Ron's View

North Carolina State Capitol

Six weeks ago, I described a day trip we might take when visiting Joel in Chapel Hill this month. We would drive 50 miles west to Greensboro to visit the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which opened two years ago on the site of the Woolworth’s where four college students began their 1960 lunch counter sit-in. And along the way, we would stop at the Saxapahaw General Store, featured in the NYT Sunday travel section in January, for a meal. That’s still the plan. The civil rights museum provides hour-long guided tours and we have made our reservations.

That leaves two more days to plan, not counting our arrival and departure days. Here’s what I’m thinking (though Gail has yet to weigh in). We’ll go down to Raleigh one day, hang out in Durham and Chapel Hill the other, and see still more museums.

Raleigh has three state museums, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of History, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. I can’t imagine going to all three. The good news is, we can’t. The natural sciences museum will be closed for two weeks in preparation for the opening of a new wing. This is bad news too, of course. It would have been fun to see the wing. But it simplifies our decision.

What most interests me at the history museum is an exhibit called The Story of North Carolina:

More than 14,000 years of the state’s history unfold through fascinating artifacts, multimedia presentations, dioramas, and hands-on interactive components. Additionally, two full-size historic houses and several re-created environments immerse museum visitors in places where North Carolinians have lived and worked.

[snip]

Highlights in the first part of The Story of North Carolina include American Indian life, European settlement, piracy, the American Revolution and early 1800s farm life. The exhibit continues through the antebellum era, the Civil War, the rise of industry, the Great Depression, the two World Wars, and the Civil Rights movement.

The art museum has a park that is “home to more than a dozen monumental works of art, with artists actively involved in the restoration of the Park’s landscape and the integration of art into its natural systems.” One is pictured below.

Gyre, Thomas Sayre, 1999

The museum also has a notable collection of Judaica, such as the Torah finials below from the treasury of the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam.

Torah finials, circa 1765, attributed to Willem Hendrik Rosier, Dutch, Amsterdam, 1707-1775. Medium: Silver and brass; cast, repoussé, chased, partly gilded.

We could also try to fit in a tour of the State Capitol, completed in 1840 and pictured at the top.

On the day we go to Durham, we can visit the Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

At Duke Homestead, visitors can tour the early home, factories, and farm where Washington Duke first grew and processed tobacco. Duke’s sons later founded The American Tobacco Company, the largest tobacco company in the world. The Dukes became one of the wealthiest families in the country at the turn of the 20th century and now lend their name to Duke University, Duke Energy, and the Duke Endowment.

Duke Homestead offers an orientation film twice an hour, an extensive tobacco museum, and guided tours of the surviving historical structures on the grounds. Among these structures are early Bright Leaf tobacco barns, Washington Duke’s first and third factories, and his 1852 homestead.

And on the Duke campus, there’s The Nasher Museum of Art, which “opened in 2005 with a building designed by Rafael Viñoly as the center for the visual arts on campus.” We’re talking Nasher as in Ray and Patsy Nasher of Dallas, the Nashers of downtown Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center , and of the NorthPark Center mall, which displays more art from the Nasher collection. (I wrote about our visit to the Nasher Sculpture Center two years ago.)

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

We may not have time to do all this. After all, we also want to enjoy the local restaurant offerings, walk around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill to get a sense of what they’re like, and drive around as well. We’ll have to return soon.

Not quite a year ago, I wrote with great enthusiasm about William Cronon‘s 1992 book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, calling it a “thrilling experience” and “the most astonishing blend of history, geography, economics, and ecology that I can imagine.” Since then, I’ve been intending to read his first book, from 1983, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. I mentioned a month ago that I had downloaded it. Monday night, after finishing Orlando Figes’ The Crimean War, I started it. It’s a short book, much shorter than the Chicago book, and last night I finished it.

Changes in the Land is another fabulous blend of history, geography, economics, and ecology, plus culture. Highlights include the treatment of the differing conceptions Indians and colonists had of land rights and ownership, the complex nature of the forest ecology circa 1600, and the deforestation that took place over the next two centuries. The blurb for the book at Amazon gets it right:

In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists’ sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, “The people of plenty were a people of waste,” Cronon’s enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

I do have one major complaint, not about the book itself but about the rotten thing that was done with its Kindle-ization. A year ago, when I finished Cronon’s Chicago book, I looked on Amazon for this one and saw that it was available only as a paperback, that being the 20th anniversary re-issue described in the blurb above, with preface and afterword. Had there been a Kindle version, I would have downloaded and begun reading it instantly. Instead, I simply put added it to my list of books to read.

A month ago, I went looking again and was surprised to discover that there was a Kindle version. I didn’t see it at first. In contrast to Amazon’s normal setup, in which when one goes to a book’s webpage, one sees listings of all available versions, including Kindle versions, the paperback page does not show a Kindle version. I stumbled on it in a separate search, not usually necessary, revealing an independent listing of a 2011 Kindle version at the unusually low price of $6.99. That’s what I downloaded a month ago.

Just today, in looking for the Amazon webpage to insert in this post, I saw the blurb quoted above and was reminded that there’s such a thing as the 20th anniversary edition. That’s great, but the Kindle version is the 1982 original. No preface. No afterword. And no warning. Geez. I feel cheated. I’ll have to find a copy of the new version in the library and read the missing pieces. I’m especially interested in Cronon’s afterword.

But don’t let me distract you from the main point. Cronon is brilliant. Read his books. If you read only one, make it Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. If you don’t read it all, read the three central chapters, each with a separate theme: grain, lumber, meat. As I wrote a year ago, “each is a gem. I can think of no better microeconomics primer, as we watch capitalism take root and transform the western regions of the country along with the way of life of its population and the land itself. Prairie makes way for farming, the white pine of the north woods makes way to fence the prairie and house its inhabitants, and plains buffalo make way for cattle range land. People’s lives improve, but at a cost, which Cronon always keeps in our field of view.”

I mentioned in my post a week ago on Jim Dodson’s American Triumvirate: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf that I had started Orlando Figes’ The Crimean War: A History, but set it aside 60 pages in when the Dodson book appeared. That night I returned to the Crimean War history and this morning I finished it.

What a book! I learned so much. It starts slowly. Figes even warns in the Introduction that a reader eager to get to the war without reading the preliminary chapters on the conditions that led to war should just skip ahead. This would amount to jumping to about page 150 of its 500 pages. And it would be a huge mistake, since much of what makes the book so good is the context it provides for the war. On the other hand, the pace certainly picks up once the war starts.

I had intended on several occasions over the past week to write about the book’s many strengths. Now that I’m done, I hardly know what to highlight. I’m tempted simply to say read it yourself and you’ll see. Plus, much of what so fascinated me may reveal more about my prior ignorance than about the book itself. Still, it’s a superb primer on the tensions from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth between Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire over the former, present, and future countries, the principalities, and assorted ethnic and national groups that surround the Black Sea. Underlying all these tensions is the religious divide between Islam and Christianity, along with the divide within Christianity between Orthodox and western Christians, and still further between Protestants and Catholics, as well as divides between modernizing Muslims of Turkey and more fundamentalist Muslims throughout the Ottoman Empire or within areas controlled by Russia. It’s for good reason that the original British title of Figes’ book is Crimea: The Last Crusade.

I can try to elaborate on all of this, but there’s a reason Figes takes 500 pages to lay it out. Any attempt on my part to summarize would be silly. Keep in mind, when it comes to the complexity of the religious and political considerations, that ultimately France and Britain would go to war against Russia on the side of the Ottomans. Russia saw itself as the protector of Orthodox Christianity, the rightful heir since the fall exactly 400 years earlier of Constantinople. Britain was more interested in preserving its trade routes through Ottoman-controlled lands to India, and in supporting a liberalizing Turkey against what it perceived to be an expansionary Russia. But this is simplifying.

The broader issues aside, there are the amazing stories of poorly trained troops (with ample quotes from their letters), the never-ending wonder of the siege of Sebastopol, bad weather, inadequate supply lines, sea battles, reporters in the field getting word back home via telegraph, war photography. And, of course, the battle of Balaklava with its Charge of the Light Brigade. Oh, and don’t forget Florence Nightingale. Tolstoy too.

Time and again, as I read the book, I would recognize the ground being laid for conflicts of the twentieth century. The Balkans. The Caucasus. Afghanistan. Recent developments such as the Chechen War and the 2008 conflicts between Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia all make more sense to me now. Not to mention that I know where they all are. I have a complete picture for the first time in my life of the geography of the Black Sea (which happens to be where my grandmother was born and spent the first part of her childhood, in Odessa). And for good measure, I’ve extended my picture eastward past the Caspian Sea into Central Asia, inspired in part by the book and in part by attending the Central Asian ikat exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum two weeks ago. Indeed, I can now name and locate all 15 former Soviet republics.

The Black Sea at the time of the Crimean War

[Mike King, in The New York Review of Books, June 2011]

I’m getting away from the point, which is that like all great history, the book has much to teach us, both about the past and about our present time. Here’s one example, from early in the book, in a discussion of British attitudes toward Russia:

In November 1835 [David] Urquhart launched a periodical, The Portfolio, in which he aired his Russophobic views, of which the following is typical: “The ignorance of the Russian people separates them from all community with the feelings of other nations, and prepares them to regard every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves, and the Government has already announced by its Acts a determination to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without.”

I have to confess that when I read about a country whose people regard “every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves,” with a government determined “to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without,” I could not help but think of our own country under President Bush, though I fear that Obama is little different in this regard. You may think otherwise, but I promise you this. If you read Figes book, time and again you will find passages that resonate with the present day.

(See also reviews by Max Hastings last June in The New York Review and Gary Bass last July in the NYT.)

It’s not often that my very own Seattle neighborhood of Madison Park is featured on the home page of the NYT. This is one of those moments, as attested to by the screenshot above.

Well, maybe you don’t see Madison Park. But you see the video titled, “Hi! I’m a Nutria.” That’s the one. (I can’t embed the video. Click here to watch it.) It’s by Drew Christie, whose website I’ve just visited, thereby learning:

I am an animator and an illustrator who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. I create stories through hand-made images. My work has been featured on The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Drawn, Cartoon Brew, Boooooooom! and Juxtapoz among other sites. I make short films, music videos, commercials, cartoons, books, zines and relief prints.

The video stars a nutria who lives down by Lake Washington’s Madison Park Beach. That’s our beach! The beach house is the meeting site for the Madison Park Community Council, over which Gail presides (and where I celebrated a major birthday a decade ago). I lived just north of the beach during my first 5 1/2 years in Seattle.

But the nutria isn’t there to tell you about my life in Madison Park. He has other issues on his mind, like why he’s considered an interloper. How many generations must his kind live here before they get to qualify as native?

Which oddly enough was one theme of a dinner conversation we had last night with other members of the Madison Park Community Council, one of whom decried the loss during his childhood of the orange groves in his native Claremont, California. I couldn’t refrain from asking just how long he thought those groves were around. They’re no more native to southern California than nutria are to the northwest, and probably haven’t been around much longer.

Here’s a partial answer, from the site of the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside:

In 1873, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forever changed the history of Southern California when it sent two small navel orange trees to Riverside resident Eliza Tibbets. Those trees, growing in near perfect soil and weather conditions, produced an especially sweet and flavorful fruit. Word of this far superior orange quickly spread, and a great agricultural industry was born. An effort to promote citrus ranching in the state brought would-be citrus ranch barons flocking to California. The second “gold rush” was on.

This sounds like an interesting park. Here’s more:

This park preserves some of the rapidly vanishing cultural landscape of the citrus industry and to tell the story of this industry’s role in the history and development of California. The park recaptures the time when “Citrus was King” in California, recognizing the importance of the citrus industry in southern California.

In the early 1900s, an effort to promote citrus ranching in the state brought hundreds of would-be citrus barons to California for the “second Gold Rush.” The lush groves of oranges, lemons and grapefruit gave California another legacy – its lingering image as the Golden State – the land of sunshine and opportunity.

The design of the park is reminiscent of a 1900s city park, complete with an activity center, interpretive structure, amphitheater, picnic area, and demonstration groves. The land contained within the park still continues to produce high-quality fruits.

And check out the photo below.

But I’ve strayed. First listen to the nutria and learn what he’s doing in our neighborhood.

Three weeks ago, I finished Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, which I had been reading off and on and writing about several times over the preceding two months. As I mentioned two weeks ago, it focus in the later chapters on the close of World War II, the arrival of Red Army, and the mass westward re-location of the German population reminded me that a year earlier I had thought of reading Timothy Snyder’s then-new Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Anne Applebaum’s review in the New York Review of Books had caught my attention, and I quoted from the review at the time.

Two weeks ago I downloaded the free opening sample of Bloodlands to my Kindle. A day later, I bought and downloaded the full book. With the arrival of snow days later in the week, I began to read it and was surprised by how gripping Snyder’s account was of the events between 1932 and 1945 in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. No short description can do the book justice, and in any case, you can read Applebaum’s account for that. But the book turns out to be an unexpected, and horrific, page turner.

I finally broke free from Bloodlands‘s grip early this past week, in mid World War II, because a new New York Review of Books had arrived and I decided to devote my evening reading to that. A day later, fearful of returning to the horrors, I took another night off. But once I returned, I was again swept along, finishing last night.

Snyder works on three levels, if I may be a bit simplistic. There are brief overviews of the broader historic European and world events, beginning with the close of World War I and the Russian Revolution. There are detailed accounts of the actual horrors, starting with Stalin’s mass starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in 1932-1933 in favor of shipping agricultural produce abroad in order to obtain the necessary capital for rapid industrialization (to simplify once again). And there are the searing descriptions, typically no more than a few sentences or a paragraph, of individual lives and deaths.

Special attention is given to the lands that formed the eastern half of Poland at the onset of war in 1939, the portion that the Soviet union took over by mutual agreement with Germany when the two invaded from east and west and divided the country between them. Two years later, Hitler would take these lands over on his way east toward Moscow, and three years after that the Red Army returned, pushing its way on to Berlin.

This of course isn’t news. Nor is the ultimate result, Stalin choosing to incorporate one-time eastern Poland into the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, while getting the agreement of Churchill and Roosevelt that Poland would be shifted westward to include lands that had been part of Germany before the war. Millions of Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others were moved back and forth, a significant percentage dying along the way. And this was the least of the horrors. The Jews, of course, were by then already largely exterminated, as were (by design) millions of Poles, this suiting the interests of both Hitler and Stalin.

How all this came about, and why, with an explanation of the evolving political logic, forms the heart of the book. A central goal is the placement of the murder of six million Jews in a broader context, where it can be seen as not just an isolated abhorrence but part of a larger universe of mass killings. Snyder argues that there is in particular a need to recognize that typical accounts of the Holocaust are skewed, and for a particular historical reason: much of what we knew for decades was based on the camps discovered by the US and British troops in the west, whereas much of the killing was done in the “bloodlands” to the east, lands conquered by Soviet troops. This had two consequences in terms of our sources of information. First, Stalin did not allow news to come out about what was found. Second, much of the killing in the east was by shooting, or mobile gassing, the gas chambers of Auschwitz for example coming into use only after the majority of the killing was done. Thus, to the extent that we typically picture the Holocaust as consisting of Jews being sent to and dying in concentration camps, we are viewing only a small part of the story.

Here’s a short passage from Snyder’s Preface:

At the end of the Second World War, American and British forces liberated German concentration camps such as Belsen and Dachau, but the western Allies liberated none of the important death facilities. The Germans carried out all of they major killing policies on lands subsequently occupied by the Soviets. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and it liberated the sites of Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek as well. American and British forces reached none of the bloodlands and saw none of the major killing sites. It is not just that American and British forces saw none of the places where the Soviets killed, leaving the crimes of Stalinism to be documented after the end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives. Is that they never saw the places where the Germans killed, meaning that understanding of Hitler’s crimes has taken just as long.

I am so glad that I read Bloodlands, and didn’t content myself with a few reviews. A natural book to read next might be Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which has sat above my desk for years. But 831 pages?! And small print? I don’t know. Some day. I’ll then want to re-purchase it for my Kindle, the price for that currently being set at $16.99. (What’s up with that?) For now, I’m ready for something completely different.

Europe in 1933

[Map credit: Mike King, in New York Review of Books]

I finished Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia two Saturdays ago and have intended to write about it since, but I’m struggling with what to say. I first wrote about it at the end of November, having been inspired to order it earlier in the month because of Andrew Stuttaford’s Wall Street Journal review, in which he wrote:

Max Egremont’s idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, “Forgotten Land” is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.

I commented at the time that I was “some 70 pages into Egremont’s book and thoroughly enjoying it.” But I then became distracted by a sequence of other books, returning to it intermittently but not making further progress until late December, at which point I wrote:

I’ve been slowly working my way through Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia in recent days, reaching not quite the halfway point yesterday. And what do you know? It’s reviewed by Richard Eder today in the NYT, not entirely flatteringly. I’ve been convincing myself that I enjoy Egremont’s meandering approach. A little World War I history here, a little World War II history there. A few words about one historical figure, then another. It’s not entirely clear why we spend so many pages in Ypres reading about British World War I war dead. Belgium’s a long way from East Prussia. But that’s the journey we sign up for when we read the book. Eder clearly has less patience for it than I do.

Will I make it to the end?

That Eder review almost stopped me in my tracks, given my eagerness to get to the books I had lined up to read next. Fortunately, I kept going — fortunately because of the astonishing tales that awaited me. In the latter stages of the book, the focus is on the lives of selected residents of East Prussia in the buildup to World War II, during the war itself, and in its immediate aftermath. We’re talking about land that passed back and forth in complicated ways between Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union.

A chapter is devoted to the historic German city of Memel, now the Lithuanian city of Klaipėda. A recurring character in several chapters is Walter Frevert, an East Prussian forester who becomes the head forest master for Hermann Göring. Göring, of course, would become the head of the German Air Force, but when the Nazis initially came to power in 1933, he was put in charge of Prussia, coming often to East Prussia to hunt. As we learn, Frevert’s responsibilities grew as Göring expanded the forest holdings in Germany’s eastern lands. Expansion might mean, for instance, forcibly moving Poles from their villages to be re-settled farther east and then razing the villages, an operation Frevert oversaw. Frevert would take on forest duties in West Germany after the war and become a popular figure, through radio and TV programs and his memoir Rominten, about the hunting preserve in East Prussia that he once ran.

Egremont tells these stories in an understated manner that allows the details to speak for themselves, which they do quite powerfully. Another example is the story of the last Jews left in Königsberg in January 1945, whom the Germans decide to move westward before the inevitable arrival of the Red Army. They are forcibly marched to the Baltic town of Palmnicken. Two thousand die or are killed along the way. The survivors were driven down to the beach, into the frozen sea, and shot. The details of the march are described from the perspective of some of the East Prussian natives, some of whom would go through their own hell when the Russians arrived.

The closing chapters of the book reminded me that last year I had thought of reading Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was widely and well reviewed. Anne Applebaum’s review in the New York Review of Books (from which the map at the top is taken) had especially gotten my attention. As Applebaum explains,

Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map [above]). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.

More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L’viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.

This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow,” writes Snyder, “but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”

Egremont, of course, is not writing a comprehensive history. He is examining a handful of people who are victims, collaborators, or perpetrators in one region, East Prussia, that forms part of Snyder’s larger bloodlands story. When I set Egremont’s haunting book aside, I was tempted to turn directly to Bloodlands to better understand that larger story. I haven’t yet, for fear that it will keep me from other books and other projects. But yesterday I downloaded the opening portion that Amazon makes available as a Kindle sample. It won’t be long before I buy and download the entire book. Perhaps I’ll have more to say after reading it.

I wrote last night about how much I’ll miss the daily book review in the Wall Street Journal when the paper’s delivery finally ceases. A month ago it led me to Robert Crease’s World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, the subject of last night’s post. Two and a half weeks ago, I was introduced by Andrew Stuttaford to Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia. I’m now some 70 pages into Egremont’s book and thoroughly enjoying it.

Here is the opening of Stuttaford’s review:

In 1945, Stalin seized East Prussia, Germany’s venerable redoubt on the Baltic Sea, as a spoil of war. A portion went to the “People’s Republic” that the Soviets had just created in Poland. He kept the rest. The last surviving Germans were killed or deported. The cozy old Königsberg of the Teutonic Knights—the home, during the Enlightenment, of no less than Immanuel Kant—was transformed into Kaliningrad—a bleak Soviet place named after Mikhail Kalinin, the token peasant who was titular head of Stalin’s USSR.

Nearly 70 years later, the countries behind these borders have changed, but the frontiers have not, and will not. The Polish part is finally and truly Polish; the sliver of East Prussia given to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic is now a part of independent Lithuania; the rest of the old Soviet slice is a seedy Russian exclave surrounded by the European Union. The only Germans there are tourists, in search of an elusive land that lingers on in family lore and in the dreams of the dispossessed for a vanished, fondly imagined, past.

Max Egremont’s idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, “Forgotten Land” is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.

Immanuel Kant may be the most famous genius associated to Königsberg, but the one whom Königsberg brings to my mind is Kant’s near contemporary Leonhard Euler, the greatest mathematician of the eighteenth century. Euler, a Swiss native, did not actually live in Königsberg. He spent much of his career in St. Petersburg and Berlin. But he knew Königsberg’s layout, and one of his early successes was his 1735 solution of the Königsberg bridge problem.*

I learned as a child about the problem and Euler’s solution, prompting me to wonder where Königsberg was. I was puzzled on finding that it lay in the Soviet Union and was called Kaliningrad. In due course, I read some of the relevant history, but new puzzles were introduced, such as why Prussia had an outpost so far east, embedded in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. On reading Stuttaford’s review, I realized that Egremont’s book offered me the opportunity, at last, to put the pieces in their proper places. Plus, I could wallow in elegiac, wistful melancholy. I wasted no time downloading and starting Forgotten Land.

*Perhaps a few words on the Königsberg bridge problem would be in order. Below you see a drawing of the seven bridges that crossed the Pregel River in Königsberg in Euler’s time. (I have taken this drawing from Wikipedia, where it was the picture of the month on the Mathematics Portal for September 2011 and credited to Bogdan Giuşcă.)

The problem is to find a route through the city that crosses each bridge exactly once. Euler proved that there is no way to do this. In so doing, he laid the foundation for the modern-day mathematical field known as graph theory.

Albert Pujols hitting his second home run of three tonight in the 7th inning

[Tim Sharp, Reuters]

This is a little embarrassing. Little did I know while writing my post earlier this evening about the 1960 World Series, in which I mentioned seeing Bobby Richardson get a World Series record six RBIs in one game, that Albert Pujols was in the process of doing the very same thing. I noted that Hideki Matsui duplicated Richardson’s feat two years ago. If I had taken the time to watch tonight’s World Series game instead of writing about one half a century ago, I could have seen history being made instead of being stuck in history.

In fairness to myself, the game was essentially over when Pujols tied the record with two out in the top of the ninth. His solo homer upped the Cardinal lead over the Rangers from 15-7 to 16-7. Still, a marvelous feat. After grounding out in the first, Pujols singled in the fourth, singled in the fifth, hit a three-run homer in the sixth, a two-run homer in the seventh, and the solo home run in the ninth. That’s some kind of night. The three home runs tied the famous series record for most home runs in a game, set by Babe Ruth (1926, 1928) and tied by Reggie Jackson (1977).

I seem to be reading two books at once. I just wrote about Harold Bloom’s The Shadow of a Great Rock. No sooner had I ordered it, and while I awaited its delivery, I came upon the review eight days ago in the Sunday NYT of Charles C. Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, which was published three weeks ago. In one of those spontaneous moments that the Kindle makes possible, I bought and downloaded it.

Well, not quite. I looked around to see what I could learn about it online first, and was led to a brief note by Tyler Cowen on his blog Marginal Revolution back in May. Cowen wrote: “I am spellbound reading it, it will be one of the best books of this year, and, although I know this area somewhat, I am learning fascinating information on literally every page. Mann stresses how much it mattered to suddenly be living in the “Homogenocene,” where Asia, Europe, and the New World suddenly started becoming more alike. Mexico City had the world’s first Chinatown and was the first global city. The discussion of the importance of the potato, and in general New World agriculture, surpasses previous accounts and he explains the importance of knowing how to make chuño.”

After reading that, I bought the book.

In his NYT review, Ian Morris explains its premise.

“1493” picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.

[snip]

[Mann suggests] that only by understanding what Crosby called “the Columbian Exchange” — the transfer of plants, animals, germs and people across continents over the last 500 years — can we make sense of contemporary globalization. The lesson of history, Mann argues, is that “from the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.”

With admirable evenhandedness, he shows how the costs and benefits of globalization have always been inseparable. We cannot have one without the other. Bringing the potato to Europe made it possible for the Irish famine to kill millions when the potatoes were stricken by blight, but it also kept other millions of half-starved peasants alive. Bringing malaria to the Americas depopulated some parts of the New World, but it also kept European armies out of other parts. Mann can even see the point of view of the chainsaw-­wielding loggers who deforested the Philippines so that Americans could have cheap furniture: “These agents of destruction were just putting food on the table.”

[snip]

Most impressive of all, he manages to turn plants, germs, insects and excrement into the lead actors in his drama while still parading before us an unforgettable cast of human characters. He makes even the most unpromising-­sounding subjects fascinating. I, for one, will never look at a piece of rubber in quite the same way now that I have been introduced to the debauched nouveaux riches of 19th-­century Brazil, guzzling Champagne from bathtubs and gunning one another down in the streets of Manaus.

I made my way through the Prologue and first chapter soon after downloading the book, but then The Shadow of a Great Rock arrived, waylaying me until this morning, when I picked it up again. So far so good. I don’t have much to add. Perhaps I will once I’m further along.

Famed Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322*

[Christine Proust and Columbia University]

I read a marvelous passage earlier this week that I would like to share. It’s an old one, from a book published in 1952, but it’s new to me. The book: The Exact Sciences in Antiquity by Otto Neugebauer. Neugebauer is a giant of twentieth-century history, the expert on ancient Babylonian mathematics and astronomy. An Austrian, he studied engineering, mathematics, and physics in Graz, then Munich, and then Göttingen, where he began to work on the history of ancient mathematics. He left Germany for Copenhagen in 1934, then moved on to the US, where he spent the remainder of his career at Brown and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Neugebauer died in 1990. I was aware of his name and vaguely of his importance to the history of mathematics when we spent the year at the Institute in 1987-1988, but unfortunately I didn’t think to meet him or learn more about his work. Talk about missed opportunities. But now, 23 years later, I’ve been looking at some of his work.

In the 1930′s and 1940′s, in a series of books, he translated and interpreted the mathematics on the Babylonian cuneiform tablets that can be found in many of the world’s great museums and that date to the time period of 1900 BCE-1600 BCE. The book on exact sciences in antiquity from which I am about to quote is more of an overview that grew out of lectures he gave at Cornell in 1949. In the Preface, he explains that the nature of the presentation led him to omit the qualifications he might ordinarily have offered in a more scholarly work, adding that he has “enjoyed the possibility of being compelled for once to abandon all learned apparatus and to pretend to know when actually I am guessing.” The paragraph concludes with the passage below, which I leave for your enjoyment without further comment.

This does not imply that I have ignored facts. Indeed I have consistently tried to keep as close as possible to the source material. Only in its selection, in its arrangement, and in its coherent interpretation have I permitted myself much greater freedom than is usual in technical publications. And in order to counteract somewhat the impression of security which easily emerges from general discussions I have often inserted methodological remarks to remind the reader of the exceedingly slim basis on which, of necessity, is built any discussion of historical developments from which we are separated by many centuries. The common belief that we gain “historical perspective” with increasing distance seems to me utterly to misrepresent the actual situation. What we gain is merely confidence in generalizations which we would never dare make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence.

*The photo at the top is taken from a NYT article by Nicholas Wade last fall on the occasion of an exhibition of cuneiform tablets at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Unfortunately, the exhibition closed last December, or else I would be making plans to see it during our upcoming trip to New York. Wade explained that the “considerable mathematical knowledge of the Babylonians was uncovered by the Austrian mathematician Otto E. Neugebauer, who died in 1990. Scholars since then have turned to the task of understanding how the knowledge was used. The items in the exhibition are drawn from the archaeological collections of Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.” Be sure to look at the accompanying slide show, which includes more tablets, a photo of Otto Neugebauer, and his hand drawing of both sides of a tablet.