical “mental floss.”

Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers by Joseph Mazur

Disorderly presentation of a complex subject

My attraction to arcane knowledge sometimes leads me to read a book that’s somewhat over my head. Such is the case with Joseph Mazur’s Enlightening Symbols, published in 2014. Mazur is a mathematician and considers himself a “mathematics journalist.” He has published several books on mathematics that appear to be aimed at a general trade audience, but this book may be for a more specialized audience.

Enlightening Symbols is a history of mathematics, in particular the history of how symbols have been created and adopted for various mathematical operations, functions, and concepts. As the subtitle indicates, much of the book is concerned with notation—such as, where did we get +, -, ×, and ÷—but that’s not the whole story. In the early portions of the book, Mazur talks about counting with fingers, sticks, and stones, and the use of the abacus. Ancient mathematicians didn’t even have numerals, at least not widely accepted ones. Early math texts, such as Euclid’s Elements, are written entirely in words. Mazur details how Arabic numerals spread and came to be accepted in Europe—except they’re not really Arabic numerals; they’re of Indian or Hindu origin. The book then goes into the history of algebra and how certain Greek and Latin letters came to be used in equations. Who was the first to decide the mathematical meaning of pi (π), for example?

I read quite a few books on the history of science, which has led to an interest in the history of mathematics. I’m also quite interested in different written languages, to which the subject of mathematical notation pertains. I wish this book would have stuck a little closer to its subtitle and focused more on notation. Mazur, however, keeps venturing into symbology and semiotics—how we process and interpret symbols. Towards the end of the book, he summarizes various psychological experiments concerning mathematical thought, and he gives his own epistemological theories about how the mind works. It’s a subject that clearly fascinates him, but that psychological content was far less interesting to me than the math history.

As a history, however, Enlightening Symbols does have its problems. While the table of contents indicates the book is organized roughly chronologically, Mazur jumps all over the place temporally. No matter what century he’s talking about, he constantly flashes back to earlier figures like Brahmagupta (c. 598–c. 668) and Al-Khwarizmi (c. 789–c. 850), creating a tangled narrative that’s really difficult to follow. In examining who was the first to introduce Indian numerals to Western Europe, Mazur seems to propose about 17 answers to that question. Some he disproves, but I couldn’t even tell you whom he finally settled on. I kept hoping for a chart, but when I finally got one, halfway through the book, it was still confusing. A simple timeline in list or table form would have been most helpful.

You don’t really need to know a whole lot of math to appreciate the history in Enlightening Symbols. I’m not up on calculus, but I could still roughly follow what Mazur had to say about the history of calculus notation. Some interest in linguistics helps. I’ll admit that I’m probably not qualified to review this book. If you’re reading this review at my blog, however, rather than reading a review in the Journal of Mathematics, then you’re probably in the same boat I am. I provide my layman’s perspective of the book, for what it’s worth, to help you decide if you want to read it.

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby

The disheartening saga of the separation of church and state

Susan Jacoby is a former journalist and an outspoken atheist who has published a few books on the history of atheism and freethought, among other topics. Her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was published in 2004. “Freethinker” is a blanket term that could be used to describe those who don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to any formal organized religion—perhaps anyone from a hardcore atheist to a liberal protestant. In American history, the term may refer to many of the founding fathers who were deists (e.g. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine) or to the atheist and agnostic activists of the late 19th and 20th centuries (e.g. Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clarence Darrow, Madalyn Murray O’Hair). Was Abraham Lincoln a freethinker? Jacoby looks into that too. Basically anyone who believes in the separation of church and state is covered here. The book essentially charts the changing status of that separation from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to the end of the 20th century.

This is not an impartial, objective history. Jacoby certainly has an axe to grind, but that’s part of her point. The real history of freethought has been suppressed by American religious factions, and the only person who would write a book like this is a true nonbeliever. Many of America’s founders were freethinkers, yet today a myth persists that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation. Historically, many White Christian clergy in America were pro-slavery, anti-women’s rights, and anti-civil rights, and encouraged their congregations to toe those party lines, yet somehow when you read today’s history textbooks you’d think that all those problems were solved by the God-fearing faithful singing “Amazing Grace.” Jacoby sets the record straight from a freethinker’s perspective.

This book often reads less like a history of freethinkers than a history of freethought’s adversaries. It’s as if Jacoby defines freethinkers by their challenges, and their persecutors seem to get more coverage than the secular saints they’re persecuting. The book includes entire chapters on Catholics and their exertion of influence on American government. Jews, on the other hand, have generally been political allies of freethought who often found themselves grouped with atheists as alleged radicals and communists. Jacoby discusses the movements to abolish slavery, win women’s suffrage, teach evolution in schools, and make abortion legal, all of which were notably supported by freethinkers.

For an American freethinker such as myself, this book can be really depressing. Among the events chronicled, there are few freethought victories here. The one high point is the popularity of Robert Ingersoll in the 1880s and ‘90s. Thomas Paine is another hallowed freethought luminary, but sadly he ended his life more reviled than revered. By the time you get to the late 20th century, you’re convinced that the United States is one step away from becoming the Christian equivalent of the authoritarian Islamic regimes of the Ayatollahs or the Taliban. Jacoby repeatedly and bluntly points out how Christian Conservatives have subverted the Constitution for their own theistical agenda. This book ends with the George W. Bush administration, which Jacoby considers the low point in the ongoing battle for the separation of church and state. Things have only gotten worse since then—not because Donald Trump is more religious than Bush, but because Trump’s administration cozies up to religious interests to further his conservative aims. I’m glad somebody told this story, and Jacoby tells it well, but the truth hurts.   

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Fascinating tetrabiography of sci-fi luminaries

John W. Campbell (1910–1971) was the longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Isaac Asimov once called him “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.” Through the pages of Astounding, Campbell elevated science fiction from a pulp-fiction amusement to a serious exercise in speculative science aimed at an intelligent adult audience. Alec Nevala-Lee’s 2018 book Astounding is a joint biography of Campbell and three prominent science fiction authors whom he discovered, developed, befriended, and tormented: Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard. Through the intertwined lives of these four figures, and their personality quirks and strange obsessions, Nevala-Lee charts the history of the science fiction genre from its niche beginnings, through World War II and the Atomic Age, to its acceptance and ubiquity in mainstream American culture.

Originally titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the magazine was founded in 1930, not by Campbell, but he took over as editor in 1937 and held that position until his death in 1971. The publication went through a number of minor title changes, all of them begining with “Astounding.” In 1960, however, Campbell drastically changed the title to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, a change no one seemed to like but himself.

Of this book’s four main characters, Asimov comes across the most sympathetically in Nevala-Lee’s narrative. He’s shown as a nice guy, not too egotistical, but a terribly horny lecher. If he had lived several decades later, his career would have been cancelled by the Me Too movement. Hubbard is shown as a shameless braggart and schemer who pathologically lies about his background and achievements. For much of the time period covered here, he was the most financially successful author in sci-fi, but Nevala-Lee thinks his work is hacky and mediocre at best. Heinlein, on the other hand, is presented as the G.O.A.T. of science fiction. His personality is harder to pin down. He definitely had a big ego, but given his talent, that was probably justified. He comes across as the smartest and most serious of the four and uncompromising in his unconventional views. Campbell, though praised for his literary influence, is deservedly castigated for his overt racism and sexism. All four of these guys, by the way, were swingers to some extent, so their love lives make for lively reading, although one feels sorry for their wives.

Hubbard was, of course, the founder of Scientology, and that plays into this story quite a bit as well. Campbell was a collaborator or at least a supporter in the creation of Dianetics, the psychotherapeutic precursor to the religion of Scientology. Nevala-Lee makes Hubbard out to be a flim-flam man who just used Dianetics to con people for financial gain. Campbell, on the other hand, was a true believer who saw Dianetics as a tool for increasing human potential. He was obsessed with “psionics”—heightened mental powers such as ESP, ancestral memories, or telekinesis—and he often steered the contents of Astounding/Analog in that direction. (Frank Herbert’s Dune—right up Campbell’s alley—was first published in Analog). When writing about Hubbard, Nevala-Lee treats Dianetics as a scam. When writing about Campbell, however, Nevala-Lee makes it sound like his weird psychological experiments were actually successful­ and then doesn’t bother to examine how or why that might be. If Nevala-Lee means to paint Campbell’s pursuits as pseudoscience, he doesn’t sufficiently discredit them.

That’s the only reservation I have about this book. Though I am not by any means a science fiction expert, I was fascinated from cover to cover. You never know which way this story is going to twist and turn because these four guys were so idiosyncratic—a polite word for messed up. While envisioning alternate worlds, each tried to fashion his life into his own personal utopia, somehow above the rules of the real world. They treated their work and their lives like science experiments, and in this book they often resemble mad scientists engaged in cockamamie or failed experiments. The pulp fiction era was an exciting time in publishing that generated a lot of classics and a lot of trash. Nevala-Lee brilliantly captures that time in science fiction’s history, the genre’s triumphs of creativity, and its sometimes misguided hopes and dreams for the future.

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris

Liberal common sense, well-argued

American science writer Timothy Ferris published about a dozen books on astronomy before the 2010 release of his book The Science of Liberty, which is about a whole lot more than just astronomy. Ferris was a friend and colleague of Carl Sagan (the two worked together on that gold record that went out with the Voyager 1 space probe), and, judging by this book, he shares a lot of common ground with Sagan as a science educator/promoter and liberal activist. The message of The Science of Liberty could have come from Sagan’s pen, but I actually like Ferris’s journalistic style of writing better than Sagan’s more personal Henry-David-Thoreau-of-space musings. In The Science of Liberty, Ferris makes the case that—as simply put as possible—science is beneficial to liberty and vice versa. He argues that science furthers human happiness and freedom, thus advancing the cause of classical liberalism, and that science can only prosper in a liberal-democratic society that values civil liberties, academic freedom, and emancipation from dogma.

That may sound like common sense, but it’s surprising how many people and regimes in history have tried to argue the opposite, as Ferris recounts in this historical overview. In the opening chapters, Ferris outlines the framework of his political hypotheses. Then follows a series of investigations into chronologically presented periods in history—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, World War II, the Cold War, etc.—in which Ferris examines how science and liberty were furthered or hindered. Periodically interspersed are a few statistics-heavy chapters in which Ferris compares the successes and failures of liberal-democratic nations versus other, less scientifically inclined societies.

Ferris introduces a simple but insightful new model of political ideology. Instead of the familiar spectrum analogy in which liberals fall to the left and conservatives to the right, Ferris proposes a triangular model in which liberals, conservatives, and progressives are the three equidistant corners. This book was published before Donald Trump entered politics, so Ferris doesn’t cover the most recent wave of anti-intellectualism from the conservative right, though he does hint at its foreshadowing with some brief mentions of George W. Bush. Surprisingly, Ferris spends fewer pages discussing conservative anti-science (e.g. fascists, Christian fundamentalists, Islamist terrorists) than he spends discussing progressive anti-science (e.g. communists, Marxists, ultra-woke academics, postmodern deconstructionists). Ferris, in my opinion, is too dismissive of socialism, implying that it always leads to totalitarianism. While Stalin and Mao were nightmares that certainly didn’t do science or liberty any favors, FDR’s New Deal or Scandinavia’s social service programs could be considered socialist science experiments that worked out for the good.

Prior to reading this book, I already agreed with just about every aspect of Ferris’s thesis, so I didn’t really need any convincing. Most of what he argues here just seems like common sense to my Jeffersonian side. While reading the first couple chapters, I found myself wondering, do I really want to read a whole book that’s persuading me to believe what I already believe? As I got further into the book, however, I really enjoyed it, and I learned quite a bit. The historical chapters present a lot of familiar characters and stories from science history, but Ferris fleshes them out with many interesting details that were new to me. I gleaned all sorts of fascinating biographical tidbits on scientists like Galileo, Newton, Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, Edison, and even anti-science figures like Hitler. Ferris also has a real knack for selecting memorable and relevant quotes, and the statistics he cites are well chosen and quite eye-opening. Though I primarily expected a book on science history, Ferris’s explication of political ideologies as they relate to science and liberty also prompted me to reexamine some of my own political preconceptions. 

The Science of Liberty is a very thought-provoking read. It really spoke to me, not only aligning with much of what I believe but also helping to clarify some of those beliefs. People who already believe in liberalism and the value of science will appreciate this book immensely, but will it convince anyone who needs convincing? Will conservatives want to read it? They should read it, but unfortunately, they probably won’t.

The French Mind: 400 Years of Romance, Revolution and Renewal by Peter Watson

A feminine emphasis on France’s intellectual history

British historian Peter Watson has been my favorite nonfiction author since I discovered his books a couple years ago. Though he also writes fiction, Watson is better known for his sweeping intellectual histories, or histories of ideas. Watson’s book The French Mind was published in 2022. In this book, Watson tries to answer the question: What’s so special about the French? To do that, as the subtitle indicates, he examines 400 years of French history, from the early 17th century to the present. Watson’s histories are generally not about kings, queens, and wars (although the Bourbons, Orléans, and Napoleons do make prominent appearances here) but rather about important developments in literature, philosophy, the arts, and culture. In The French Mind, Watson also looks beyond such highbrow disciplines and discusses how the French came to be renowned for perfecting some enjoyable aspects of life and leisure, such as fashion, food, furniture, and sex. Unlike some of Watson’s other intellectual histories, science is not part of the discussion here (Marie Curie isn’t even mentioned), except the social sciences.

Though the USA has always had its anti-intellectual tendencies (some might say now more than ever), France has always presented a decidedly pro-intellectual attitude. High culture is fashionable among the French, and one is expected to be well-read. When I visited France, I recall being amazed at how many streets they named after philosophers, scientists, and men of letters. France has always seen it as their duty to civilize the world through its refined culture, even if that means showing a disdain for capitalism, hard science, and technological progress. A crucial aspect of French intellectual life, Watson asserts, is “sociability,” which is manifested in the long tradition of the French salon and the café culture that followed. Watson also pursues a thesis (borrowed from historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch) of France’s “culture of defeat.” Even after losing the Franco-Prussian War and undergoing Nazi occupation, the French zeitgeist still managed to turn those losses into morally righteous victories.

Another element Watson really wants to emphasize is the role that women played in the development of French culture. I knew that salons would be an important part of this story, but I didn’t expect they would be the focus of the bulk of the book. Salons, in this case, were weekly gatherings, usually hosted by aristocrats in their homes, at which intellectuals and artists would gather and exchange ideas. Watson makes much of the women who hosted these salons and the influence they wielded. Many, probably most, of the chapters in the book focus on one of these salonnières—her life story, who she married, with whom she had affairs, and which luminaries she included among the regulars at her salon. France may have been less chauvinistic and misogynistic than the rest of Western Civilization, but it was still an unfairly male-dominated world. Despite his efforts to praise these unsung women, Watson’s feminist assertions feel forced. If the best thing he can say about many of these women is that they hosted a bunch of important men in their home, that’s not much of a feminist revelation. When these salonnières wrote published literature or wielded real political power, however, Watson does give credit where it’s due. At the point when the salons fade away, so does Watson’s feminist focus. Surprisingly, once this book moves past World War I, there’s barely a female mentioned other than Simone de Beauvoir.

Watson is a master of summary and synthesis, showing how ideas and movements spawn, influence, and interconnect one another. A master generalist, he draws the big picture in a sufficiently detailed and lively narrative that inspires the reader to want to learn more. If you really want to know what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Paul Sartre, or Michel Foucault were all about, you’re going to have to read their books, but with the help of an erudite survey such as Watson provides here, maybe you won’t have to read everything that came before and after those thinkers in order to understand their work. Similar to The French Mind, Watson has written other books in which he strives to encapsulate a nation’s intellectual and cultural spirit: The German Genius and The British Imagination. What’s next? The Dutch Mystique? The Scandinavian Psyche? The Polish Persuasion? Whatever Watson comes up with, I’m looking forward to it.   

An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, edited by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa, and David Collard

A survey of his career in and beyond biology

Alfred Russel Wallace is known as the other British naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. While Darwin was taking his time writing On the Origin of Species, Wallace wrote a paper that also spelled out the process of natural selection. Through a gentleman’s agreement, Wallace stepped aside and let Darwin finish his book. That’s a highly abbreviated summary of what happened; the truth, of course, is more complicated. Nevertheless, Darwin’s name will forever be associated with evolution while many an average Joe these days has never even heard of Wallace. Wallace was nevertheless a very accomplished and respected biologist in his own right. He explored the Amazon basin and the Malay Archipelago, outlived Darwin by 31 years, and enjoyed a reputation as a “grand old man” of science. The book An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, published in 2019, is an edited collection of essays by nine academics who examine various aspects of Wallace’s career. They give much-deserved consideration to his numerous accomplishments in the biological sciences while also shedding light on his endeavors further afield.

This is not an introduction to Wallace, but it is a synthesis. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of who Wallace was and his relation to Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection, but the book does not get into arcane matters that require a PhD to understand. The essays are written with scholarly rigor, citations, and notes. The reading degree of difficulty is about at an undergraduate level of proficiency. Although all the contributors are clearly very knowledgeable about Wallace’s life and career, they explain matters sufficiently for those who are not. As a survey of Wallace’s career, the book is successful in educating the reader about his significant accomplishments and influence. The scope of the essays sometimes overlap, however, which results in reading some of the same information multiple times.

If another goal of this book, as I suspect, is to get the reader to admire and esteem Wallace, it is less successful on that score. My regard for Wallace as a scientist actually lessened as I worked my way through this book. For starters, the book opens with a discussion of Wallace’s belief in spiritualism. The word “spiritualism,” in the late 19th century, meant a belief in ghosts, the “spirit world,” and communication with the dead. In other words, Wallace was attending séances and being fooled by spirit-conjuring mediums. Although Wallace was one of the chief formulators of evolutionary science, he also believed in intelligent design. When animals became humans, God intervened and somehow turned on their minds and souls. The book closes with a discussion of Wallace’s writings on extraterrestrial life. He thought humans on Earth must be the only intelligent life in the universe because God essentially created evolution for us: We are the purpose of the universe. It gets hard to take seriously a scientist who clings to such superstitious, supernatural, and teleological beliefs. The book also discusses disagreements between Wallace and Darwin over the details of natural selection, and in most cases, it seems Darwin was in the right. In the end, one doesn’t feel so bad that Darwin got most of the credit for evolution.

Wallace was also an outspoken public intellectual on socioeconomic matters. He advocated socialism and came up with a plan for land nationalization. If you’re reading this book because you’re interested in natural history, you won’t relish the chapter on British land law, tariffs, etc. The main positive verdict with which one comes away from this book is that Wallace was a pioneer in the field of biogeography: the study and mapping of the distribution ranges of species. In the days before genetics and continental drift, this was a key to determining where species arose, how they spread, and how they were related to other species. Although Alexander von Humboldt preceded him in the creation of this field, Wallace developed it to a higher level, carving out a specific domain of research in which he surpassed Darwin. There is no doubt that Wallace is an immensely important scientist in the pantheon of natural history, but the spiritualism and anthropocentric teleology are definitely a disappointment. If you’re only going to read one book on Wallace, this volume does provide a fine overview of his thought, for better or for worse.

Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson by Paul Lawrence Farber

A brief primer on the history of natural history

Paul Lawrence Farber (1944–2021) was a professor of the history of science at Oregon State University. His specific area of interest was biology and natural history. His book Finding Order in Nature was first published in 1994. It relates how, over the course of about 250 years, the science of natural history progressed from the earliest efforts at species classification to the development of unified theories of life and the discovery of universal laws of nature.

Farber begins in the mid-18th century with the work of Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus and France’s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, both of whom brought the classification of species to a systematic level that formed the foundation of modern natural history as we know it today. Many of the subsequent chapters revolve around conflicts of opposing views in the biological sciences: religious vs. secular views, form-ists (e.g. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) vs. function-ists (e.g. Georges Cuvier), experimental physiologists vs. collector/taxonomists, morphology vs. genetics. Of course, there’s a chapter on Charles Darwin, as well as those who championed his theory of evolution (e.g. Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Henry Huxley) and those who opposed it (e.g. Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen). As the subtitle indicates, the book ends with the recent work of E. O. Wilson, who pretty much gets a chapter all to himself.

This book is in Johns Hopkins University Press’s series Introductory Studies in the History of Science. The volumes in this series are deliberately intended to be brief overviews of their particular domains of science. Judging by Farber’s book alone, the only one I’ve read, these books are indeed introductory and written for students or other nonscientists. Finding Order in Nature runs about 200 pages. There are only about two or three footnotes per chapter and a bibliographic essay at the end. To me, this book reads as if it were meant to be a textbook for undergraduate students. The reading level is accessible enough, however, that it could even be used as a text for a high school course, if a course on such a subject existed.

I myself am not a scientist, but I read quite a few history books and biographies of naturalists. I like to live vicariously through their travels, researches, and discoveries. I was hoping that by reading this book I might discover some naturalists I’d never heard of and perhaps a few books I might want to pursue reading. The contents of Finding Order in Nature, however, were already largely familiar to me. In each of the book’s nine chapters, Farber covers two or three major players in natural history, and for the most part they are very well-known individuals. The most I got out of this was a few interesting biographical details on some of the scientists featured. I found a few titles of interest in the bibliographic essay, but the list of books is almost entirely comprised of secondary texts from the past fifty years rather than accounts written by the naturalists themselves.

That’s not to say that the book was a disappointment. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I bought it (as a Kindle Daily Deal). Farber accomplishes exactly what he set out to do. If I had read this book in my college days, it would have sparked my interest in natural history and given me a basic foundation for building further knowledge. At my present state of life and education, it was a brief and satisfying recap of a subject that I enjoy.

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas

Speaking truth to power in the 16th century

Perhaps a half a dozen contemporary book-length accounts of the Spanish conquest of Latin America have survived. These accounts now serve as foundational texts in Latin American history. Much of what we know about the early days of conquest and colonization come from just a few narratives, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the autobiographical Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the Narrative of Some Things of New Spain by an anonymous member of Hernán Cortés’s army. Indigenous accounts of this period are even scarcer. One Spaniard, however, did stand up for the Native peoples of the Americas and documented their experience of oppression and genocide under the Spanish conquerors.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was among the first Spaniards to arrive in the New World. His father, who had served on one of Christopher Columbus’s voyages of exploration, brought his family across the Atlantic in 1502 to become colonists on the island of Hispaniola. At first, Bartolomé de las Casas lived on a farm with slaves and participated in raids and massacres of the Native population. In 1514, however, he had a change of heart and began campaigning to end slavery and the abuse of the Indigenous people of the Americas. He had been ordained a secular priest in 1507 and entered the Dominican order in 1522. De las Cases wrote A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542 and, during one of his trips back to Spain, presented the document to King Charles V of Spain and members of the Council of the Indies in hopes of influencing policy changes in Spain’s governing of the Americas. The Brief Account was published in book form in 1552.

The book is divided into chapters based on geographic location, starting with Hispaniola, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. Mexico is divided into several chapters according to the provincial divisions of the time. Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, and the Rio de la Plata region (near Buenos Aires) are all covered. In each district, de las Casas details how the Spaniards subdued, persecuted, and tortured the Native population. De las Casas traveled to quite a few of these locations himself, so much of his testimony is based on first-hand knowledge. Some chapters, however, are drawn from letters or previous documents written by other sympathetic clergymen. De las Casas cites a lot of population and death statistics, but his figures should be taken with a grain of salt considering the difficulty of achieving accurate numbers in those times.

The historical importance of this document is immeasurable, but is it a pleasant read? Of course not. It’s horrifying and demoralizing, but that goes with the territory of this subject matter. De las Casas, as an author, also has some shortcomings. If you’re expecting an eloquent philosophical essay condemning slavery, like someone might have written in the Enlightenment Era, you’ll be disappointed. The text is basically just a catalogue of atrocities listed one after the other, with very little pausing for reflection and almost no conclusive summation. Some of the more interesting passages relate how groups of Indians fought back against the conquistadores. Although such efforts were ultimately crushed, they do indicate that the Native Americans were not merely passive and ignorant victims. One odd authorial choice that de las Casas makes is to omit the names of the perpetrators of these war crimes. Instead, he’ll use phrases like “a certain tyrant” or “this captain” or “that pirate.” In some cases, one can tell when he’s talking about Columbus, Hernán Cortés, or Ponce de Leon, for example, but one would have to be a professor of Latin American history to identify all of the unnamed persons he accuses in this book.

De las Casas has his share of critics. One measure he advocated to lesson the oppression of the Indians was to increase the African slave trade. Whether or not the Brief Account really brought about tangible changes in Spanish America, his speaking truth to power and exposing these crimes is commendable. If nothing else, we owe de las Casas a debt of gratitude for the historical documentation he has provided of this time and place.   

Rock and Roll, Part 3

More music history and biography
I occasionally review books on the history of rock and roll music. After reaching a critical mass of reviews, I periodically post a recap on the subject. This is the third of such “omnibus” posts, the prior installments being Rock and Roll (Auto)biographies and Rock and Roll, Part 2. Highlights of the past have included memoirs by Bobby Womack, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young, oral histories of Warren Zevon and Sly and the Family Stone, and a biography of session man Nicky Hopkins. Below are ten new selections reviewed by Old Books by Dead Guys over roughly the past year and a half. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

Heartbreaker: A Memoir by Mike Campbell with Ari Surdoval (5 stars)
Tom Petty’s lifelong guitarist Mike Campbell presents this candid account of his career as one of rock’s greatest sidemen. The story of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (and their earlier bar band, Mudcrutch) is an engaging rags to riches tale, and as Campbell tells it here, they wore rags for a long time before the riches showed up. Campbell also details his work as a sought-after session man and producer for other artists, including Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and Don Henley. Everything you'd want in a rock autobiography is here: every recording session, every touring milestone, every band personnel change, every interior personality conflict, and every record company business deal. Campbell’s humble and likable voice shines through in this very well-crafted narrative. This is one of the best rock memoirs I’ve ever read.

Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin (4.5 stars)
Jim Gordon was one of the top rock drummers of the 1970s. He was briefly a member of Derek and the Dominos and Traffic, but he was also a session musician on thousands of recordings by many other artists, including the Beach Boys, George Harrison, John Lennon, Steely Dan, the Everly Brothers, and even television theme songs. This book provides a fascinating look inside the career of an expert session man. Behind this great talent, however, there was a darker side to Jim Gordon. A longtime sufferer from undiagnosed schizophrenia, he eventually went insane, killed his mother, and died in prison. Gordon’s tragic downward slide  into insanity is riveting, and veteran rock journalist Joel Selvin delivers a compassionate and moving account free of tabloid sensationalism. 

The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial (4 stars)
John Hammond is a legend in the music industry. As a talent scout, record producer, and Columbia executive, he was one of the most influential trendsetters and tastemakers in 20th-century American music. Rock fans will know him as the man who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Hammond started decades earlier as a jazz impresario who helped launch the careers of Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Hammond was also instrumental in desegregating the music industry and also served on the board of the NAACP. Author Dunstan Prial delivers a well-researched, balanced, and comprehensive biography that really gives you a sense of the personality of the man behind the music.

Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas (3.5 stars)
An odd but interesting study of Dylan’s music by a professor of classics at Harvard University. Richard F. Thomas uses his prodigious knowledge of Dylan lyrics and classical (ancient Greek and Roman) texts to point out parrallels between the two. Focusing mostly on Dylan’s highly regarded work of the 1960s, his 1976 album Blood on the Tracks, and his late '90s and early 2000s renaissance, Thomas makes a reasonably convincing case that Dylan has drawn ideas and phrases from the works of Virgil, Ovid, and Homer and is somewhat obsessed with The Odyssey. Like most books of Dylanology, the depth of minutiae will be too much for casual readers, and not everyone is going to appreciate lengthy discussions of Cicero, Virgil, and Catullus.

Sound Man by Glyn Johns (3 stars)
Glyn Johns is one of the most highly respected record producers and sound engineers in the history of rock. He worked with the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton on albums like Who's Next, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, Led Zeppelin I, and Slowhand. Johns gives the reader a whirlwind tour of his career, recalling recording sessions with a multitude of arts, from Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to obscure has-beens. This is primarily a music-business memoir about making records. There aren’t a lot of anecdotes here about rock stars’ personal lives, with the exception of the Rolling Stones. If you’re a classic rock fan, you’ll enjoy Johns’s perspective on the music biz of the ’60s and ’70s.

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir by Sly Stone with Ben Greenman (3 stars)
Sly Stone was a genius songwriter, musician, and record producer who changed the landscape of soul music. He was also kind of a scary character, with a drug problem that allegedly fueled a vindictive demeanor and violent tendencies. That’s the picture that his bandmates and colleagues give in Joel Selvin’s book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. Here, Sly has the chance to set the record straight, if indeed it needs to be straightened, but he mostly glosses over all the negative stuff and focuses on upbeat anecdotes about recording sessions and talk show appearances. The text, written in the hip conversational voice of Sly, is fun to read, but you don’t end up liking the guy.

Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton by Philip Norman (3 stars)
British rock journalist Philip Norman provides an overview of Clapton’s life, but it’s not particularly well done or pleasant to read. It focuses heavily on Clapton’s early career and doesn’t cover much after about 1986. Because Norman is known as somewhat of an expert on the Beatles, nearly half of this book is about the relationship between Clapton, George Harrison, and Pattie Boyd (the woman who married them both). Norman has nothing good to say about Clapton in this book and seems to enjoy digging up dirt on him, so it’s a book about a not very nice guy written by someone who doesn’t like him. Sound like fun? You’d be better off just reading Clapton’s autobiography. It gives you a better understanding of the man and his music.

Hüsker Dü: The Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock by Andrew Earles (3 stars)
Minneapolis post-punk band Hüsker Dü never became a household name on the level of Nirvana, but they had a profound influence on all alternative rock that followed in their footsteps. Author Andrew Earles is so awed by this influence that he would rather write about all the bands that learned from Hüsker Dü rather than concentrate on a biography of the band itself. This book is more of a music-business narrative about recording, touring, and selling records, with little information about the personal lives of the band members. Earle also digresses into stories about every obscure band of the Minneapolis scene. Drummer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton participated in interviews for this book, while guitarist Bob Mould did not.

Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years—What Really Happened by Clinton Heylin (2.5 stars)
Clinton Heylin has written at least a dozen books on Bob Dylan, but does he even like his music? He certainly doesn’t like the period he’s writing about in this book: Dylan’s three gospel albums from 1979 to 1981—Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love—and the tours that followed them. Heylin has assembled a detailed chronology of events from this period, much of it too trivial for all but the most diehard of Dylan fans. I like this period in Dylan’s music, so I liked learning more about it, but I couldn’t stand Heylin’s snarky, pompous attitude and the way he denigrated Dylan throughout the book. The artist and this work deserve more respect and consideration. Read Scott Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life instead.

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson (4.5 stars)
This is actually a film book, but if you know anything about the Blaxploitation genre you know that the music made to accompany these films was some of the best soul and funk music of the 1970s. Maybe about 15% of this book is about the music, discussing soundtracks and scores by such artists as Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), The Impressions (Three the Hard Way), and more.