A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (2005)

I actually came across this book in the bibliography of another book I read a while back, about cholera and how it spread through the water supply in England in the 1850s. This book is sort of a trip through civilization, with each of six drinks (beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola) setting up the narrative through time. Water will be the seventh drink; the drink of the future, according to Standage. Will third-world countries have access to clean, safe water? Will World War III break out over water supplies, rather than oil? Will we find signs of water (and life) on Mars?

Of course, these are questions for the future when “6 Glasses” is focused on the past. I’m not usually a big history fan, since retrospectively it all seems so general (“and then there was a war, and some people died, and then there were some boats, and then they planted some trees, and then there was another war,” etc. ad nauseum). But this book had loads of little factoids, and that’s right up my alley. (I pretty much own trivia nights.)

Things I learned include:

Teacups and teapots and tins of Twinings tea. Photo credit: Wikipedia

• Twinings tea has what is thought to be the oldest commercial logo in continuous use in the world;
• Coca-Cola is apparently the second most commonly understood phrase in the world, after “okay”;
• beer and bread are essentially liquid and solid forms of the same thing;
• Sir Isaac Newton wrote Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica and published it in 1687 after a conversation with Edmond Halley (as in the comet!) at a coffee-house… I sometimes forget that all these famous scientists knew each other and worked together. It boggles the mind, truly;
• Lloyd’s of London and the London Stock Exchange also grew out of organizations originally based in coffee-houses;
• New Coke sucked. Jokes! I already knew that.

Beer (by the pitcher) and trivia (in teams is good, because then you can share the pitchers) go well together, incidentally.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

This book confused me a bit — I’m not used to my fiction having footnotes. I was also a little confused because there’s a lot of Spanish slang going on here, and my Spanish is at the absolute most basic level. Google translate was less helpful than I had hoped, just because the narration was so slangy.

However, I can imagine other readers being even more lost than I was, because the narrator is such a huge nerd and kept dropping references to the classics: LOTR, Star Trek, Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, old-school comics.

Here’s a picture of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. This isn’t my picture. I refuse to fold books this way. (Photo credit: flickr)

That was actually one of the reasons I picked this book up in the first place; I’d heard (actually read) about the extreme nerdiness of the narrator, which — being a big nerd myself — appealed to me. It’s a good way into the story before you figure out who the narrator is or how he fits into the plot. There’s a lot of Dominican history for him to fill in, and luckily he does so with style.

I liked the protagonist, Oscar. He was an extremely sympathetic character (shy, fat, nerdy, a writer, a dreamer), and I found myself hoping that his life was more “wondrous” than “brief”… alas, I was disappointed.

I liked “The Brief Wondrous Life” and I was interested in it while I was reading it, but it still took me a while to get through.  It just didn’t hook me like some books do, so I didn’t experience that ‘can’t put it down, have to finish it right now’ feeling. You know the one — it’s like an adrenaline rush, but for the sort of people who like armchairs and that new book smell. No? Just me? Okay.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (2006)

If you look closely, you can see the map as the border on the front cover. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You wouldn’t think a book about a cholera outbreak in 1850s London would be very interesting, but this one certainly was. The narrative describes Dr. John Snow, an anaesthesiologist and researcher, and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, the local cleric, over the course of a week as they investigate the vicious outbreak that hits their city.

Working with what they knew at the time — which, in 1854, wasn’t much — they had to pull so much information together to make any sense of the cholera outbreak: how and where waste is disposed, where residents get their water, who had died (and where and when and how it had happened), did the terrible smell in the air have anything to do with it? At that time, the prevailing thought was that cholera was an air-borne disease, and it mainly affected the poorest and dirtiest members of society. Snow and Whitehead had to do a lot of work to find out where the cholera had come from and how it worked, in order to try to save the Golden Square neighbourhood where the outbreak took place.

The level of detail is phenomenal. Johnson has assembled so many bits and pieces to create this book, and each bit is interesting on its own. Some of these 150-year-old anecdotes are worth the price of admission.

Johnson describes Snow in particular as being a “consillient” thinker — that is, he took what he knew from his research in so many different areas (including biology, sociology, psychology, pharmacology, statistics,…) and made connections between those concrete facts and abstract ideas to translate them to another field: epidemiology research.

Johnson’s brain seems to operate the same way. The art of tanning leather; the propensity among certain ethnic groups to lactose intolerance; information design and mapping; nuclear weaponry; drinking brandy: what could any of these things have to do with cholera? Not much, you’d guess, if you hadn’t read the book.