Armadillo’s Book Blog

When I chose to read 1776, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to have to worry about the plot. After all, here we all are seven years after 9-11. Or, most of us at least...

I tried to persuade my very sensitive 13 year old to read 1776 with me. "I think it might be pretty depressing," she said. She was right. Depressing. Harrowing in fact. But well worth reading.

I was very impressed with how certain these guys, on both sides, were of the importance of their cause. In particular, I was astonished by the Americans, who, even before the Declaration of Independence was published, thought of themselves as Americans. Believed that they needed to establish a democracy, even though no country of this type had ever existed on Earth before. Believed that they and those they lead needed to fight and possibly die for a concept that had never been tried in the world before.

As for Washington himself, he seems to have felt qualified for the task he'd undertaken, but very aware of the terrible consequences of the mistakes he made. That death and disease, starvation and freezing, rape and pillage, of both troops and American non-combatants were the necessary accompaniments to war were always on his mind. And yet he fought on.

This is not a book for the sensitive reader. But I am so glad that I read it.

This book also provides a great overview of the history of the theory of continental drift, which I think is currently thought to be the cause for volcanism in much of the world.

And I did indeed like it a lot. And, I learned a lot about sea voyaging in the late 1700's too.

Nick's story is told in the form of his journal entries for the entire voyage, each of which provides a date, a latitude and longitude (in measurements of Capt. Cook's time, which means that if a reader were to want to follow Nick's journey on a globe, one would have to do a little math), and an approximate location in words.

Because the tale is told in the voice of a boy, it is not challenging to read. However, Nick does have a strong grasp of sailing terminology and 18th century turns of speech. The glossary at the end of the book and the maps on the inside covers are useful additions.

"How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.

"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously."

• How MIT and Princeton became celebrated research institutions.
• How members of the mathematical community, many of whom had not been well treated by Nash, even when he was well, cooperated to make sure he survived when he was too ill to work.
• The story of Alicia Nash, Nash's ex-wife who at tremendous cost to herself made sure that Nash was cared for throughout his life.
• How the Nobel committee decided to award its prize in Economics to Nash (sounds like the process was as lovely as the making of sausage).

It reminded me of a visit to a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit we paid a bunch to visit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry last summer. The exhibit consisted of quite a few obviously very expensively produced wooden models of sketches of machines that Da Vinci drew in his journals. Next to each model was a large poster explaining in text and diagrams what the machine was supposed to do. I think that the word "genius" was used at least once, possibly several times, in each of these posters. However, the posters never actually stated whether the machine would actually do what Leonardo intended it to do.

Yeah, so Leonardo was a genius. And with that and, what is it now, $1.50, you can get on the subway.

The cool thing about Nash was that he was a genius who did truly work at his craft. He specifically chose problems that people he respected labeled as being difficult. (Nasar seems to look down on Nash's problem selection process, or perhaps she felt that Nash's colleagues did.) Once Nash had chosen a problem, he worked on it diligently and only gave up if he realized that the problem had already been solved.

• Does meanness go with genius?
  Based on my experiences with some exceptionally brilliant people, I don't believe it has to.
• Does madness go with mathematical genius?
  Well, Godel was certainly suicidally nuts. Turing was driven that way, but seems to have been pretty sane for most of his life. Nash's explanation, that his mathematical intuitions "just appeared" in exactly the same way as the voices in his head, makes a lot of sense to me.
  I often know things will happen long before they do. And I am often accused of "jumping to conclusions", or "being overly pessimistic", or thinking differently. And family members who think that my ideas are overly controversial are certainly quick to let me know they think I'm crazy to express them.
• Can madness be overcome through sheer will?
  Seems like maybe Nash has succeeded in doing this, but maybe it's only because of his genius that he did. In explaining his recovery, he talks about how he now post-processes his thoughts and kind of throws away the ones that seem not-normal.

A Beautiful Mind is not a book for young readers. It describes a brilliant man's entire life (and if his mind was indeed "beautiful", it seems to me that it was beautiful in the way it processed mathematics, not beautiful in its humanity or generosity), including his homosexual experimentation, his fathering of a child outside of wedlock, his refusal to marry or even care for his mistress, and his neglect of his child. However, it gives interesting insights into the functioning of the intellectual community (and it most certainly is a community) and the advantages and disadvantages of being an unusually gifted person in our society.

Skipping grades in school was part of Dad's master plan. There was no need, he said, for his children to be held back by a school system geared for children of simply average parents.

Dad made periodic surprise visits to our schools to find out if and when we were ready to skip. Because of his home-training program -- spelling games, geography quizzes, and the arithmetic and languages -- we sometimes were prepared to skip.

... The standard reward for skipping was a new bicycle.

Although I tried to warn her about the ending by pointing out some of the foreshadowing and emphasizing that this is a true story, she was pretty much devastated by it.

The story of the mother of the twelve children, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, is told in the biography, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth -- A Life Beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen".

Winchester's explanations of the geology are clear and frank. The appendix about the Richter Scale is worth the price of admission.

We learn, in "their own voices", of the boy who was stolen from his home island in Scotland and so brought the song to the New World, of his hard life during the Revolutionary War, and of his journey to Appalachia. The song then leads us into the mind of a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, which in this part of the country, literally pitched neighbor against neighbor, few of whom cared all that much for the Northern OR Southern cause. Because the song continuously eludes capture by the songcatchers, we then follow its course through family of a young girl in the early twentieth century and then into the mind of another soldier in World War II and then into the later twentieth century.

Highly recommended for advanced young readers.

Note: The violence, suffering, and death caused by wars are described in short, sharp, riveting, but horrifying bursts that punctuate many of the stories told by the song's custodians.