Books – Page 96 – artdiamondblog.com

Resistance to New Technology

(p. 59) . . . , not everyone was happy with the loss of open hearths. Many people missed the drifting smoke and were convinced they had been healthier when kept “well kippered in wood smoke,” as one observer put it. As late as 1577, a William Harrison insisted that in the days of open fires our heads did never ake.” Smoke in the roof space discouraged nesting birds and was believed to strengthen timbers. Above all, people complained that they weren’t nearly as warm as before, which was true. Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Medieval Pollution

(p. 58) One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke. An open hearth had certain clear advantages–it radiated heat in all directions and allowed people to sit around it on all four sides–but it was also like having a permanent bonfire in the middle of one’s living room. Smoke went wherever passing drafts directed it–and with many people coming and going, and all the windows glassless, every passing gust must have brought somebody a faceful of smoke–or otherwise rose up to the ceiling and hung thickly until it leaked out a hole in the roof.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

“People Condemned to Short Lives and Chronic Hardship Are Perhaps Unlikely to Worry Overmuch about Decor”

If “necessity is the mother of invention,” then why did it take so long for someone to invent the louvered slats mentioned at the end of this passage?

(p. 55) In even the best homes comfort was in short supply. It really is extraordinary how long it took people to achieve even the most elemental levels of comfort. There was one good reason for it: life was tough. Throughout the Middle Ages, a good deal of every life was devoted simply to surviving. Famine was common. The medieval world was a world without reserves; when harvests were poor, as they were about one year in four on average, hunger was immediate. When crops failed altogether, starvation inevitably followed. England suffered especially catastrophic harvests in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292, and 1311, and then an unrelievedly murderous stretch from 1315 to 1319. And this was of course on top of plagues and other illnesses that swept away millions. People condemned to short lives and chronic hardship are perhaps unlikely to worry overmuch about decor. But even allowing for all that, there was just a great, strange slowness to strive for even modest levels of comfort. Roof holes, for instance, let smoke escape, but they also let in rain and drafts until somebody finally, belatedly invented a lantern structure with louvered slats that allowed smoke to escape but kept out rain, birds, and wind. It was a marvelous invention, but by the time it (p. 56) was thought of, in the fourteenth century, chimneys were already coming in and louvered caps were not needed.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

“If We Can’t Win on Quality, We Shouldn’t Win at All”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) At the tail end of the 1990s dot-com boom, Douglas Edwards took a gamble: He left his marketing job at an old-media company, taking a $25,000 salary cut to start work at a small, little-known Internet concern in its second year of operation. That his new employer was losing money and burning through venture capital went without saying. But unlike the footloose 20-somethings who usually populated Silicon Valley start-ups, Mr. Edwards had little margin to bet wrong; he was 41, with a mortgage, three children and a worried wife. He hoped he could get his old job back if the company ran out of money.

. . .
Mr. Edwards came to his job as a subscriber to the conventional wisdom. In an early presentation to cofounder Larry Page and others, Mr. Edwards unwisely declared that only marketing, not technology, could set Google apart. “In a world where all search engines are equal,” he asserted, “we’ll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from our competitors.”
The room became quiet. Then Mr. Page spoke up. “If we can’t win on quality,” he said, “we shouldn’t win at all.”

For the full review, see:
DAVID A. PRICE. “BOOKSHELF; How Google Got Going; Branding, shmanding, a marketer was told. ‘If we can’t win on quality,’ Larry Page said, ‘we shouldn’t win at all.'” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 12, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book being reviewed:
Edwards, Douglas. I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2011.

Medieval Halls of the Rich Incubated Plague in a Nest of “Filth Unmentionable”

(p. 51) In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524. New layers of rushes were laid down twice a year normally, but the old accretions were seldom removed, so that, Erasmus added glumly, “the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years.” The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Medieval Halls Did Not Conduce to Comfort or to Observing Modern Proprieties

Practically all living, awake or asleep, was done in this single large, mostly bare, always smoky chamber. Servants and family ate, dressed, and slept together–“a custom which conduced neither to comfort nor the observance of the proprieties,” as J. Alfred Gotch noted with a certain clear absence of comfort himself in his classic book The Growth of the English House (1909). Through the whole of the medieval period, till well Into the fifteenth century the hall effectively was the house, so much so that it became the convention to give its name to the entire dwelling, as in Hardwlck Hall or Toad Hall.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

“We Are All Dutchmen Now”

Source of the book image: http://yalepress.yale.edu/images/full13/9780300115475.jpg

(p. A15) Samuel Pufendorf, a 17th-century German historian, described the English people as “having been always inclined to rebellion and intestine commotion.” But England’s regime change in 1688–soon called “glorious”–was a revolution with a difference. Instead of overthrowing the existing order in violent upheaval, it put “government upon its ancient and proper basis, which the measures of a mad bigot had almost destroyed.” The “mad bigot” was, in this case, James II, the Stuart king (and a Catholic) who was deposed in favor of William of Orange, a Protestant from the Dutch Republic. Edmund Burke famously contrasted England’s balance of change and continuity in 1688 with the ferocity in France a century later.

In “1688: The First Modern Revolution,” Steve Pincus challenges this received account to argue that the Glorious Revolution marked a much greater break with history than Burke realized–and proved to be an emblem of the West’s future. James II, Mr. Pincus notes, sought to extend state power at the expense of Parliament and the privileges of local communities. James’s adversaries preferred the dynamism of commerce; they believed that wealth sprang from the limitless striving of human endeavor rather than the finite availability of land. France under Louis XIV provided James with a pattern for absolutism; the Dutch Republic provided his opponents with a commercial ideal. The Glorious Revolution is often seen as a clash between ”popery”–the term for authoritarian Catholicism–and ancient English liberties. But Mr. Pincus persuasively describes it as the collision of two ideas about the state in society. In a sense, he implies, we are all Dutchmen now.

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY. “Going Dutch; When a dynamic commercial ideal won out over centralized power.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., September 1, 2011): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated AUGUST 31, 2009.)

The book under review is:
Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale, 2009.

An alternative view is presented in a a book by Lisa Jardine (reference below). She argues that William of Orange was more interested in grabbing power than in promoting liberty. Her view is persuasively disputed in the following review by Andrew Roberts:
ANDREW ROBERTS. “A New William The Conqueror.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 28, 2008): A13.

The Jardine book is:
Jardine, Lisa. Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

38 Theories Why Humans Became Sedentary

(p. 36) . . . if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea–or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right. According to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place. One theory, evidently seriously suggested (Jane Jacobs cites It In her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities), was that “fortuitous showers” of cosmic rays caused mutations in grasses that made them suddenly attractive as a food source. The short answer is that no one knows why agriculture developed as it did.

Making food out of plants is hard work. The conversion of wheat, rice, corn, millet, barley, and other grasses into staple foodstuffs is one of the great achievements of human history, but also one of the more unexpected ones.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)

“The American Machines Did Things that the World Earnestly Wished Machines to Do”

(p. 22) . . . when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do–stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles–but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe’s sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men–a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper (p. 23) was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt’s repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from inter-changeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as “the American system.” Only one homegrown creation could match these virtuoso qualities of novelty, utility, and machine-age precision–Paxton’s great hall itself, and that was to disappear when the show was over. For many Europeans this was the first unsettling hint that those tobacco-chewing rustics across the water were quietly creating the next industrial colossus–a transformation so improbable that most wouldn’t believe it even as It was happening.

The most popular feature at the Great Exhibition was not an exhibition at all, but rather the elegant “retiring rooms,” where visitors could relieve themselves in comfort, an offer taken up with gratitude and enthusiasm by 827,000 people–11,000 of them on a single day. Public facilities in London were woefully lacking in 1851. At the British Museum, up to 30,000 daily visitors had to share just two outside privies. At the Crystal Palace the toilets actually flushed, enchanting visitors so much that It started a vogue for installing flushing toilets at home– . . .

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Italian “Legal System Barely Functions”

(p. B4) The Italy that Mr. Severgnini describes seethes with frustration. Government works poorly. The legal system barely functions. Too many Italians are crowded into too little space. Fear of failure stymies innovation. Mr. Severgnini is dismayed at the national genius for enjoyment and the Italian inability to plan for the future. “Our sun is setting in installments,” he writes. “It’s festive and flamboyant, but it’s still a sunset.”

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Insider Explains Italy, Land of Cheery Dysfunction.” The New York Times (Weds., August 23, 2006): B1 & B4.

Book under review:
Severgnini, Beppe. La Bella Figura; a Field Guide to the Italian Mind. Translated by Giles Watson. pb ed. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.