Tom's blog: March 2021

Ten non-fiction books for a lockdown: A personal selection based on my own interests.

Day 1: What Google searches say about you and about the world. People will put their darkest thoughts into a Google search box, even (especially) things they would never confide to another human being. The extent of racism in the US, what people are really doing in bed (which is most definitely NOT what they tell pollsters); it's an interesting read. But beware: in the discussion on racism, he uses the n-word (because he tracks searches using this word combined with other words, such as 'Obama'); and his discussion of sex can also be disturbing. Requires an open mind.

Day 2: A very literate and well-written overview of human history, with some interesting analysis that ought to raise some discussion. He identifies several Revolutions in our history, the first being the Cognitive Revolution (about 70,000 years ago) which brought the ability to deal in abstract concepts into language. As with chimpanzees today, we probably had ways of communicating "there's a lion in the bushes" or "food is over there", but a discussion of tactics for evading that lion or tracking down that food required abstract concepts. "I'll hide here with a spear, you go scare that gazelle into coming this way". By 40,000 years ago, bands of homo sapiens were stampeding herds of animals into narrow canyons where meat and furs for a year could be obtained fairly easily, something Neanderthals never seemed to have grasped.

Day 3: There's nothing like a good spy novel. This one, by Ben MacIntyre, is even better because it is true. The basic story is how German intelligence was fooled into thinking the Allies would land in Greece and Sardinia rather than in Sicily, thus diverting defensive efforts away from the actual landing sites, but the plot line is so far out there that if it were a novel, you'd say 'yeah, right, that would never happen'. In fact Neal Stephenson used some of the more outrageous components of the story in his classic novel Cryptonomicon. And MacIntyre writes very well; see also his books on Kim Philby and other famous spy stories.

Day 4: Continuing on yesterday's theme of WWII, this overview of the bloody Winter War (1939-1940) following Russia's invasion of Finland is a classic and describes events that are probably not well known outside Finland. Those of you who have been to Finland will know that this was a defining moment for the country, which only obtained its independence from Russia in 1917. On my first trip to Finland back in about 2002, three different people said the same thing to me, in three different contexts, but all referring more or less indirectly to the Winter War: "We are a small country, we have to work together". The Finnish concept of Sisu, meaning grit or fortitude in the face of lousy odds, is well described. I first picked up this book at the airport in Helsinki on my way home in 2002, and have since purchased two other copies over time as it tends to get borrowed and not returned.

Day 5: Two, well OK three books about Everest. While I have absolutely no intention of ever going there (I had enough trouble at 11,000 feet, never mind 29,000), I have always been fascinated by people who tackle Everest and places like it. The Vendée Globe race is another incomprehensible activity, and the classic Antarctic adventures of Scott and Shackleton are always fascinating.

Wade Davis has assembled an excellent book that combines the best of several previous books on the topic. Mallory, Irvine and their colleagues are not presented in a vacuum but in the context of their backgrounds as shell-shocked survivors of the trenches of World War I, and in the context of post-war Britain as well as manoeuvring between the Great Powers. Both characters are well drawn, but so are the people who accompanied them on their several trips before their ultimate disappearance.

The finding of Mallory's body, and the analysis of whether they were ascending when they died or had managed to summit, are covered in Davis' book, but a better source for this part of the story is presented in "Weighing the Evidence", Chapter 22 in "Last Hours on Everest" by Graham Hoyland. Hoyland, who was on the expedition that found Mallory, has written a very personal and emotional account of the impact of his Everest obsession on his family and marriage. But unlike Davis, he has summited Everest several times; and a cousin of Hoyland's father, Howard Somervell, was on the fateful 1924 expedition. These personal circumstances make his account very informative if you want to delve deeper into the topic.

Of course Krakauer's story of the commercialization of Everest, and the fact it can still be deadly, is priceless and belongs on any bookshelf devoted to Everest or the broader field of mountaineering.

Day 6: This book provides a fascinating alternative to the usual story of how the late Middle Ages became the Renaissance. One thinks of Florentine or Parisian artisans and their wealthy, well-connected patrons; but the mercantile activities around the North Sea and the Baltic are equally part of the story. I for one knew very little about the Hanseatic League or the trading activities of the Vikings. The story begins with the Frisians, living and trading among coastal marshes and dunes in what is now Belgium and Holland. The Romans didn't get it -- how can you be civilised if you haven't built any monumental cities -- and failed to root them out because their horses and carriages got mired in marshes while the Frisians disappeared on flat bottomed boats. But those same boats allowed them to trade easily; and they quickly learned about dikes and canals. Trade flourished between cities, extending well beyond the marshes to cities from Gdansk to Trondheim and the east coast of England, with little or no royal "supervision"; taxes were collected and used for port facilities, and for the establishment of early trading houses or bourses.

Day 7: More on the Vikings. To illustrate how far the Vikings roamed, it is enough to point out that the Mongolian and Icelandic ponies are genetically very closely related. Vikings served in the Varangian guards and as mercenaries in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Middle East, having crossed from Moscow to rivers such as the Volga that empty into the Caspian Sea. Looking west, a small group made it to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and wintered over at least once. But they weren't just rampaging barbarians, and this book gives you a more balanced view.

Day 8: A fascinating history of Central Asia, the crossroads of the world straddling the so-called Silk Roads, from the Arab invasion of 680 to the Mongol invasion of 1220. (The chapter on the years between Chinggis and Tamerlane is somewhat brief). Traders met here from all over Eurasia, bringing goods for trade but also ideas and religions into what was for a time a multi-cultural, multi-lingual melting pot.

In particular, the scientific understanding developed by Central Asians of Persian descent is absolutely stunning. After the Arab conquest, most scientists in Central Asia wrote in Arabic, and we think of the results as being of Arab origin, but in fact it is mostly Persian. And the so-called Arab numerals in use today, complete with the concept of zero, came to us from India via Central Asia and just happened to reach Europe in texts written in Arabic.

One example will suffice. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (Abū Rayḥān Bērōnī) was born in what is now Uzbekistan in about 973. He developed early concepts in spherical trigonometry which he used to estimate the diameter of the Earth; he also plotted longitude and latitude of all the cities he had visited on a globe, and concluded that the known inhabited Earth represented only a third of the surface; he then posited that the processes leading to the creation of the Eurasian landmass must operate elsewhere, and that there must therefore be another continent out there somewhere. And if this continent is at the same latitudes as Eurasia, then it must be inhabited. Of course the Vikings were proving this proposition by actually going there at about the same time.

Biruni is known to have written at least 145 other books, most of which have not survived, but references to his work demonstrate the range of his interests. Most of the cities of Central Asia, such as Merv, Balkh, Bukhara or Gurganj, have fared equally poorly, with the failure of irrigation systems following invasions and the fact that a lot of it was built with mud bricks rather than granite or marble.

The fall of the scientifically literate Central Asian societies is ascribed to several causes. The Mongol invasion didn't help; and the fact that one of the major rulers of the time had the audacity to have Chinggis' ambassadors executed made things worse. (Chinggis wouldn't let something like that go without totally disproportionate punishment, and the damage done was much greater than that done by the preceding nomadic invasions that tended to happen with monotonous regularity every few decades). But the rise of extremist religious factions that frowned on rational investigations of the physical world was a big part of the decline; the argument was that since the Koran clearly provides all needed information about the world and is of divine provenance, rational scientific discovery is not only undesirable but actually heretical as it can be seen to question the veracity of the book.

Central Asia had been a crossroads of ideas and religions as well as trade but by Tamerlane's time that had ended; and the scientific Renaissance picked up, after a pause, in the West. One Christopher Columbus, in fact, depended on estimates of the Earth's diameter obtained from these Persian polymaths; but he made an error in converting units and was off by a large amount. Fortunately he made landfall about when he expected to...

Day 9. Two biographies of Genghis (now spelled Chinggis) show the story of Central Asia from the other side of the nomad's arrows. Widely seen as bloodthirsty barbarians, it is clear their PR department wasn't very well staffed. And without denying the waste they laid across Central Asia, these books provide a more balanced view. They were a bit like the Borg: agree to assimilation and all will be fine; but resist and your city will be razed. And it appeared that issues around race or religion were minor, with no one group targeted (unless of course the leader had rashly executed Mongol ambassadors in a show of misguided defiance). Regardless, Genghis stitched together the largest land empire the world has ever known; he was the first among nomadic invaders to recognise the importance of writing if only to account for the distribution of loot to his armies. His lack of a proper succession plan meant that it crumbled within a generation or two, with his grandson Kublai becoming the first of the Yuan dynasty in China and other descendants squabbling over Central Asia. Today Chinggis is revered in Mongolia, where the main international airport is Chinggis Khaan International.