Lydia Pyne

How do we decide what’s real? Sometimes it’s about full disclosure of the conditions of production, as when museums make blue whale models and reconstruct parts—even significant parts—of the animal for display. Other times that’s not quite enough, as when a present-day artist uses Warhol’s acetates to create a new set of prints from the negatives by employing the same methods (inks, stretcher bars, canvas, etc.) that Warhol used to create his “originals.” The artist called show more the project a ‘forced collaboration’ and pointed out that Warhol himself said “ I want other people to make my paintings.” Meanwhile, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the representatives of Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Jackson Pollock have all dissolved their authentication boards to minimize hassle and legal risk, “rather than deal with the legal repercussions of mistakenly authenticating some work of art that later proves to be fraudulent,” and “scholarly conferences that focus on the authenticity of an artist’ s work have been cancelled, as even the merest whisper of doubt about a painting could have ramifications for its value.” In this vein, the book explores various types of historical authenticity, not just in paintings but in “fossils,” synthetic diamonds, synthetic flavors, nature films, blue whale models, and replicas of ancient art where the art itself is too physically sensitive to be exposed to tourists.

Although the book argues that some forgeries gain value with time as artifacts of their own time of production—the Spanish Forger is the prime example—that didn’t particularly convince me; the value seemed to come from being sufficiently old to tell us something about the artistic preferences of the people around at the time of creation, which is fine but not super tightly connected to the fact of being a forgery (except insofar as that fake provenance led people to notice and preserve that particular work). More convincingly to me, the book tracks shifting ideas around synthetic diamonds, which are both physically like natural diamonds and highly unlike them in conditions of production, which initially made synthetic diamonds less appealing but may now make them more so to people worried about conflict diamonds. (Although the book characterizes synthetic diamonds as physically “identical” to mined diamonds, it also says that De Beers developed technologies that could often distinguish them by looking for “an optical absorption line, found in the majority of natural diamonds but not in laboratory ones.” I would have liked more about that—first, is it a distinction without a difference? Second, that “majority” is really interesting in context: should we think of those natural diamonds without absorption lines as less “real”?)

I wasn’t as clear about the point of the chapter on synthetic flavors. You may have seen the tidbit that artificial banana flavor tastes so distinct from today’s bananas because it was based on the extinct Gros Michel banana, but there’s been a lot of effort to create synthetic flavors that would qualify as “better” than the original—super-strawberry and the like. But the book doesn’t explain much about what “better” would mean here, and the supposed reversal of valuation doesn’t seem complete without an attempt to create flavors that don’t actually have a natural referent. We haven’t seen much in the way of attempts to create “unicorn flavor,” for example, even if Jelly Belly experiments with gross flavors. Another useful factoid: telling people they were eating free-range, organic meats made the meat taste better, though they mostly can’t differentiate in blind taste tests; likewise, “oysters taste better with the sound of the seashore playing in the background.”

Because I’m interested in visual realism, I liked the chapter about how what counts as a “realistic” nature documentary has changed over time, in terms of the amount of human intervention into creating and narrating the story. Apparently, “certain kinds of artifice are necessary to create an ethical wildlife documentary,” such as splicing in footage of tame or captive animals to illustrate an otherwise unseeable part of an animal’s story. It makes sense that it’s not a great idea to get too close to wild bears, or to habituate them to humans. The blue whale chapter was similar: whale skin and bones are uniquely hard to preserve, so if you want a whale or whale skeleton that looks like the real thing (and doesn’t smell nauseating), you can’t have it made entirely or even substantially of real whales. The question then becomes what is an “authentic” model, and museum location (as opposed to sideshow appearance) as well as at least some disclosure of what happened seems to be the key here. “As whale curators and showmen have found, there’ s only so much authenticity about whales that audiences are willing to tolerate–no leaking, dripping or smelling–even if those things are just as ‘real’ as the other parts of an exhibit.”

Similarly, caves with ancient human paintings deteriorate if exposed to many humans, as discovered with Lascaux, so replicas are the only way that the art can be both visible and preserved for the future. As with the synthetic diamonds and nature documentaries, there’s a specifically ethical appeal to the artifice: using the replica keeps the original in existence. show less

4.5 I forget how I stumbled upon this clever miniseries of books from Bloomsbury Press called ObjectLessons, but I'm glad I did. It is like the Tedtalk of nouns in book form. Titles include: Glass, Tree, Hotel, Bread, Silence and many intriguing more. This particular edition is about bookshelves and examines their cultural significance, their history, some of their unique features and unknown trivia. Subcategories within this include a medieval chained library (Hereford, England), the Donkey show more Mobile Library in Ethiopia, the Franklin naval expedition to the Arctic in 1845 whose ships were outfitted with a total of 2,900 books for the use of the voyage, futuristic depictions of bookshelves (anachronistic) and the symbiotic relationship of NY Public Library's architecture and its iron shelving. One key lesson throughout is that form follows function. "Since form and function of a text determines how and where it is curated, every text is store on its shelf and encountered and read in ways that are consistent with its respective technology, history, and cultural symbolism. Text and shelf shape each other." (5) and "Social expectations and cultural needs shape how bookshelves move from place to place or how books move from shelf to shelf...bookshelves exist as a series of relationships." and "Bookshelves act as the mediating object between a person and a book...." (52) and "The bookshelf leads a life of a curious cultural sign; it is a physical, tangible thing -- a combination of technology and craft -- as well as a symbol of one's worldview." (68) The the knowledge is a little esoteric, the well-written reflection, research and philosophical premise makes this a delight. Two parting quotes that anchor the beginning: "A room without books is a body without a soul" (Cicero) and the ending: "Books speak of other books and every story tells a story that has already been told." (Umberto Eco) show less

I read nonfiction to expand my view of the world. I read about things I'm interested in, and I read about things I know nothing about so that I can find new things to become interested in. When I read nonfiction, I implicitly trust in the author. I have to. I trust that the author has done a lot of research and has some level of expertise in their work. I trust that editors have looked over the work and combed through for errors. However I also understand that some things are always going to show more have some hanging chads that make it through the publication process.

While this book was interesting and informative, I found too many hanging chads for my like. The irony being that this book's credibility started to falter in my eyes.

In my grad student life, I spent many many hours in clean rooms, so I am familiar with a lot of technology such as CVD, and I worked extensively with silicon both doing some CMOS processing but later a lot of e-beam lithography on quartz substrates. So let me say that it was jarring for me to read the author refer to silicon dioxide (glass) as "silicone", which is actually a polymer that, while related to silicon and SiO2, is nowhere near actually the same thing. But that's an issue that many non-scientific people struggle with so I was willing to let it go.

Then I got to the section about the Mayan Codices. I was fascinated! I wanted to see pictures. I looked at the glossy section inside the book and saw a photo labeled that it was of the Grolier Codex, so I decided to do more searching online. I looked at the Wikipedia page for the Maya codices and saw that same exact picture -- labeled as the Madrid Codex. Doing a lot more searching led me to a stock photo website showing the Madrid Codex incorrectly labeled as the Grolier Codex.

How could the author take that stock photo and include it in a book without doing more research? Without asking why a photo about a codex that's worn down with water damage shows a codex with no water damage? Why didn't the author just look at Wikipedia, the low-hanging fruit of fact-checking?

OK, so I'm disappointed. There were typos and logical inconsistencies. (The author mentioned a cave that was discovered in 1985, after a cave that was discovered in 1991 (!?) - when they meant to say that the cave was only made public after a cave that was discovered in 1991.) Quotes that never closed out. Too many hanging chads that pile on and make this book go through a heavier filter as I continue to read.

As a collection of essays, this book is interesting. Thought-provoking even. But as a nonfiction book leading to educate, I would have hoped for a lot more research and editing than what I was presented with. show less

When I was eight, I was going to be a paleontologist...I had a book on dinosaurs. When I was nine, I was going to be an anthropologist (I got a new book...), so despite 46 years since, I'm primed to like this book, which I got an early look at via First to Read.

I have more than a passing familiarity with six of the seven - Old Man of La Chapelle (Neanderthal), Piltdown, Taung Child (Australopithicus africanus), Peking, Lucy - of course, and Flo the "Hobbit" (Homo floresiensis). I've devoted show more reading the past five to eight years to other things, so did not recognize Australopithicus sediba. Thanks to Ms. Pyne, I now do!

Very nicely written, almost in a conversational tone, Ms. Pyne does a great job describing the history of each and why the significance of her chosen "celebrity" fossils. A recommended read.

{A cool thing about reading advanced galleys...sometimes neat artifacts show up: on one page in the margin was an editor's note about needing confirmation of a source, as the article cited didn't have the quote. Bill O'Reilly avoids editors like that.} show less