“The Story of Civilization. Volume 7: The Age of Reason Begins”, by Will and Ariel Durant

 

731 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671013202

The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writer, historian and philosopher Will Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 7: The Age of Reason Begins was originally published in 1961, and covers the history of Europe and the Near East from 1559 to 1648 (it also marks the first time that Ariel Durant was recognized as a co-author, whereas before she was merely mentioned in the acknowledgements). These 80 years were some of the most tumultuous the continent had even seen, which saw the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I, King James I (and VI of Scotland) and King Charles I (as well as his beheading) and the conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants engulfing the realms. It was also the Age of Shakespeare, and the Durant’s are not silent about the contributions of the Bard to the culture of the world:

The language is the richest in all of literature: fifteen thousand words, including the technical terms of heraldry, music, sports, and the professions, the dialect of the shires, the argot of the pavement, and a thousand hurried or lazy inventions – occulted, unkenneled, fumitory, burnet, spurring…He relished words and explored the nooks and crannies of the language; he loved words in general and poured them forth in frolicsome abandon; if he names a flower he must go on to name a dozen – the words themselves are fragrant. He makes simple characters mouth polysyllabic circumlocutions. He plays jolly havoc with the grammar: turns nouns, adjectives, even adverbs into verbs, and verbs, adjectives, even pronouns into nouns; gives a plural verb to a singular subject or a singular verb to a plural subject; but there were as yet no grammars of English usage. Shakespeare wrote in haste, and had no leisure to repent.

Meanwhile, The Netherlands at last gained independence from Bloody Spain, France experienced a civil war that saw the Catholics and Huguenots in constant conflict and the Holy Roman Empire was turned into an abattoir by one foreign, invading army after another. On the theological front, the long-running dispute between the followers of John Calvin and Jakob Hermanszoon led to the Synod of Dordrecht and the Canons of Dordrecht, while the Catholic Church continued onwards after the Council of Trent at last wrapped up its business, which left the Church with an ambiguous relationship with science, to say the least (just ask Galileo).

As usual, though long – 731 pages or so – The Age of Reason Begins is never boring. The Durant’s knack for writing in a manner both informative and interesting tells me that they must have been terrific teachers, and I can imagine their classrooms as being just an intellectual smorgasbord of thought and discussion. I, for one, was particularly amused (chagrined?) by the manner in which the governments of the era tried to manage their societies and how similar it all is to our current struggles to do the same (the more things change and all that…). But for all of our current challenges, would one really want to switch places with someone from this era? After all, our present time of freedom and plenty is really the exception to human history which has typically seen man in a state of “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (thanks, Hobbes). Doctors didn’t cure you but killed you quicker with their peculiar treatments; your standing with some inbred monarch or other could see you advance to the top or crash into the depths; superstition and dogma would drive people to slaughter one another for no other reason than that they believed differently than you (actually, that one would appear to still be with us…) And our age hasn’t been free from war and suffering, as this passage describing the Thirty Years’ War could just as easily have been written about World War II or any other conflict you could dream up:

The towns suffered only less than the villages. Many of them were reduced to half their former population. Great cities were in ruins – Magdeburg, Heidelberg, Wurzburg, Neustadt, Bayreuth. Industry declined for lack of producers, purchasers, and trade; commerce hid its head; once-wealthy merchants begged and robbed for bread. Communes, declaring themselves bankrupt, repudiated their debts. Financiers were loath to lend, fearing that loans would be gifts. Taxation impoverished everyone but generals, tax collectors, prelates, and kings. The air was poisonous with refuse and offal and carcasses rotting in the streets. Epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and scurvy ran through the terrified population and from town to town…Morals and morale alike collapsed. The fatalism of despair invited the cynicism of brutality. All the ideals of religion and patriotism disappeared after a generation of violence; simple men now fought for food or drink or hate, while their masters mobilized their passions in a competition for taxable lands and political power. Here and there some humane features showed: Jesuits gathering and feeding deserted children; preachers demanding of governments an end to bloodshed and destruction. “God send that there may be an end at last,” wrote a peasant in his daybook. “God send that there be peace again. God in heaven, send us peace”.

In “To the Reader” at the beginning of The Age of Reason Begins, Durant wrote that he “had hoped to conclude my sketch of the history of civilization with a seventh volume…which was to cover the cultural development of Europe from the accession of Elizabeth I to the outbreak of the French Revolution. But as the story came closer to our own times and interests it presented an every greater number of personalities and events still vitally influential today…Since the great debate between religion and science is the main current in the stream of modern thought, it will be recorded in these pages more frankly than may seem wise to the men of the world…” Again, the more things change…

“Brave New World”, by Aldous Huxley

 

176 pages, The Folio Society

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a dystopian novel first published in 1932. My copy from the Folio Society is a third printing from 1997, based on the Society’s original version from 1971, with drawings by Leonard Rosoman, a rather well-known British artist (once). Huxley got his title from Miranda’s speech from Act V, Scene I of The Tempest by Shakespeare:

            O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t.

Of course, smart person that you are, Dear Reader, you know that this speech is ironic in nature, as the innocent and naive Miranda cannot recognize the evil intent in the invaders. The novel is largely set in an all-powerful, nameless World State, the citizens of which are produced rather than born and conditioned to fit into an intelligence-based and color-coded social hierarchy from which none can ever escape. Huxley anticipated grand scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are thence used by this dystopian society to master humanity the world over. Considering that Fascist Italy and Communist Russia, both powerful top-down governments, were going strong and, indeed, were widely admired by many at this time, the idea of an all-powerful government that could control and manipulate the people of the world did not seem at all far-fetched in 1932 – or in the early 21^st Century, for that matter.

As to how to keep 2 billion people (the ideal population number to support global welfare) under control in the year 632 AF (After Ford, or 2540 AD)? Well, that little conundrum is solved by flooding the bodies of the masses with a drug called soma; whenever one of the herd feels any kind of negative emotion welling up inside, soma solves it all and euphoria takes the place of miasma. In addition to drugs, sex is used to master the masses, with promiscuity being absolutely encouraged from childhood on as simply a way of life and with everyone sleeping with everyone else, without feeling jealousy or resentment (indeed, Lenina Crowne, one of the main characters, is made to feel shame for desiring monogamy). As the State says, “Everybody belongs to everybody else”; thus, promiscuity is the way in which the nuclear family was destroyed in order to make the State supreme in the hearts and minds of the masses. The herd is brainwashed into believing the virtues of these and other interventions by the State through subliminal messages played when they are sleeping, with such unconscious brainwashing going all the way back to their birth (one of the other main characters, Bernard Marx, comes to rebel against this through the course of the book). People do die, but out of sight, and when they are still young looking and attractive. Death is little more than a nuisance, a distraction from youth, beauty and fun.

Huxley explored all of the negatives of a totalitarian New World Order, in which everyone appears to be housed, well-fed and provided for in all of their earthly needs, and yet this apparent stability is only achieved by the total sacrifice of personal freedom in its true sense and the idea of personal responsibility. This brave new world may be safe, but it is also stultifying, oppressive and dull, dull, dull. And, it is still the driving force of many today: Feeling bad? Here are some drugs to fix that. Frightened by the chaotic state of the world? Let’s reorganize it so everyone has a place and knows it – and stays there. Have a differing moral authority than the state? Remove all religion and even the family as competing foci of thought and feeling to the state. At the end of the book, when John the Savage, the one character born outside of this “utopian” world at last meets his fate, one can only envy his escape from this “brave new world” and its totalitarian crushing of the individual.

“Zora Arkus-Duntov: The Legend Behind Corvette”, by Jerry Burton

 

428 pages, Robert Bentley, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0837608587

Isn’t America a great country? This is not a rhetorical question, but one that needs to be asked frequently as with all of the negativity heaped upon this country can cause one to forget what is so great about us. Like how one Zora Arkus-Duntov, the Belgian-born Russian engineer whose work on the Chevrolet Corvette earned him the nickname “The Father of the Corvette” (not inventor; that would be Harley Earl). Duntov was born Zachary Arkus on Christmas Day in 1909 to Yakov “Jacques” Arkus (a mining engineer) and Rachel Kogan (a medical student), both Russian-born Jews who returned home when the Russian Revolution was in full swing, with Rachel even becoming an official in the new, Bolshevik government. When Duntov’s parents divorced, Zora and his younger brother, Yura, took on the hyphenated last name of Arkus-Duntov, out of respect to their mother’s new husband, Josef Duntov, an electrical engineer (although, even after the divorce, Jacques continued to live with the family. Weird). Inspired first by Auto Union and then by Mercedes-Benz racing, Zora became involved in road racing before earning a degree in mechanical engineering at Berlin’s University of Charlottenburg. Zora and his new wife ultimately arrived in Michigan where he joined GM as a development engineer.

Zora Arkus-Duntov: The Legend Behind Corvette by Jerry Burton tells the story of how this gifted immigrant-engineer, brought up by Red parents no less, became the guiding force behind the legendary American sports car and, along the way, became an American legend himself. We learn all about Zora in this detailed yet accessible story of a man who became one of the automotive engineering giants of the 20^th Century (even if you’ve never heard of him; I hadn’t). Burton, editor of Corvette Quarterly, has worked with many of Zora’s friends and colleagues (as well as his widow Elfi, God Bless her) to write the definitive biography of Zora Arkus-Duntov. Corvette enthusiasts know Zora as the guy who snatched Corvette from the jaws of death in the early 1950s, then improved its engineering, performance and image to such an extent that it went from a product Chevrolet dealers couldn’t give away to the most successful high-performance sports car on earth: The Great American Sports Car. A good part of how Corvette became one of the rare automobiles to attain American Icon status is attributable directly to Zora’s vision, personality and hard work.

Only in America. Through painstaking research and an affable style, Burton weaves all of the colorful aspects of Zora’s life into a highly-captivating story. The book is decidedly non-technical (one of its major strong points, if you ask me, and I know you did) with each chapter almost a short-story unto itself, encompassing a particular period or aspect of Zora’s fascinating life. But the book is remarkably unbiased and never degenerates into hero-worship, as Burton covers his subject’s strengths and weaknesses in an unadulterated fashion. Zora was a wonderfully talented and visionary engineer who was all too-human: he cheated on his wife, partied too much, drove too fast and pissed-off half the executives at GM, right up to the CEO. But he loved the Corvette, worked hard to make it better and strived to promote it, not only to the public, but also to the company that was making it because, in the car’s early years, GM didn’t know what to do with Corvettes and often didn’t want them at all, if you can believe that. Burton’s smooth writing style and easy reading make this biography an outstanding entertainment as well as an excellent work of biography.

“Jim Clark: Grand Prix Legend”, by Andrew Tulloch

 

240 pages, Orion Publishing Group, ISBN-13: 978-0297854401

Jim Clark: Grand Prix Legend by Andrew Tulloch was another one of my father’s books, and no mystery there: Dad had been a Jim Clark fan after reading about him in the July 9^th, 1965 issue of Time Magazine, which featured Clark on the cover. This edition of Tulloch’s book was rather interesting in its own right for a number of reasons: first, there was an author’s autograph, made out “To Bob with best wishes” written on a “Scottish Borders Council” slip included with the book; a printed copy of Dad’s correspondence with someone named “gpmodeler” regarding some of Clark’s early races (and from which I got the above tale of Dad’s fandom); and a rare $2 bill, the one featuring Thomas Jefferson.

Clark was one of the most versatile drivers who ever raced on four wheels, racing in sports cars, touring cars, the Indianapolis 500 (which he won in 1965) and, of course, Formula 1 (winning the 1963 and 1965 World Championships). At the time of his death during a Formula Two race on April 7^th, 1968 in Hockenheim, West Germany (aged only 32), he had won 25 Grand Prix races and achieved 33 Grand Prix pole positions. The Times placed Clark at the top of a list of the greatest-ever Formula One drivers in 2009.

This particular book is crammed full of countless excellent photographs that make this more of a kind of photobiography than a definitive Jim Clark bio. Tulloch also spends the majority of his time covering Clark’s racing career in a results-focused manner, recording race after race in a monotonous, win-or-lose fashion that does precious little to delve into the mind of this most successful and driven of competitors. So there is precious little about Clark the person; just page after photographic page of Clark the racer – mind you, this is no bad thing, really, just so long as one goes into this book with the foreknowledge that they will learn precious little about Jimmy Clark (as he was universally known).

In short, if you are looking for an interesting look into the life of Jimmy Clark, and not just what he did on the track, this is not the book for you. No editor is mentioned, but the book could have benefited from one; one example will suffice: Tulloch refers again and again to the engine in Clark’s Lotuses 25 and 33 as a “Cosworth-Climax”, and not the properly-named “Coventry-Climax”. Still, a good introduction of the best open-wheel driver of the 1960’s and, in Dad’s opinion, of all time.

“Detroit: Then and Now”, by Cheri Y. Gay

 

144 pages, Thunder Bay Press, ISBN-13: 978-1571456892

Detroit is on the rebound. Again. No, really; select sections of the Motor City are in the midst of a comeback, and downtown hasn’t looked this good since Gordie Howe was throwing down or the Four Tops were putting on their show. In Detroit: Then and Now by Cheri Y. Gay, the photoarchivist of the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library, has gathered together a series of photographs that show just how Motown has changed between…then and now. Then, Detroit was America’s fourth-largest city with 1.8 million people, and the Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – were humming along and offered a myriad of job opportunities for any willing to work and earn.

But now? Times have changed, and the effects of the collapse of the auto industry, the rise of the global marketplace and the disintegration of the nuclear family have left Detroit a shell of its former self. Several former factories are now nothing more than vandalized monuments to deindustrialization. From its peak population in the 1950s, the city now has fewer than seven hundred thousand residents, with city services that often don’t function and, since July 18^th, 2013, struggling under Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The so-called comeback has affected many of the popular, visual places that people frequent, but as any activist will tell you, the residents of Detroit have seen little to celebrate in their neighborhoods.

To witness this slow decay in person was hard, but to watch it all over again in Detroit: Then and Now brings the fall of this Great American City once again to the fore. Over a hundred years ago the first Model T put the world on wheels from the bustling Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. Today, visitors may stroll the aged wooden planks of the former factory floor, snapping photos of antique cars; the place that was once a symbol of American modernization now functions as a museum and a love letter to Detroit’s industrial past. The Motor City, the eponymous home of Motown Records, has been inextricably linked to the auto-manufacturing industry ever since Henry Ford débuted those cars at his factory, and one can only hope that this rebirth is for real. This time.

“Biltmore Estate: The Most Distinguished Private Place”, by John Bryan

 

160 pages, Rizzoli, ISBN-13: 978-0847818112

I have never been to Biltmore, but it is without question on my list of Places to Go before I Drop Dead. In the meantime, I have Biltmore Estate: The Most Distinguished Private Place by John Bryan, the official guidebook to the 1994 exhibition organized by The Octagon: The Museum of the American Architectural Foundation. Biltmore is a private estate, still owned by the descendants of its builder, George Washington Vanderbilt, but they have opened it to the public and, in so doing, made this grand house one of the most visited in the States. Biltmore Estate is a chronicle of the design, planning and construction of the house and surrounding lands right through its opening at Christmas of 1895 to the present day – circa 1994, that is. In order to do so, the book is packed with original architectural drawings, sketches, plans, presentation drawings, period and modern-day photographs in order to present a complete record of this, as the subtitle says, “most distinguished private place”.

From the beginning, Biltmore was more than just a great big house. Under the guidance of Frederick Law Olmsted, popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, the estate became the first-ever working model of a privately-owned and scientifically managed forest, serving as the incubator of the United States Forest Service; indeed, the 512,758 acre Pisgah National Forest was created in 1916 with the sale of 86,700 acres of Biltmore forest. But it is the house, the 255 room monument to the Gilded Age that is at the center of this book. As designed by Richard Morris Hunt, perhaps the preeminent figure in the history of American architecture, Biltmore is full of opulent interiors, finely-crafted furnishings (many designed by Hunt) and countless precious things gathered from around the world by this heir to fortune. This monument to wealth and property, itself modeled (at least in part) on the chateaux of the Loire Valley, has become one of the greatest and most important houses in American architectural history.

“Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch”, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

 

354 pages, Workman Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0894808531

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, is a collaborative novel between the English authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The book is a comedy about the birth of the Antichrist and the coming of the End Times, along with the attempts by the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley – each of whom have grown to love Planet Earth and (some) of its inhabitants – to sabotage the Apocalypse. A subplot features a mix-up at the small English country hospital on the day of birth and the life of the Antichrist (Adam), who grows up with the wrong family, in the wrong country village and, consequently, basically normal; another, further subplot concerns the summoning of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, War (or is it All Foreigners Especially the French?), Famine (Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them a Good Thumping?) and Pollution (Plague having retired after the invention of penicillin). Other subplots abound, too: the writings of the aforementioned Agnes Nutter, the 17^th Century witch who saw all of this going down; the Chattering Order of St. Beryl (those would be Satanic nuns); the Buggre Alle This Bible; and Queen (the band). Sooooo…yeah, there’s a lot going on here.

I bought Good Omens back in the early 90s, not long after it originally came out, from one of my favorite used bookstores, Avalon Books, in suburban Shelby Township, MI (sadly deceased). Now, not being a doctrinaire Christian, I don’t know how much of this book follows the End of Days accurately or not; how much the interpretation of Angels and Demons is blasphemous or no; and all other issues of Christian faith and prophesies and etc. and etc. and etc. What I do know is that, because Gaiman and Pratchett are spoofing Christian beliefs, they were praised and rewarded for doing so (if they had, oh I don’t know, done the same with Muslims, the fatwā would have been issued before the first book came off the presses. Just ask Salman Rushdie).

But, really, what Good Omens is is a lot of silly fun – blasphemous fun, perhaps, but then again we live in the Rational West where that sort of thing is allowed. And, in a strange sorta way, the blasphemy is so hilarious and light-hearted as to be completely inoffensive. No, really, the whole thing is a strange kind of mishmash of classic British wit and American pop culture. While I was familiar with Neil Gaiman from his Sandman line of comics (borrowed from my brother Tom), Terry Pratchett’s work is still unknown to me; whatever I may have been expecting, what with Gaiman’s ultra-serious and off-kilter way of looking at the world, Good Omens completely subverted my view of things, and mostly in a good way.

There’s probably a deeper message hidden underneath all of this Britishness and Americana – like, perhaps Evil isn’t as pervasive and unstoppable as one would think, seeing as the Antichrist himself turned out alright in the end, having been raised by an average English Mum and Dad in the verdant British countryside. Or how British and American culture feeds upon and nourishes each other to such an extraordinary extent. And I still can’t shake the notion that, while I would not classify Good Omens as being ant-Christian, it still has its way with Christian beliefs and ideals because Gaiman and Pratchett know full well that they have nothing to fear from Christians, who would sooner pray for them than do them harm.

“X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga”, written by Chris Claremont, illustrated by John Byrne

 

200 pages, Marvel, ISBN-13: 978-0785122135

Everything I know about comic books I absorbed via osmosis from my brother Tom, a true Comic Book Geek (which I say with all love, Bro). I tried to get into comic books, once: I collected Firestorm when it was restarted in the early 80s, and I was there at the birth of Groo the Wanderer by Sergio Aragonés, of Mad Magazine fame. But when my Dad took the family on a historic tour of Civil and Revolutionary War sights in 1982, I was lost: it was history for me forevermore, and comic books and such were pretty much given the old heave-ho. But not entirely. When Tom began collecting X-Men, I was interested enough to bum the latest issue off of him when he was finished. As I recall, his interest didn’t start until after the Dark Phoenix saga had run its course, and so this particular character was spoken of with dread and sorrow by the current characters in the series.

And so, as an adult, when I found X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga…somewhere, I picked it up in the spirit of an historian seeking to educate myself about a past event I knew but a little about. Written by Chris Claremont (before he became intolerable) and illustrated by the incomparable John Byrne, The Dark Phoenix Saga collects together X-Men issues #129 through #137 in an omnibus edition. I have to say that, for a “mere comic book”, The Dark Phoenix Saga is a shockingly emotional tale of a good woman driven mad by power. As I said, although I already knew Jean Grey’s ultimate fate, the writing and art sucked me in to the extent that I still found myself dreading what I knew was coming. I won’t go into details, but Jean Grey became, for me, a very real person struggling with powers she could no longer control and, ultimately, fell to temptation like so many mortals, given absolute power, have done.

Jean Grey, like any mortal – even a mutant mortal – was doomed from the start, as who but a god could contain god-like powers? The Dark Phoenix Saga is a story from the Bronze Age of Comic Books (circa 1970 to 1984) and, as such, I don’t think can be pulled off in the modern age, what with a weekly EPIC EVENT and 1000-and-1 titles and artists and writers with egos the size of small moons (Jean Grey, like every dead superhero, comes back to life eventually, a storyline that pretty much destroys the meaning of the Saga). This was more than a comic book; it was an event that dealt with universal themes in a new, different format, and for that, The Dark Phoenix Saga ranks right up there with any event pop culture could manage to pull off.