Infotainment

[Which Tyler]

Been on an infotainment* kick the last couple of years, and want to hear about your favourites here. My personal interests would generally be evolutionary, ancient history, etymology... origins.

 

My favourites so far:

Guns, Germs and Steel; by Jared Diamond - an older classic, first read a couple of decades ago.

The Story of the Human Body; by Dan Lieberman  - mapping out the evolution of the human body

Tamed; by Alice Roberts - covering how we think humanity domesticated 10 species of plant and animal

Sapiens; by Yuval Noah Harari  - IMO, a lesser version of similar material to Lieberman's book, but with broader scope and greater attempts to extrapolate (somewhat tenuously) into the current and future.

 

I'm not sure if they count, but I also really enjoyed Norse Mythology; by Neil Gaimon, and the Mythos 3; by Stephen Fry
 

What are your favourites?
Any suggestions for me ppersonally

 

 

* For the avoidance of doubt, infotainment is not just non-fiction, but actively educational whilst not being text book dry. Could almost be a primer ahead of a further education course. Most famous examples would be something like The Selfish Gene, or A Brief History of Time

[Zorral]

Do you think 'infotainment' is the best term for these works of history, which need a great deal of attention by the reader, such as The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007) by David W. Anthony, or Empires of the Word:  A Language History of the World (2005) by Nicholas Ostler?  

[Which Tyler]

On 3/12/2022 at 11:47 PM, Zorral said:

Do you think 'infotainment' is the best term for these works of history, which need a great deal of attention by the reader, such as The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007) by David W. Anthony, or Empires of the Word:  A Language History of the World (2005) by Nicholas Ostler?  

I'll tell you once I've had a chance to read.
My definition of "infotainment" would be that it's accessible to the complete layman - so that it is actually entertaining, rather than just educational - which is the job of a text book.

Purely from the reviews there, it sounds like the David Anthony book at least might be a bit too... dry/inaccessable for the classification - but I'm good with giving it a shot

 

I've put those 2 into my amazon basket though, so TY

[Argonath Diver]

I'm not nearly as voracious a reader as most here, but here are two nonfiction books that are very fun for casual reading (I had both in my little man-bathroom reading rack for the longest time).

Tasting Whiskey: An Insider's Guide to the Unique Pleasures of the World's Finest Spirit by Lew Bryson. I'm biased as I'm a career bartender who spent years working a well-regarded Scotch whiskey pub. Anyone with an interest in the finest spirit would have a blast reading this, though. Bryson does a great job blending (... snicker) informational sections with great stories and anecdotes, as befits a book about the most story-telling inducing spirit out there.

Ancient Mysteries by Peter James. This one's somewhat of a coffee table book rather than a distinct narrative. I love the subject in general, and James does a good job explaining lots and lots of silly conspiracy stuff while leaning heavily on actual archaeology and science to explain why we have so much fun talking about Atlantis and Machu Piccu. I recently popped it open and read about Phoenicians possibly sailing around Africa two millenia before the Age of Explorers in the 1400s.

I loved Gaiman's Norse Mythology. I'll have to check out a couple of your recommendations, they sound intriguing. 

[Zorral]

4 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

it sounds like the David Anthony book at least might be a bit too... dry/inaccessable for the classification

Not dry -- not dry at all.  But it is a book that takes concentration and focus, which qualities even professionals and academics are seemingly losing the capacity to exercise, myself no less than anyone else!

[Which Tyler]

2 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

I loved Gaiman's Norse Mythology. I'll have to check out a couple of your recommendations, they sound intriguing. 

If you like that, give Stephen Fry's Mythos (and, indeed "Heros") a try as well.
Love those 3, wish there was something similar with Celtic mythology and folklaw - maybe a job for our very own @Theda Baratheon?

 

  

17 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Not dry -- not dry at all.  But it is a book that takes concentration and focus, which qualities even professionals and academics are seemingly losing the capacity to exercise, myself no less than anyone else!

You can stop selling - they're both already in the basket, awaiting a spar £40 and space in my "to read" pile (without me getting distracted by a Pratchett, or a Cornwall, or a...).

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

You can stop selling - they're both already in the basket, awaiting a spar £40 and space in my "to read" pile (without me getting distracted by a Pratchett, or a Cornwall, or a...).

Not trying to sell, just attempting to make clear this isn't easy reading.  It's very clear, detailed, coherent and sourced.  But it uses the professional language (as opposed to jargon) of the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology and forensic historical linguistic studies w/o apology. There are also multiple maps, tables and so on. It's NOT a textbook though.

[Teng Ai Hui]

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I have read and liked books by Bill Bryson and Jon Ronson.

[Larry of the Lawn]

I've been rereading O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books with two companion non-fiction pieces:

Harbours and High Seas by Dean King

Men of War: Life in Nelson's Navy by O'Brian

The first one is basically a geographical guide to the books, with relevant history interspersed, the second is sort of an overview of the vessels, people, weaponry, logistics, and structure of the British Navy at the advent of the 19th century.  

It's made for a slow but informed and fun reread.  

 

It's been awhile but I really enjoyed Bryson's At Home. The Fuse Box chapter is hilarious (basically a history of artificial lighting).

[Wilbur]

My personal favorite of the Stephen Fry books is Troy: The Siege of Troy Retold.  I think it does a tremendous job of putting the story into context of the Bronze Age and Greek Myth.

I find these kinds of books irresistible, so I am looking at a couple of shelves of them right now. Some of my favorites that might fit your appetite:

James D. Hornfischer is the king of Naval Histories, particularly his American Naval Histories in the Pacific, the best of which is Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal.

M.M. Patterson Muir - The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

Colin Woodward - American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Paul Cartledge has three excellent Greek Histories - Thebes, Thermopylae, and The Spartans

David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years and alsoThe Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

William Dalrymple - The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

Richard Homes has two very catchy works - Falling Upward: How We Took to the Air and The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science

Ian Mortimer has a series of Time Traveler's Guides to... books that are neat, as are his Kings books about Edward III, Henry IV and Henry V.

William Rosen - The Most Powerful Idea in the World; A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention and Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe

Ian W. Toll - Six Frigates

John Julius Norwich - A Short History of Bizantium

Tom Standage - The History of the World in 6 Glasses, The Edible History of Humanity, and The Victorian Internet

Steven Johnson - The Ghost Map

John Keay - The Great Arc

Guadalupi and Shugaar - Latitude Zero

Dava Shobel - Longitude

Thomas Stewart - Intellectual Capital

Fred Warshofsky - The Patent Wars

Bryan Burrough and John Helyar - Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Robert X. Cringely - Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can't Get a Date

Connor Cunnen - Why the Irish Never Invaded America

Neal Stephenson - In the Beginning Was The Command Line

Michael Lewis - Liar's Poker

McLean and Elkind - The Smartest Guys in the Room

[dog-days]

Seconding Richard Holmes - he's a wonderful writer with a beautiful, absorbing style. I also enjoyed the first part of his Coleridge biography Early Visions. 

I liked Ian Mortimer's Henry IV biography - particularly the details from a list of court provisions, including galingale, the first time I'd heard that rather wonderful name for various types of ginger. (If there isn't a character named for it in a neo-Dickensian novel, there should be). But the writing itself was a bit plodding - he's probably improved since then. 

I loved Andrea Wulf's Alexander von Humboldt biography The Invention of Nature, which placed particular emphasis on Humboldt-as-proto-ecologist. Also glad I read it before seeing Die andere Heimat (Reitz, 2013) with Werner Herzog providing a short but entertaining cameo as the elderly genius. 

Esther Woolfson is brilliant, and deserves to be better known. She's an Aberdonian writer on birds, natural history and the relationship between humans and animals. She's widely read in science and the humanities, and her books contain both intelligence and feeling. Corvus (2008) focuses on her various adopted birds. I'm currently reading Between Light and Storm (2020), a collection of essays looking at different aspects of human and animal (dis)connections. It's very good, though I'm struggling to get through the chapter on vivisection. 

ETA:  Forgot to mention Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea and the Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. After I read it, it felt as if the universe had moved into a new position. It's full of enchanting but sad details - the many-hued Giant Cuttlefish that have brains and personality, but live such a short time, their skin turning grey and flaking during their second year - and also of explorations of fascinating questions - how do these animals perceive the world? Are cuttlefish even capable of perceiving the brilliant colours they assume? 

[Zorral]

19 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Seconding Richard Holmes

He is a most felicitous writer!

The book of his that still most impresses me is his biography of Shelley, The Pursuit, way back in 1974, that made his reputation.  What particularly impresses this reader is that books take one on what seems a long journey into other times and places and minds.  The reader feels away from our own life all together, which is refreshing in its own way.  This is particularly so with his Shelley and his Coleridge.  Yet! his books aren't doorstops at all.

[Rippounet]

I'd personally recommend:

- Robert Sapolsky's Behave.
- Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the forest.
- Joseph Henrich's The secret of our success.
- David Graeber and David Wengrow's Dawn of everything.

That last one being an interesting answer to Harari's Sapiens (which they obviously loathed). To be clear, I would personally be quite critical of Graeber and Wengrow's writing: their objective of going against (deconstructing) established narratives while claiming not to build a narrative of their own was always a tricky endeavor, and I feel it fails at times.
OTOH, it did lead me to reread Sapiens with a more critical approach, and I was quite astonished by the many small mistakes and manipulations in Harari's narrative. Partner and I both had had an uneasy feeling while reading Sapiens, and a reread allowed me to spot quite a few biases.

For example there's this:

Quote

Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparabale part of every human culture. In fact, they are the engines of cultural development, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species.

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It's such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name : cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and bvalues, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

A reasonable position on the face of it, but the more one thinks about this passage, the more troubling it is.
Fukuyama made a comparable assertion in The end of history. However, Fukuyama had been careful to talk of economic liberty while accusing Marxism of seeking to eliminate "natural" inequalities between humans. By contrast, Harari states that "Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off," a far more vague and sweeping statement. I'm also of the opinion that presenting cognitive dissonance as a good thing is a surprising position for a scholar.
Harari also has surprising takes on imperialism and colonialism. While he does describe how horrific they can be, he also dedicates a lot of pages to insist on their benefits. Generally speaking throughout the book, he avoids criticising power and domination, often being content to describe things in a matter-of-fact way. For instance, he points out that "culturism" is replacing "racism," but doesn't attempt to criticize it, leaving open the possibility that he personally condones it.
As an example of the troubling things in Sapiens, these two quotes say a lot, I think:

Quote

During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Unrestrained market forces, rather than tyrannical kings or racist ideologues, were responsible for this calamity.

Quote

At heart, the Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. It has demonstrated again and again that there is no limit to the amount of energy at our disposal. Or, more precisely that the only limit is set by our ignorance. Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing.

Needless to say, Harari's dismissal of climate change in Sapiens is something I find both disturbing in dangerous.
As to his positions on imperialism, colonialism, and culturism, it's hard not to see that they constitute an indirect support for Israel and Israeli policies...
The fact that he carefully avoids condemning domination and inequality explains his success. It also explains why, in spite of his wealth of knowledge, he ends up with little to offer in terms of solutions to the problems he identifies.

[Wilbur]

Grady Hillhouse has written a book about infrastructure engineering.  I enjoy his Practical Engineering channel very much, so if you have an interest in the underpinnings of modern Western urban and suburban society (and I mean underpinnings in the most literal sense), check this out.

Book — Practical Engineering

 

[Iskaral Pust]

I need to bookmark this thread.

[Which Tyler]

@Rippounet

Thank you for that - it summarises some of the problems I had with Sapiens - but puts it much better than I ever could have, and a more informed critique than mine would have been.

I still liked it well enough, but felt there were some pretty big leaps and assumptions in there; and the odd contradiction of what I thought I knew from reading other books on the same subject (mostly human evolution).

 

Incidentally, I have another of Christopher Boehm's books in my amazon list to buy at some point; so I'll certainly add that one, and the Henrich.
Have you tried the Liebermann one I'd suggested above?

On which, there's another Alice Roberts book I'd recommend in here - I did her book on domestication in the OP, but her "Incredible Human Journey" is also excellent, charting the evolution and spread of Homo Sapiens - though it's more a companion book to the (excellent) TV series, than a stand-alone; and is also a bit dated now as archaeology and DNA analysis progresses.

[IFR]

I quite like these types of books, and there are many to recommend.

Of the books I've read in the last couple of years, here are a few of my favorites, which haven't yet been mentioned:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. My favorite book of any genre.

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, also by Rhodes.

Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation by Timothy J Jorgensen.

The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Sadam's Nuclear Mastermind by Mahdi Obeidi.

Plentiful Energy: The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor by Charles Till and Yoon Il Chang.

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters by James Mahaffy. His book Atomic Adventures is also good.

Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy by Trita Parsi.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherman.

The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of Modern Physics by Bottina Hoerlin and Gino Claudio Serge.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser.

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham.

SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future by Richard Martin. Although it's not a full recommendation, since there are errors in this work.

For non-nuclear science reading:

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester.

The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler by Thomas Hager.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben Rich and Leo Janos.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel.

Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais.

Never at Rest by Richard S. Westfall.

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics by Basil Mahon and Nancy Forbes.

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean.

Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman. All of his work is great.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin.

[Conflicting Thought]

On 3/12/2022 at 7:28 PM, Which Tyler said:

Guns, Germs and Steel; by Jared Diamond - an older classic, first read a couple of decades ago.

i read that this book has been heavily criticized for being incorrect on many thing. an exapmple  from Wikipedia; "Kathleen Lowrey argued that Guns, Germs, and Steel "lets the West off the hook" and "poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody's fault. This is a wicked cop-out. [...] It basically says [non-Western cultures/societies] are sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn't/can't help it."

[Zorral]

It has indeed been criticized and challenged on these and even scientific grounds.

[Conflicting Thought]

On 3/24/2022 at 11:00 PM, Rippounet said:

OTOH, it did lead me to reread Sapiens with a more critical approach, and I was quite astonished by the many small mistakes and manipulations in Harari's narrative. Partner and I both had had an uneasy feeling while reading Sapiens, and a reread allowed me to spot quite a few biases.

sorry for the double post. i guess this is the problem with infotainment, so many people read that book without questioning it, and take it as fact, allot of liberal people love it.