Log in Subscribe

September 27, 2019

George Ernsberger - Columnist
Posted 9/27/19

THE ANARCHY by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury). Terrifically readable serious/popular history with important contemporary implications. It was news to me that the almost legendary East India Company, …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

September 27, 2019

Posted

THE ANARCHY by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury). Terrifically readable serious/popular history with important contemporary implications. It was news to me that the almost legendary East India Company, referred to often in historical adventure fiction—it has almost seemed to be a Kipling invention—was this significant a power, almost a nation to itself—and a seriously aggressive one, with a “security force” in its heyday that was twice the size of the British Army. It is, indeed, an object lesson, with especially sharp contemporary meaning, in how unregulated corporate power can dominate, and even tyrannize, a great nation. But mostly, it's just a rousing read—Kipling for grown-ups. With many color illustrations.

THE GRAMMARIANS by Cathleen Schine (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Schine is essentially a comic novelist, and certainly a writer of enormous intelligence and wit. Pretty sure she's smarter than me, because her characters are—but she makes them emotionally real and deeply honest and well-intentioned, which makes them irresistibly likable without ever seeming to ask for that. As you read, you think, once in a while, whoa! Proud of yourself, Schine? How you got me to see that? Nicely done. And to make all that seem harder, or so you might expect: the central figures, identical twin sisters, might strike you in a casual description as also a couple of clichés, of a fairly fancy sort: not only are they indeed grammarians—they love language—one lives on the Upper West Side, the other in Brooklyn.

PROOF! HOW THE WORLD BECAME GEOMETRICAL by Amir Alexander (Scientific American/ Farrar, Straus). The column discovers yet another of the great explainers it so admires—even loves: a matter of wanting to believe the world needn't be forever defended against or hidden from. It gets us to understand one of the profoundest of insights and most radical advances ever in what humanity understood—namely, that every thing and place had not only discernable and even precisely measurable dimensions—but equally understandable relations with every other thing and place. Which is a bit more evidence that the world is rational, logical, and thus predictable if one only keeps one's mind free of terror or rage. Which becomes a bit more do-able with every such discovery.

KOPP SISTERS ON THE MARCH by Amy Stewart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This smart, amusing, and warm series of historical novels just gets better and better as the history it's portraying in the sisters' lives gets deeper and wider. It's The Great War (nobody knew we'd need numbers for them), so the stage gets more crowded. As for the sisters, they have stumbled into meaningful situations at times, earlier, but there's no stumbling, here, all three are caught up in the patriotic fervor—and the sudden new ways that opened for women to contribute to the crusade the nation was undertaking.

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here