My review of The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge ran today at PopMatters.

This thick book covers the full two-hundred plus year span of the crusades, and while its comprehensiveness is admirable, it’s lacking in some respects. There’s lots of descriptive, expository writing on the battles, figures, and issues that drove these conflicts, but not a lot of the kind of colorful, imaginative prose that can truly bring a subject to life. That’s one of the drawbacks of writing such an all-inclusive book. There are so many details to cram in, it’s not easy to linger a bit and conjure up a rich, immersive atmosphere. The one exception is Asbridge’s treatment of Saladin, a significant enough figure to warrant an in-depth, quasi-biographical treatment. That said, as long as you know what you’re in for, The Crusades is a great way to become acquainted with what is a very complex history, where religion, politics, and culture inform the motivations of those involved in ways that contemporary readers may find surprising.

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The paperback edition of Christopher Potter’s You Are Here is in stores now and if you flip to the second or third page of the book, you’ll find a short blurb taken from my review of the book at PopMatters. I really enjoyed this book; it’s a masterful exploration of the universe that manages to explain extraordinarily complicated concepts, both scientific and philosophical, in a way that makes sense. It’s nice to have my commentary on the book excerpted for the new edition, and I’m in some good company, with reviewers from The Guardian, NPR, New York Magazine, and The Boston Globe represented. If you’re at all interested in the origins of the universe, the inner workings of quantum mechanics, or the evolution of human philosophy into the modern scientific method, I strongly suggest you pick up You Are Here, it’s remarkably slim but packs in quite a bit of information.

My review of The Friends of Eddie Coyle ran today at PopMatters.

As a guy who tends to love elaborate sentences and the aimless meandering of literary fiction, the plot-heavy minimalism of crime and genre fiction can be a little irritating at times. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is incredibly spartan, driven almost entirely by dialogue, but with a tough verisimilitude that has earned it a reputation as the definitive Boston crime novel since its publication 40 years ago. And it’s definitely good, but Higgins is determined to dispel the glamorous aura and sensationalism that often shrouds crime in fiction and does so with extreme force and efficacy. The criminals, cops, and everyone in between come off like dreadful dead-enders, struggling to survive in a system that helps no one and solves nothing. It’s a short book, and very focused, never wandering into tangents or losing sight of its goal. Very compelling, occasionally frustrating, and definitely disheartening, The Friends of Eddie Coyle makes no effort to make readers feel comfortable or uplifted. It doesn’t show the criminal underworld as full of adventure and intrigue, but rather as it truly is, the last refuge of the disturbed and damaged.

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My review of Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs and the Rise of Modern Mathematics ran today at Forbes.com.

This was a book that made me wish I had learned more about mathematics, or at least been taught it better. Alexander does an excellent job of making this often challenging field engrossing, telling the story of math’s evolution from a grounded, mechanical science to a pure, theoretical artform at the turn of the 19th century. He makes a compelling philosophical argument about this transformation, with the mathematicians of the late 18th century cleaving to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the new young upstarts of the early 19th century embodying the spirit of Romanticism more commonly associated with artists and poets. Alexander revels in both discussing the myth of the legendary Evariste Galois and in tearing it down, but even though the book is titled for the tragic it’s the story of Janos Bolyai and his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry that I found most compelling.

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My review of American Lives: A Reader, an anthology of short stories excerpted from a series of memoirs, ran today at PopMatters.

By and large, this collection was very spotty, full of the kind of self-indulgent, melodramatic material that you’ll often find in memoirs. Murder, kidnapping, suicide, alcoholism, terminal illness, all rendered in tedious, eye-rolling prose. There were, however, a few strong exceptions. Brenda Serotte’s “Fortuna” from her book The Fortune Teller’s Kiss was so excellent I didn’t want it to end. In it, she tells the story of her grandmother Nona, an Old World fortune teller making a living in her ethnically diverse mid-century Lower East Side neighborhood. Serotte expertly defines this unique character and pieces together her compelling narrative from shards of memory and stories from her parents. Eli Hastings’ “Good, Alright, Fine” from Falling Room is another highlight, managing to discuss addiction and familial obligations with good humor and a wry sense of the story’s inherent absurdity. Hastings avoids the easy path of self-pity and overwhelming grimness that many of the other entries in this book fall into and emerges with a touching, humorous story about serious matters.

My review of Cartographies of Time by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton ran today at PopMatters.

This big book is a look back at the development of visual representations of time and history, filled with vivid, impressive illustrations and an enlightening narrative pulling it all together. In some ways it bears a resemblance to The Fourth Part of the World in that it depicts the evolution of a form of charting and navigating time and space. It also has a slight connection to The Invention of Air, as it deals with the very versatile Joseph Priestley, exploring his pivotal role in setting a graphical standard for timelines that endured for many years.

The book also introduced me to Sebastian Adams’ A Chronological Chart of Ancient, Modern, and Biblical History, a sprawling, 40-foot long banner that seemingly includes every last drop of history as conceived by the people of the 19th century. It’s truly amazing, although Cartographies of Time strains to show it properly as it is so large. It’s difficult to make out some of the finer details. I must have this for my wall.

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My Review of The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester ran today at PopMatters.

Though the subtitle says this book is about the map that gave America its name, it’s about much more than that. Lester uses that map (really, the entire history of cartography up to the creation of the 1507 Waldseemuller Map) to tell the story of the Age of Exploration and all it entails. It’s an excellent book. I always love reading about a time when there were still undiscovered countries and unknown lands on the Earth, and Lester helps the reader see the world as it was in those times, vague, hazy, and fantastical.

He also manages to show that a lot of what we think we know about what they knew about their world is wrong.

Christopher Columbus is often depicted as a forward-thinking explorer who maintained that the world was round despite the scorn of the European establishment, who believed it was flat. Nothing could be further from the truth. That the Earth was spherical was widely accepted in Columbus’ time, and had been relatively common knowledge since antiquity. Columbus did, however, endure the scorn of his contemporaries, because his calculations about the size of the world, and by extension, his projections on how long it would take to reach India traveling westward, were way off base. And everybody knew it but him.

Enough Columbus bashing. The Fourth Part of the World covers a lot of ground. It’s a story of adventures in both the old and new worlds, of politics, of the rise of humanism and rational thought and its effect on innovation. And it’s a story about maps and how they both portray and shape the world as we know it.

My review of The Complete Stories of Lydia Davis ran today at PopMatters.

I had been introduced to Lydia Davis’ writing in a college writer’s workshop and her writing piqued my interest. For whatever reason, though, instead of tracking down more of her short fiction, I went straight for her only novel, The End of the Story. It’s likely I assumed that short stories were really just a midpoint in a writer’s evolution, which invariably culminated in a novel.

Lydia Davis is not a novelist, however, she’s a short story writer. I appreciated The End of the Story. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but I didn’t hate it either. The point-of-view, within the mind of a neurotic, obsessive woman fixated on a romantic entanglement, felt stifling and claustrophobic. I felt the same anxiety in the opening piece of this collection, “Story,” which I’m pretty certain served as the seed for that novel. Thankfully, those feelings were short lived; the rest of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was entertaining and enlightening.

I’d strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in a massive book full of brief stories, essays, and prose poems that manage to be engaging without overstaying their welcome. Davis has a relatively dry voice and style but somehow coaxes a significant amount of emotion from those matter-of-fact lines. It’s a great book to pick up on a whim, flip to random page in, and spend a few short minutes getting acquainted with one of Davis’ many well-crafted characters.

Buy The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis at Amazon.com

My review of The Roman Forum by David Watkin ran today at PopMatters.

This book is a nice contrast to another offering from Harvard University Press that I reviewed back in May, Paris From The Ground Up. That book attempted to tell the complete story of the history of Paris, but was full of half-started threads and distracting tangents. It took on too much and diluted its power. The Roman Forum narrows its scope and succeeds in bringing this rich, historical location to life.

It also introduces an intriguing conflict that many readers might not have thought of, a conflict between art, architecture, and archaeology that is evident in the controversial excavations, restorations, and preservation attempts in the Forum. Watkin deftly explores this conflict, though he’s not unbiased. He explicitly decries the damage archaeology has done to the Forum’s true historical and artistic character, however well-meaning those efforts were. This slim, attractive book is a very entertaining and enlightening read, well written and impressively researched.

Buy The Romun Forum by David Watkin at Amazon.com

My review of Boston Noir ran today at PopMatters.

The book is a collection of short stories from area authors all roughly in the crime/noir genre. My reaction is mixed, understandably. Some of the stories, like Dana Cameron’s “Femme Sole” or Brendan DuBois’ “The Dark Island” were excellent. Others, like Lynne Heitman’s “Exit Interview” were disappointing: a sterile plot allegedly set in the Financial District, but with very little local color to be seen.

What really interested me, however, was editor Dennis Lehane’s introduction. Lehane and I are both from Dorchester, and we both attended Boston College High School (Classes of ’83 and ’01, respectively. He graduated the year I was born.) so our backgrounds are roughly similar, though I came of age in a much safer, much more sedate city than he did.

In his introduction, Lehane laments the increasing beigeness of Boston, the loss of local color and character that has accompanied the city’s upward progress. I understand the sentiment, and sympathize to some degree. Still, I find it hard to be nostalgic for a time that, while interesting, was also riven by racial strife, awash in poverty, and plagued by crime. Boston is a cleaner, safer city with more potential. It’s not perfect, and many neighborhoods still struggle with the aforementioned issues, but whatever problems one might have with a BU-tified Kenmore Square or a South End with million-dollar mortgages, the past should not be romanticized. The full picture of what contributed to the city’s old character must be remembered.

When I was young, Causeway Street was shrouded in darkness by the elevated Green Line tracks. The train tracks cloaked the street below, and it was a very dismal environment outside the Boston Garden. The tracks are gone now, and the sky has returned. It’s beautiful and liberating, but yes, sometimes I find myself nostalgic for those dark, claustrophobic times. I know I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do, because in my memory, it’s fascinating and mysterious, with a hint of danger. Were they to put those tracks back up, however, I’m sure the truth of the situation, the dank, oppressive reality, would come rushing back and remind me why it’s better that we’ve moved on from those days.

Causeway Street, Boston. Image Credit: MIT

My review of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece ran today at PopMatters.

This is a book intended for those who have already read Ulysses, as it relies on a relative familiarity with the plot and events. So beginners may not find Ulysses and Us very welcoming. Nevertheless, it’s an excellent exploration of the novel and of Joyce’s original intentions: that his epic of the common man be enjoyed by all, not just by stuffy intellectuals. Kiberd argues that the focus on hidden clues and trivia have obscured the richness of the story and intimidated the average reader from taking up what is, admittedly, a very difficult book. He wants to make Ulysses comprehensible, and combat the difficult reputation it has gained over the years. He wishes to make Ulysses approachable.

What struck me about Kiberd’s walkthrough of the novel is how he divides the chapters. Those who have studied Ulysses will be aware that Joyce associated each chapter with an idea from The Odyssey which roughly corresponded to the action, such as “Penelope” or “Oxen of the Sun.” These chapter titles were not part of the original text but rather included in private correspondence subsequent to publication. Joyce had removed them from the novel, but the academy quickly latched onto them as a means of structuring the story. This had the unfortunate side-effect of entrapping Ulysses within the framework of a classical epic, exactly what Joyce had feared when he decided to eliminate the titles.

Kiberd’s approach is much more appropriate. He titles each chapter based on the primary action that takes place — “Eating,” “Walking,” “Ogling” — which brings the story out of the realm of epic heroes and back down to earth, where Leo Bloom, and the rest of us, dwell. It frees the reader from the lofty, pretentious preconceptions that come along with the Odyssey-inspired titles and allows you to really consider what’s happening in the book on its own terms.