Andrew Robinson (1) (1957–)

I've lived in a couple of countries (Mexico, New Zealand) where earthquakes were a regular, if frightening feature of life. And also spent a lot of time in Japan. I recall, once in Japan, the house was shaken by a sizable earthquake which lasted maybe 5 seconds (though one's sense of time in an event like this gets distorted). Immediately, sirens were going off and loudspeakers warning about earthquake and giving out information. (not sure exactly what because I don't speak much Japanese). show more But what really impressed me was that within a few minutes...maybe 10? there were experts on TV explaining what had happened and that this was not "the big one". Well that was reassuring but what was not reassuring was the diagram of what we could expect when the "big one" released itself like a giant rat-trap with a under-plate springing to the surface. It did not look good to me. And, worse still, the fault was not that far away and I estimated that there would be a massive tsunami that could reach 5km inland where our house stood. And I'm still very nervous when we go to the famous Senbon (thousand pine trees) beach to watch the sunset.....because that's where the tsunami will hit first. And yes there are high walls ....maybe 15 m high to prevent the tsunami sweeping inland but I don't think they will be big enough to protect against the "big one".
So Andrew Robinson's book is not at all re-assuring about earthquakes. In fact, it's pretty much a collection of stories about historical big earthquakes.
A couple of things stood out for me from Robinson's account and that is that the science of predicting earthquakes is getting better but is totally unreliable still; Earthquakes are usually accompanied by collateral damage such as from fire or from Tsunami or from both; And people have tended to rebuild in the same spot and go on living. There is a collective amnesia.
In fact, in San Francisco there were massive and deliberate measures taken to downplay the significance of the 1906 earthquake. Interestingly, buildings were insured against fire but earthquake damage was excluded so there was an incentive to claim fire damage rather than quake damage...and people even set fire to their quake damaged buildings. The city fathers and railroad companies were keen to downplay the significance of the earthquake because of the impact on property prices and so the real impact of the earthquake was massively understated.
I recall my father-in-law taking me to see some of the impact from a 1930 earthquake along the Tanna fault near Mishima, in Japan. A footpath had been ripped sideways by about 1.5 m.so that the actual rip in the earth at this site was very visible. And in 1972, I was sent as the Australian envoy from the Embassy in Mexico, into the ruined city of Managua in Nicaragua after a massive earthquake there on 23rd December 1972. I recall looking across the levelled city and seeing just a few reinforced concrete buildings still standing. Most of the family dwellings made from "wattle and daub" walls but with tile roofs had collapsed with the heavy roof beams and tiles causing many deaths. Some 75% of the population were made homeless. Also, indelibly in my mind, is a three story school that had just collapsed floor upon floor like a house of cards. (Fortunately, the kids were home ...though that did not spare many of them). One has to question the building codes which led to this result whilst other better constructed buildings were damaged but still standing.
In fact, recurring theme throughout the book is the failure of building codes to be enforced and corruption allowing construction on re-claimed ground (which liquified when shaken).
I remember reading about the famous American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, being ecstatic that his Grand Hotel in Tokyo had survived the September 1923 earthquake in Tokyo /Yokohama. (In fact, it was apparently so badly damaged that it had to be demolished...though the flat topped pillars had apparently done their job). It seemed that fire across Tokyo and Yokohama was the major cause of damage following the earthquake.
A recurring theme throughout the book (I guess the author's main point) is that earthquakes have lasting political impact. In Japan, he suggests that it led to increasing militarism in the country and the eventual impact on WWII. In San Francisco after 1906, the city re-bounded but with all its earlier faults. In India, in Gujarat 2001, the earthquake led to the rise of Modi as the chief minister. Post earthquake there was a flurry of infrastructure and industrial building for which Modi took credit....though there seems to be evidence that rates of growth were similar elsewhere in India. Nevertheless Modi got the reputation as a "fixer" leading to his election as PM of India. Often, it seems, minority groups have been blamed for earthquakes and murdered (Koreans in Tokyo in 1923). One leader seems to emerge from the pack as a significant "fixer" and this is Pombal...de facto Prime Minister in Portugal. After the Lisbon great earthquake in 1755, Pombal is reported to have given the blunt instructions: "Feed the living and bury the dead" and then got on with redesigning and re-building the city and surrounds. It is interesting that the clergy....immensely powerful in Portugal were greatly weakened politically.
Quite an interesting book. He makes his case reasonably well though the format (one earthquake after another) is a bit predictable and I would have appreciated some more informative diagrams, maps, photographs etc. I've given it 4 stars. show less

Previous to reading The Scientists, I read Simon Flynn's excellent The Science Magpie: A Hoard of Fascinating Facts, Stories, Poems, Diagrams and Jokes, Plucked from Science and Its History, and because he had mentioned in it so many eminent scientists that I'd never heard of, I decided to follow it up by reading a selection of essays about forty-three of the world's most famous scientists that is contained within this substantial volume. This is a gloriously produced hardcover edition with show more a multitude of fantastic reproductions of portraits, photographs, maps, documents and diagrams from the period that help to make the scientists and their individual achievements more accessible to the reader. These essays are written by different authors, each an expert in their field and an established scientist, and the enthusiasm and admiration for their subject comes easily across. For some it was more difficult than others to bring the person behind the scientific accomplishments to life; in several cases I found that the individual was entirely hidden behind an enumeration of their various attainments. Others were clearly written by experts in the field for other experts, so that I, as an interested layperson, struggled to follow. Yet others, among them Patrick Moore's article about Edwin Powell Hubble, were an enormous pleasure to read, because they managed to get across the person and the science in for a non-expert easy-to-understand language. Some reviewers have called this volume a "coffee-table book", rather unjustly, I find. These are scientists that, in the words of Virginia Morell, "shattered old ideas and ways of thinking"; they dispensed with dogma and opened the way for a scientific understanding of the world that, in large parts, is still valid to this day and was used by subsequent pioneers to build their ideas on in turn. Their names should be, if not household names, then at least much better known. I chose to read this book from cover to cover, other readers will probably decide to only read about the section they're interested in: Universe, Earth, Molecules and Matter, Inside the Atom, and Body and Mind; each part is preceded by a brief introduction, and there's an extensive bibliography added at the end. Of course this is a rather subjective selection, and others may (and will) disagree with the choice of scientists chosen and those who were omitted (I, for one, had hoped to see a few more women chosen (there are only three)), but this is an excellent introduction to some of the brightest minds history has ever produced and a fascinating foray into how we came to see the world today: built on a succession of discoveries and ideas. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the science and its history.

(This review was originally written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.) show less

Review of: The Indus: Lost Civilizations, by Andrew Robinson
by Stan Prager (6-23-17)

In the late fifth century BCE, one Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician at the Persian court, wrote passages that described the Indus River and its environs in the distant land of Sindh, and spoke of local exotica, including unicorns. Even then there was no memory of the great ancient civilization that once flourished there and then fell, a millennium and a half before. Another millennium and a half was to show more pass before British railway builders stumbled upon the startling remains of what is today called the Harappan, or more commonly, the Indus Valley Civilization, which once straddled the now sometimes contentious border region of southern Pakistan and northwestern India. Among the artifacts eventually uncovered were ancient Indus seals–contemporary with Sumer and Old Kingdom Egypt–inscribed with a script that yet remains undeciphered, and decorated with images of unicorns!
The hearts of ancient history aficionados tend to beat a little faster when the Indus Valley Civilization comes up in conversation. One of three great ancient civilizations of the Old World, along with Egypt and the Mesopotamian city states, it almost certainly hosted the largest population–perhaps as many as five million–and was the most geographically widespread. Yet, it is the least known and thus the most fascinating and enigmatic of the three.
It is this that makes the publication of The Indus, by Andrew Robinson–the first entry in a new series entitled Lost Civilizations–such a welcome addition to the scholarship. In a remarkable achievement, Robinson–a polymath who is at once journalist, scholar, and prolific author–has written an outstanding digest-sized volume that brilliantly summarizes nearly everything that we know about Indus and what remains unknown or in dispute. Moreover, he does so in an engaging narrative style replete with fact, analysis and interpretation suitable to both the scholarly and popular audience.
In 1856, British engineers laying the East Indian Railway Company line in the Punjab pilfered tons of bricks for ballast from forgotten ruins along the way, including Harappa, which unknown to them was once a great urban center inhabited from 3500-1300 BCE, and one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Some years later, amateur excavations turned up the first unicorn seal, but its significance was overlooked. Serious archaeology began in the 1920s, and coincided with the discovery of another large city, Mohenjo-daro, in Sindh. The following decades revealed that the Indus Valley Civilization encompassed a vast region represented by well over a thousand cities and settlements (uncovered thus far), extending over at least at least 800,000 square kilometers (more than 300,000 square miles), with a population in the millions.
This astonishing civilization, at its height 2600-1900 BCE, was built upon thriving river basin communities centered upon wheat and barley cultivation (and later, rice) along the Indus River, as well as another ancient river that long ago went dry and vanished, that some–including Robinson—identify with the legendary Saraswati and its descendant, the Ghaggar-Hakra river system, which now flows only with the monsoon. It is clear from Indus seals (which depicted real as well as fanciful creatures!) that they domesticated animals, including the humped zebu cattle and the water buffalo. Arts and crafts were highly developed, as was metallurgy. In addition to a writing system, they created a uniform system of weights and measures. Extensive trade networks by land and sea carried raw materials and finished objects to places as far as away as Mesopotamia, where no less a historical figure than Sargon of Akkad circa 2300 BCE boasted of ships from “Meluhha,” as the Indus was known to him, docking at his capital. Trade may also have extended to Egypt and Minion Crete. Their cities were architecturally stylized masterpieces of engineering, evidenced careful street planning, and remarkably sophisticated water drainage and sewage systems–including the world’s first toilets–that could only have been possible in a highly organized and carefully managed society. Yet, there appears to be no indication of armies or warfare. Indus Valley Civilization flourished for centuries before entering a period of slow decline most likely due to environmental factors, around 1900BCE—several hundred years prior to the time Ramses II ruled Egypt—and eventually disappeared entirely, although tantalizing traces of its cultural imprint can be detected even today.
What can we make of Indus, which truly is a “lost” civilization? As Robinson describes it, the challenges of archeology and interpretation have been and remain substantial. Stripping ruins for railway construction was only the first of many insults to the legacy of Indus. Early excavations were sloppy, in the days before strict archaeological methodology was standardized. With scant evidence, conclusions were reached and loudly trumpeted of a warlike people given to “militaristic imperialism” led by a “ruthless authoritarian regime,” who finally only succumbed to Indo-Aryan invaders—none of which stands up to scrutiny. The material culture has yet to reveal any traces of war, or even soldiers. And while Indo-Aryan migrations into the region did in fact occur, these were not coterminous with Indus decline. At the other extreme, Hindu nationalists—who vehemently reject the scholarly consensus that Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-European language family rooted in those later Indo-Aryan migrations—have on entirely spurious grounds attempted to hijack Indus as the autochthonous ancestor of Hinduism and Indian national identity. These politically powerful forces have even created from whole-cloth a faux decipherment of the Indus script, to serve their propaganda objectives, which is utterly baseless. Archaeological efforts have been compromised over the years by a variety of factors, most prominently the 1947 partition that created Pakistan and India as separate and often hostile nation states—and effectively drew an international boundary line through Indus sites in a volatile region that makes excavation both difficult and dangerous. Moreover, environmental dynamics in flooding and high water table salinity threaten existing sites and complicate future excavation. In fact, about ninety percent of Indus sites remain unexcavated, including Ganweriwala, a huge urban center that ranks in size with Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro! Finally, the stubborn resistance of the Indus script to decipherment despite decades of intensive efforts offers little hope that the many mysteries of the Indus Valley Civilization will be resolved anytime soon.
It is a testament to the genius of the author that he was able to take so much material and condense it down to such a small volume without compromising the quality of the work. Concisely but carefully, in chapters that examine architecture, trade, society and the like, he discusses what is known and deconstructs competing arguments of interpretation. And while he refutes the specious attempts of Hindu nationalists to connect the dots from ancient Indus to modern India, Robinson makes a strong case for continuity in conspicuous traces of Indus Valley Civilization that seem to have indeed left an indelible footprint on the South Asian landscape. There are elements of religious symbolism that echo in Hinduism, including ritual purification, as well as the unique system of weights and measures that still survives in markets in India and Pakistan today. One of the book’s many delightful photographs shows Harappan terracotta votive objects depicting zebus and a wheeled cart, juxtaposed with a facing page contemporary photo of a similar bullock cart in use in the Indus valley, some four thousand years later. Robinson includes much discussion of the Indus writing system and the lost language it recorded, as well as its possible link to the Dravidian family of languages prevalent in southern India today.
Robinson’s little book is an excellent introduction to an extraordinary civilization that has been all but lost to time. Skillfully organized and well-written, this fine work also contains a wealth of illustrations, photographs, maps, and a timeline, adding to its accessibility for the general audience, while the meticulous notes underscore its reliability for a more scholarly one. A glance at some of the human faces staring back at us from Indus art provokes chills of a sort for the modern reader, evoking snippets of Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias and reflecting that long before Caesar, or Pericles, or even Tutankhamen, in the days when Khufu’s mummy was interred at Giza, there was a magnificent civilization in South Asia that then disappeared from human memory for thousands of years. And we are still trying to rediscover it.

This review appears on my book blog, with a map and picture of the unicorn seal, here: https://regarp.com/2017/06/23/review-of-the-indus-lost-civilizations-by-andrew-r... show less

This book, printed in China for the Oxford University Press, is not the first in English or in translation from French, about this extraordinary man, Jean-Francois Champollion. It is printed on a thick, heavy, high quality paper that, I would imagine, will make it difficult for you to give away after reading. (272 pages including color plates weighing 1.95 pounds.)

The author's beat or wheelhouse, so to speak, is codebreaking and the polymaths who accomplish it, or, perhaps, accomplished it show more before the advent of computers. He takes a very biographical approach and on pages 127-128 explains that a lack of documentation makes it impossible to know step by step how Champillion actually unlocked the meaning of the hieroglyphic section of the Rosetta Stone.

Champillion was mercurial and often tactless, never good qualities and certainly not in unsettled post-Napoleonic France. Although Champillion knew from an early age, thanks to his bookseller father and autodidact older brother, that Egyptology would be his chosen career, he got a late start on the Rosetta Stone.

But by then an English polymath, Thomas Young, had discovered the key to understanding hieroglyphics. A cursory glance at hieroglyphics will intuitively tell you these little drawings are symbols, representative of meaning or words. This was a misconception from the beginning of the study of ancient Egyptian writing in the late 1600s.

Imagine if instead of writing an "a" you drew an apple, instead of a "b" a teddy bear, and on through the alphabet to a xylophone for a "z." It doesn't sound too plausible, does it? And yet that was Young's discovery, that hieroglyphics was largely a phonetic alphabet.

As the author Andrew Robinson explains, it is highly unlikely that Champollion made this discovery independently of Young. And yet to Champollion's discredit that is what he insisted. Young was very gracious about it. He was a true polymath who spread himself thin discovering the interference of light and astigmatism among other things. Champollion had settled down at this point in his life and was able to take Young's nascent discovery and run with it to completion. Later they made up so the story ends happily in this regard.

One issue I had was that late in the book on page 149 and late in Champollion's career, he made the observation that the Rosetta Stone contained 486 Greek words and 1,419 hieroglyphs and came to the logical conclusion that hieroglyphs must be letters not words. That strikes me as rather slow thinking for a polymath.

On page 244 is mentioned the discovery in 1866 of a second Rosetta-like stone which was quickly translated with Champollion's decipherment glossary thereby validating his work beyond doubt. show less