Books in brief: A history of plaster; Einstein for the general reader; influencers' literary antecedents
Fragility: A History of Plaster by Alain Corbin (Polity, £12.99)
If we now live in the Digital Age, should we think of the first half of the 19th century as the Plaster Age? Alain Corbin, emeritus professor of history at the University of
Paris
I, thinks so with this curious yet curiously compelling little book (a mere 70 pages). Corbin considers this era of history, from the
French
Revolution and the political regimes that succeeded it, through a plastered lens, marking its increased role in social, political and artistic structures with the overriding consequence of chipping away at France's increasingly friable establishment. The subject, taking in such details as plaster being used to house the Paris poor and Napoleon's death mask, may prove too dry and recherché for some. But the author casts his arguments with conviction.
Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein by Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael D Gordin (Oxford University Press, £14.99)
Just over 100 pages long, this small but impressive book packs a lot in for the 70th anniversary of Einstein's death. Judiciously assembled and written with the general reader in mind, we have a concise biography, addressing subjects such as Einstein's identity as a secular Jew who supported Zionism, to his complicated history with atomic energy and its development of the atomic bomb. (He felt US President Roosevelt, who died just before the first test, would not have dropped the bombs.) There's enough depth, critical analysis and teaching in addressing Einstein's work for anyone interested in physics too, tackling fascinating topics such as time dilation. And it's always worth being reminded of titbits such as, in his most famous paper, Einstein derived
that
equation in three pages.
Recommended: The influencers who changed how we read by Nicola Wilson (Holland House Books, £14.99)
The index alone is a bibliophile's dream. Literature professor Wilson has done a remarkable job recreating the story of the Book Society, established by a group of writers for 40 years from 1929 as a subscription service where readers were sent a keenly priced book from around the world once a month.
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Crime fiction: Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard, Luke Beirne, Paul Vidich, Karin Slaughter and K Anis Ahmed
Opens in new window
]
Wilson contends it was a forerunner of influencers and celebrity book clubs, and it's easy to see why from her impeccable research. She brings characters and ideologies to life – some well known; JB Priestley and Cecil Day-Lewis – as they used the pen to counter the swords of a turbulent era (the Great Depression; the rise of fascism with the Spanish Civil War and second World War). Recommended will be fascinating for anyone interested in how publishing works.
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Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Books in brief: A history of plaster; Einstein for the general reader; influencers' literary antecedents
Fragility: A History of Plaster by Alain Corbin (Polity, £12.99) If we now live in the Digital Age, should we think of the first half of the 19th century as the Plaster Age? Alain Corbin, emeritus professor of history at the University of Paris I, thinks so with this curious yet curiously compelling little book (a mere 70 pages). Corbin considers this era of history, from the French Revolution and the political regimes that succeeded it, through a plastered lens, marking its increased role in social, political and artistic structures with the overriding consequence of chipping away at France's increasingly friable establishment. The subject, taking in such details as plaster being used to house the Paris poor and Napoleon's death mask, may prove too dry and recherché for some. But the author casts his arguments with conviction. Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein by Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael D Gordin (Oxford University Press, £14.99) Just over 100 pages long, this small but impressive book packs a lot in for the 70th anniversary of Einstein's death. Judiciously assembled and written with the general reader in mind, we have a concise biography, addressing subjects such as Einstein's identity as a secular Jew who supported Zionism, to his complicated history with atomic energy and its development of the atomic bomb. (He felt US President Roosevelt, who died just before the first test, would not have dropped the bombs.) There's enough depth, critical analysis and teaching in addressing Einstein's work for anyone interested in physics too, tackling fascinating topics such as time dilation. And it's always worth being reminded of titbits such as, in his most famous paper, Einstein derived that equation in three pages. Recommended: The influencers who changed how we read by Nicola Wilson (Holland House Books, £14.99) The index alone is a bibliophile's dream. Literature professor Wilson has done a remarkable job recreating the story of the Book Society, established by a group of writers for 40 years from 1929 as a subscription service where readers were sent a keenly priced book from around the world once a month. [ Crime fiction: Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard, Luke Beirne, Paul Vidich, Karin Slaughter and K Anis Ahmed Opens in new window ] Wilson contends it was a forerunner of influencers and celebrity book clubs, and it's easy to see why from her impeccable research. She brings characters and ideologies to life – some well known; JB Priestley and Cecil Day-Lewis – as they used the pen to counter the swords of a turbulent era (the Great Depression; the rise of fascism with the Spanish Civil War and second World War). Recommended will be fascinating for anyone interested in how publishing works.
Irish Times
10 hours ago
- Irish Times
Collected Poems by Gerard Fanning: Elliptical, at times cryptic works built on mood and atmosphere
Collected Poems Author : Gerard Fanning ISBN-13 : 978-1943667154 Publisher : Wake Forest University Press Guideline Price : £19.99 I hadn't come across the late Gerard Fanning's work before encountering it whole, as it were, in the shape of this Collected Poems. It comes with helpful apparatus – a foreword by Gerald Dawe, an afterword by Colm Tóibín – a contemporary and friend of Fanning's at UCD – and an interview with Fanning and Conor O'Callaghan. All of these angles are helpful, perhaps even essential, to the new reader of his writing. These poems are elliptical, at times cryptic; they mostly don't so much perform as talk quietly into their shirt sleeves, operating in an air of manila envelopes and uncompromisingly referential Europhilia; they're lit by a sort of coastal glare, and often feel as if they're squinting under exposed scrutiny. Tóibín rightly says that poetry wasn't – for Fanning – Auden's 'memorable speech', and these are poems built on mood, atmospheres – his avowed Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon admiration hint at his wide range of references, from film and literature to something more playfully esoteric, more guardedly private and coded. He was a government man, a life of 'benign Glengarry Glen Ross', in his own words; on the road, and on the right side of intrusion. On the page, too. If the early work from the 1990s has an abiding flavour it's one of withdrawal and departure, a sort of whistling chilliness, looking for – as per one of the best of his early poems An Evening in Booterstown – 'a pale permanence'. READ MORE He has something of Tom Waits to his titles – often proper names, recognisable or otherwise, are thrown around; we're located but we're left out a little too – this is a poetry of overhearing, eschewing careless talk, or the loose lip. [ From the archive: Poet and Rooney Prize winner Gerard Fanning dies Opens in new window ] At times in the first books he can exclude us entirely – one feels the need to ask for a primer, or Rosetta Stone, for some of his piled-up enigmas, but later he seems to relax into a more open, approachable clarity. Rhyme comes in, but by Slip Road his language as a whole is, largely, more open, more parseable – poems like These Days allying a new clarity to an encroaching sense of creeping dread, spotlighting a melancholy undertow that was always there, tidal like so many of his landscapes – 'I will be sent for, soon, at night'.
Irish Times
17 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘Maybe Elon Musk is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories'
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci via the songwriting chemistry of Lennon and McCartney to the Florida launch pad of Elon Musk's SpaceX , Helen Lewis's new book, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers, sets out to unravel the mystery of what we mean when we call someone a genius and asks whether the modern idea of genius as a class of special people is distorting our view of the world. There's a sense throughout the book that these people are modern versions of saints, that they're performing something sacred in our increasingly secular world. It is a really compelling argument, made by historian Darrin McMahon in his Divine Fury: A History of Genius, that during the Enlightenment, when people became more rationalist, less religious, we still craved this sense of the divine. The idea that miracles happen in the world. Where you might once have thought that a miracle was attributable to the Virgin Mary, now the miracle is: how did Van Gogh's paintings happen? How did someone have this moment of inspiration where they came up with this scientific breakthrough? There is this deep hunger within all of us for the world not to be mundane, for there to be things that are still extraordinary within it. Even the phrase 'gifted', which people sometimes use about children and young people. Gifted by whom and for what purpose? READ MORE In classical times, you were possessed by 'a genius'. The muse of poetry or whatever spoke through you. I think that was a much more healthy way to think about it. The argument in the book really is about this category of special people and what that does to us and to them. It's much healthier to say I've done something extraordinary rather than I'm an extraordinary person and everything I do is probably going to be brilliant. That's the bit that tends to lead people astray. You look in the book at the story of how Shakespeare became the figure that he is now. Part of that is these enablers who made sure the folios weren't destroyed and forgotten. And then there's a fascinating process of mythmaking, which is about Englishness and Britishness in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's a classic story for your purposes, isn't it? Because there is something extraordinary going on in those plays, but then there's a whole other process that involves lots of people. That's the bit I wanted to try to unpick. There's a bad version of this book that is falsely egalitarian and implies that there is no such thing as extraordinary achievement. You're hard-pressed to look at the plays of Shakespeare and think that. So, yeah, I'm not trying to argue that great achievement doesn't exist, but I think which achievements we choose to praise and flag up often has a political dimension to it too, which is worth exploring. Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers Then there's another element added to the mix, which is the idea of the artist as mad, bad and dangerous to know. The outsider who burns brightly and sputters out early. I find that really interesting because it isn't at all the idea of the artist that you have before then, If you take someone like a Rembrandt, he was painting portraits of rich Dutch people. There was no sense that in order to market himself, he needed to be wasting away in a cupboard somewhere. It's only when you get to the Romantics that we get so into the idea that great art has this terrible cost to people. Susan Sontag wrote about tuberculosis being part of that story. Tuberculosis, which spiked as people moved into cities, has a lot of symptoms that are quite similar to all the things that people used to say about Romantic poets. And that's hard to separate out from the rise of capitalism. The idea that artists don't rely on patronage any more. They now compete in the marketplace. My brutal conclusion about a lot of the way that we talk about genius is that it's really a kind of a branding exercise. The idea that the life itself is the work of art. One of the things that's really interesting is the hunger for people who achieve things to have had interesting biographies and the slight sense of disappointment when they don't, as if we feel like we've been cheated. The book is also very much about science and also about pseudoscience – when science gets too big for its boots. Someone like Francis Galton, who used to be very famous but has been airbrushed out of history by embarrassed institutions. He was an incredible 19th-century polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin from the same very talented family. He came to be interested in the idea of genius. He was grappling with the new ideas of evolution and natural selection and selective breeding. And that gets him to eugenics, which is the idea that you can 'improve a population' by only letting the smart people have babies. From that, you get this scientific discipline of eugenics that has absolutely no human empathy behind it. And it was really widely accepted. I used to work for the New Statesman magazine, which was founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were Fabian socialists. But part of the paternalism of their socialism was they were interested in the eugenics movement. I wrote in my last book, Difficult Women, about Marie Stopes, the great contraceptive pioneer, who was also madly interested, until the [19]30s, it was a respectable scientific endeavour. Because people hadn't yet had the vivid proof about what happened when this ideology was put into practice. The book is a very odd book. It pings about from Renaissance Florence to eugenics to The Beatles. When you put them all together, you begin to realise that we have these very deep ideas about human worth and that we're always fighting over them. [ Difficult Women book review: Whirlwind tour of feminism Opens in new window ] One of the other themes is that just because somebody is good at something, it doesn't mean they're necessarily good at anything else. But that seems to be a common fallacy. Yes, the book ends with Elon Musk, who I think is a great demonstration of this. It's hard for people on the left to acknowledge that he did have great success in business because of personal qualities. He's not purely a lucky idiot who wandered into his success with Tesla and SpaceX. However, the last six months have shown that he isn't good at everything. If I may say something controversial, maybe he also is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories. What it comes back to is humility. Just because you've had great success in one area, you should still be humble about all the other areas. Humility doesn't seem to come with most of these characters. There's a really interesting question about whether or not there are certain personality traits that make you more predisposed to either be a genius or get called a genius. A certain level of narcissism, because you're okay with people looking at you and bigging you up and you accept the attention and you thrive in it. You can take two people of absolutely equal achievements and the bigger narcissist will probably get called a genius more. You quote someone saying that in this world there are actors and there are movie stars. I think that there are these people who have those magnetic qualities to them. But yeah, it's really hard to separate it out, isn't it? You can't be a genius on your own. It's not an intrinsic quality to you. It's something that gets conferred on you by other people. There's a right-wing, left-wing element to this. On the one hand an emphasis on collaboration and community. And on the other, on the primacy of individual agency and the individual casting off the bonds of the little people all around him. Because of copyright, because of the patent system, because of people wanting to make money, it becomes winner takes all. Alexander Graham Bell becomes the inventor of the telephone, even though it was much more collaborative than that. You're a writer with t he Atlantic magazine and often cover politics. Some of these themes feed into what's happening right now, such as the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I have my own reservations about some aspects of DEI, but the crudeness of that assault uses language about excellence being damped down by it. Is there a resurgence of the genius myth happening right now? Definitely. One of the things I argue in the book is that every age has its own different template of genius, which tells you a lot about that society. Our current one is the tech superman, these brilliant start-up founders who have an insight that no one else does. And you are right, they are often guys who think that they're just special people. But to go back to Elon Musk, both Tesla and SpaceX had significant public investment. SpaceX, at its lowest point, got a Nasa contract that assured its future. So, yeah, the dynamism of the private sector contributed enormously to its success, but taxpayers' money was ultimately also part of the story of what allowed it to thrive. It's really tempting for people to believe that they made it all on their own, whereas what you usually need is talent, plus luck, plus society that lets you achieve stuff. [ Elon Musk sees humanity's purpose as a facilitator of superintelligent AI. That should worry us Opens in new window ] As you point out, there are millions of people who never got that opportunity. Like you, I have reservations about some of the way that that DEI has ended up being implemented. Things like the implicit bias test don't really seem to predict very well who is actually racist in real life. But go back and look at someone as brilliant a scientist as George Washington Carver, who was black and therefore never got to go to school. Or the fact that Jewish people were excluded from lots of the Ivy Leagues. The exclusion of women from the professions for a huge amount of history. The number of bright working-class kids who never got the opportunities they deserved. So for all that we are now in this period of backlash, I think you have to say that the small efforts that we've made towards allowing more people to realise their potential come against this background of a huge amount through human history of wasted talent. I'm thinking about all the children who died in war or starved to death. There's a quote from Stephen Jay Gould about people who got very into preserving bits of Einstein's brain. He said he was less interested in the exact form of Einstein's brain than in the people who were just as brilliant but who died working in sweatshops or cotton fields. The Genius Myth is published by Penguin This is an edited extract from an episode of the Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan podcast Is there any such thing as a political genius? With Helen Lewis Listen | 39:17
