The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
Blackstone Audio, 2008
22 discs, unabridged

This book is phenomenal, and therefore I'm not sure how I'm going to talk about it without gushing unscientifically all over the blog. One looks at 22 discs of what is essentially science biography (though much, much more than that) and quails a little at the task one has set oneself, but if I didn't love exactly every minute of it, it was close. This book is extremely well-written and lends itself to listening, though I think I will eventually re-read as well, since there were quotes and details that I know I have forgotten due to being in a car and not being able to stop to write things down.

For a brief summary, to help me put my thoughts in order: this book takes us, time-wise, from Captain Cook's voyage to view the Transit of Venus from Tahiti to that fateful voyage of the Beagle, with one Charles Darwin along as ship's naturalist. This book is described in some places as a book that delves into the lives specifically of astronomer Sir William Herschel and chemist Sir Humphry Davy, both names which are hopefully at least vaguely familiar to most people. I would say that in addition it is framed by the extraordinary life and career of Sir Joseph Banks, who was a self-financed naturalist aboard Cook's ship the Endeavour and went on to become one of the British Royal Society's greatest presidents, presiding over that body for 41 years.

With Banks' life and Royal Society presidency framing the book, we do spend a lot of time with William Herschel and even more with William's sister Caroline - whom, I am horrified to say, I had even not heard of - and then subsequently Davy, whom I knew of mostly as the inventor of the Davy Safety Lamp, that ingenious mining lamp that saved many a coal miner from a horrible fate. Turns out I had a lot to learn about Romantic Science.

Holmes makes a strong case, and makes it explicit in his Epilogue, that part of understanding the history of science is understanding the people who shaped science, not just listing their discoveries or theories. The term "scientist" didn't even exist until after the 1830s, and even as it started to emerge was incredibly controversial (attached, as it was, very provocatively, with the term "atheist," though it was also attached to "economist" and "chemist" and the like.) Therefore, understanding the major players and the major achievements in this tremendously exciting and fertile pre-modern period is tremendously important when we're trying to understand how we got where we are today.

So, biography: not one of my favourite genres. I tend to spend a lot of time wondering how the heck the biographer knows So-and-So was thinking That when This happened, particularly if So-and-So didn't leave a lot of documentation behind. Luckily for us, the So-and-Sos of the Romantic period in Britain tended to leave heaps of documentation behind: letters, lab notes, journals, published works, even memoirs. Holmes quotes liberally from all of these and makes connections, and occasionally includes corroborating quotations from So-and-So's friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and contemporary media (newspapers, pamphlets, even satirical and critical publications). In other words, I had no problem with the biographical portions of the book.

What I realized was a) how little I really did know about that period of history, and b) how much we knew, even back in the late 1700s. How quickly, once the voltaic battery was created, Davy started isolating and identifying elements. How soon the Herschels realized that the universe was enormous, that we were just one little planet in a universe that likely contained millions of such planets and almost certainly contained other forms of life. Think of the religious implications of this at a time when challenging accepted Christian doctrine could be deadly in Britain (Holmes mentions, briefly, the mob attack on Joseph Priestley's library and home; I believe there were a number of factors there, but religion was the big one.) The Herschels, happily, managed to avoid any such violence, despite the fact that Herschel was pretty clear on the fact that he believed there was life on the Moon. Their whole story was totally fascinating, not just because of their combined brilliance and the number and importance of the discoveries they made, but because of the relationship they had, the emotional and sometimes strained bond they shared. Apparently other Herschel biographers tend to be hard on Caroline; Holmes is mostly very sympathetic to her, providing a well-rounded picture of both siblings and their relationship. He provides a convincing argument that they felt deep affection for each other, but doesn't gloss over the fact that both had their difficult moments and unhappiness.

I think what struck me most profoundly about the whole book was that Holmes didn't just look at the lives of the scientists or their achievements, but also, so importantly, at the lives and thoughts of the literary figures who were their contemporaries: the Shelleys, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Erasmus Darwin (whose enormous poem The Botanic Garden is now firmly on my TBR), and many others to a lesser extent. One of the digression chapters, in which we veer away from the lives and accomplishments of the Herschels and Davy, is on the beginning of hot air balloons; in addition to being the most tragic chapter, for reasons that should be easy to understand, it's also one of the more amusing, thanks to a few well-chosen quotes from Sir Horace Walpole. We see that science and poetry are connected, intimately, at this period of time, though arguments about the oppositional nature of science and literature, empirical fact and creative imagination, are starting to surface as well. This splitting of science from the arts is touched on a couple of times, I think to good effect. It's a topic I find particularly interesting, especially in our society where it tends to be assumed that someone who is good at math necessarily is not at all interested in literature, and someone who loves to paint couldn't possibly give a fig about physics. Holmes even touches on one of my particular pet issues when discussing Davy: applied science versus theoretical science, and the need in a progressive society for both.

This book is absolutely well worth the time and effort. I ended it wanting to know more, which is not to say that Holmes didn't give me enough to ruminate on. The Age of Wonder is at times sad, thrilling, awe-inspring, frustrating, funny, and always, always fascinating. Holmes writes incredibly well - very clearly, with occasional dry humour, creating tension without manipulating the reader so that suddenly you're halfway through the book and it feels like you've just started it; and he manages to make everything very accessible so that even those who aren't familiar with the scientific concepts he's discussing will have no difficulty following. Highly, highly recommended.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

Shakespeare: The World as Stage

written and read by Bill Bryson

HarperAudio, 2008

5 discs (unabridged)

So, you may have noticed a theme with these audiobooks. I appear to be hooked on Bill Bryson. It's possible the next audiobook I'm going to look into will be written and read by him, too. No promises, but sometimes when I find a good thing I like to stick to it.

This was one of those serendipitous finds; someone brought it back to the library and I just happened to be on the desk. I had no idea Bryson had written a biography of Shakespeare. But how could it go wrong, I thought, and signed it out myself.

What I got was a very concise, rather informative, and mostly quite entertaining biography of Shakespeare. In short, just what I was hoping for. It kept me interested for a good week of commuting, which is about as much as any audiobook can hope to do. And this time, unlike the first Bryson audiobook I listened to, I knew what to expect with his delivery, so it took me no time at all to get into the flow of things.

One may wonder what the heck Bryson has to add to the piles and piles of Shakespeare biographies out there, and the answer is: not substantially much, which is kind of the point. This is a bare-bones biography, with Bryson mostly looking for the established facts from primary evidence, and fastidiously avoiding speculation, myth, legend, and heresy, of which we are informed there is a surplus. Actually, we're informed of this multiple times; the one irritation I had with this book is that there is a substantial amount of repetition of certain themes and phrases. How many surviving signatures are there? Six you say? I'm sorry, I thought there were six. Oh yes, only six signatures in Shakespeare's own hand survive. Three signatures might not even be in Shakespeare's own hand, which would be rather a blow, as that would be half of the six surviving signatures.

You perhaps get the idea. It's possible I'm exaggerating for effect.

That said, I suspect the repetition wouldn't be so obvious in a printed version, and may seem thematic or like tying up loose ends instead. I have a pretty decent auditory memory, so it's possible that I'm a little sensitive. I am much less likely to notice repetition in print.

We are taken chronologically through the little we know about Shakespeare's life, with copious asides about life, language, literature and culture in Elizabethan England at various important moments. Each of these asides attaches itself to some critical point about Shakespeare, his family, his contemporaries, the atmosphere he would have been working in, and so forth; there really isn't anything superfluous in here. The pace of the book isn't breakneck, but it's definitely snappy, which helps in keeping my attention, though it will be interesting to see how much of what I learned (which was quite a lot) gets retained. After a while, I got pretty good at keeping track of dates in my head. And remembering what went before -- because while there is excessive repetition of some facts, others are of the blink-and-it's-gone type.

Bryson also spends some time telling us about Shakespearean scholars, mostly in relation to either their expert opinions on some facet of Shakespearean knowledge, or to skewer their more fanciful suppositions and speculations. Occasionally he delves a little deeper into their eccentricities, of which Shakespearean scholars seem to have many; he clearly finds the people who have devoted their lives to Shakespearean scholarship to be fascinating, and fairly so.

I think my absolute favourite chapter was the final one, in which Bryson systematically and thoroughly debunks any suggestion that Shakespeare may not have in fact written his plays himself. It's a perfect structure; he has just spent the entire book laying out the various facts of Shakespeare's life, so it seems ludicrous to the reader in the first place that anyone would doubt the authorship of the plays, poems and sonnets. But Bryson gives each major theory careful (and really funny) consideration, and this section provided some of my favourite passages of the entire book. Because it's so simple, and because it's so concise, I must say Bryson has me completely convinced that Shakespeare was the only one who could have authored the work his name is on, and it would take something pretty earth-shattering to move me from that position.

All in all, a very worthwhile and interesting book, and I'm very glad I decided to pick it up. The next Bryson audiobook that passes by me will almost certainly be snapped up for my listening pleasure.

Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto

I seem to need these breaks into non-fiction every once in a while. Sometimes while reading, I'll feel overloaded, bloated with fictional images, ideas and characters. Then its time for non-fiction. It clarifies things; it resets my mind. And then I'm capable of picking up fiction again.

For this purpose, Lewis DeSoto's Emily Carr worked admirably well. I have mixed feelings about this book, but overall it did exactly what I wanted it to do: I learned things, I enjoyed the topic, and I ended up with new avenues to explore sometime in the future.

For those who don't know of her, Emily Carr was an artist and a writer, working on the west coast of Canada (based mostly in Victoria, British Columbia) in the early 1900s. She was inspired by the western rainforests and also by Native art, particularly the totem poles of the west coast First Nations. This slim little volume I have is one in the (very attractive) Extrordinary Canadians series, published by Penguin and edited by John Ralston Saul -- she's in good company with the likes of Norman Bethune, Lester B. Pearson, Nellie McClung, and Tommy Douglas also being profiled in the series.

I didn't know very much at all about Emily Carr before I picked up this book. Which is not to say I knew nothing; I've seen her paintings exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery, and I've always kind of liked them, although now that I know more about her I suspect I will appreciate them even more. She is definitely the sort of artist whose art stands on its own, but knowing something of her story makes it even more impressive.

As an entry into her life and ideas, this book is very useful. It was a very easy read, despite the fact that I had trouble with DeSoto's writing style. I liked this passage in a way (I think the ideas, perhaps?) but it also draws out some of the stylistic problems I had:

Carr brings the painting out from the forest, and what we see, what we perceive, is not a picture, but a sensation. The painting is pure sensation, which we in turn experience. Emily Carr, the painter, immersed herself totally in her own experience and created something that is partly the forest, partly herself, but mostly something else entirely.

Repetitive, no? That was quite common and it started to feel almost... patronizing, both to me as the reader and to Carr as the subject. I'm sure this was unintentional, because I certainly got the impression that DeSoto greatly admires Carr and was excited about the opportunity to bring her to a new generation of Canadians. But sometimes his writing seems either overwrought or judgemental. Futher, occasionally he swings into confusing conjecture at points, and that was where I found the book to be most irritating.

This is sometimes a problem with biography, and it may be something that I am sensitive to and so not everyone will find it as glaring. In an autobiography, even if the truth is obscured, glossed over, or stretched, the subject makes that decision. They may pass judgement on themselves and that's okay; they're well within their rights. I start to get uncomfortable when a biographer feels either gushy or judgmental about their subject -- I want a greater distance between biographer and subject.

The biographer has a very challenging job: they have to be factual and true to their subject's life without being boring. Where source material is lacking, they may try to extrapolate what was happening in the subjects head/life and why they did the things they did, who influenced them, that sort of thing. In some cases, biographers may even be tempted to superimpose self over the subject. This was where Emily Carr lost me; there was sometimes more DeSoto than Carr. Even if not always explicit (and sometimes it was) it felt heavily filtered at times. Some might enjoy this as a way to make Carr more accessible to the reader, but I did not.

Despite my problems with the style, I will still recommend this book because I think it fulfills its purpose as an introduction to Emily Carr. I suspect it will be highly useful to high school students in particular having to do a report on a Canadian artist, Canadian woman, or influential Canadian figure. I also recommend it for those who know nothing about Carr and would be interested in learning more. As a precursor to viewing a Carr exhibit, for example, this book would be excellent. It provides a satisfactory overview into facets of her life and it has made me interested in reading further, particularly in reading her own words.

I was going to post one of Carr's paintings, but instead let me point you to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's ARTBase Carr gallery. Four pages of Carr's paintings, sketches and even sculpture. I am particularly fond of Blue Sky.