March 2016 - Discoveries and Innovations

Read a book featuring a discovery or innovation that significantly altered (or would if it were real) how people live.

Non-fiction:
Longitude - Dava Sobel
Empires of Light -Jill Jonnes
Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words - John Man

Fiction:
Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
Anathem - Neal Stephenson
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Enigma - Robert Harris

I've been meaning to read Flowers for Algernon for quite some time, this looks like the perfect opportunity to do so!

I have been meaning to read The Swerve for quite a while sonthat may be my choice for this theme.

Hmm, I think Thunderstruck would be a good one for this theme.

I've got Enigma by Robert Harris and had been meaning to read it for the WW2 quarterly theme read, but never got around to it. So I'll be putting it on my TBR stack for this month.

I've come across one for this theme - Longitude by Dava Sobel

I'll be reading Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Dr. Mutter's Marvels : A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz was a four-star read for me earlier this year. Nonfiction about advances in surgery.

I think I'll join with Thunderstruck.

>4 Familyhistorian: I would also endorse Thunderstruck. I'm kind of sorry I've already read it, but there are some other good suggestions here.

>9 rosalita: This gives me an reason to actually read Thunderstruck. It has been sitting on my shelf for ages.

>10 Familyhistorian: Have you read other Erik Larson titles? I find his work to be consistently excellent.

>11 rosalita: I have a few books by Larson on my shelves but I have never read any of them. It is good to hear that his books are excellent.

This is not a category that appeals to me, so I will strrrrrrrrrretccchhh it a bit and read Cruising Panama's Canal: Experience the sights, sounds and thrills of cruise travel, told with the wit and charm of travel memoir writers Al & Sunny Lockwood. It does contain the history of the building of the canal, especially the plague of yellow fever.

I skimmed through My Library thinking I'd have trouble finding much on this theme and I was pleasantly surprised:

Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind (a very difficult read)
Lawrence Durrell, Nunquam
Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Peter Russell, Prince Henry the Navigator

And I can also do a reread of The Golden Compass – actually, combining it with Philip Pullman's self-narrated audiobook, which I've got somewhere but never listened to.

I'm really trying diligently to combine RTT with 2016 ROOT so I'm glad I could find all of these as treeware (which is all I'm counting for ROOT) in My Library rather than on a Wishlist.

Nunquam is a must-read (actually, reread from decades ago) since I reread Tunc for an RTT theme a few months ago. I really don't personally care for Durrell, but I'd like to get this reread of his Revolt of Aphrodite dyad out of the way and behind me. I just don't think I've got the energy for a reread of The Alexandria Quartet.

I picked up Prince Henry the Navigator on an impulse a few months ago at Baldwin's Book Barn, where I go every few weeks to browse (and to socialize with my friend Bingo, the bookstore cat). This one's a definite for me, along with Nunquam, and I'll see how it goes on the rest.

I went searching through my owned books to see if I had anything to fit this category, not expecting much, and found a couple, to my surprise:

Longitude, which has already been mentioned, and by the same author, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.

I think I'll start with the Copernicus book and see how it goes.

I've checked out the audio of How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson to listen to for this theme.

I just finished Peter Russell's Prince Henry 'the Navigator', which I stumbled across some months ago in a used book store and which can help satisfy my month quota for ROOTing. (3½*** review)

I just finished Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes. This book really touched me and I thought it was brilliant.

I did read A More Perfect Heaven, and found it pretty informative and enjoyable. My review is on my thread if anyone feels compelled to know more.

>18 DeltaQueen50: One of my all-time favorite books.

I can’t believe that I didn’t notice until I listed them, that the two books I read for this month’s challenge were both by the same author – Erik Larson – Dead Wake, published 2015, and Thunderstruck, published 2006. I had both titles on hold at my library, planning to read whichever came available first. So, of course, they both became mine on the same day – one an ebook, the other audio. I further confused myself by reading them almost simultaneously, the audio as I worked around the house during the day, and the ebook in bed at night. I gained an appreciation for the author’s art in so doing. Though they both covered some of the same territory – wireless telegraphy – the trajectory of the stories was completely different.

Dead Wake is the story of the sinking of the Lusitania. For the purposes of the Discoveries/Innovations challenge, the innovations involved diesel electric propulsion in submarines, and the standardization of periscopes, both of which made U-boats such a deadly force in WWI.

”The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.” . . . The smoothness of the sea presented some passenger with a view of the torpedo that was startling in its clarity.”

The Lusitania’s passenger list is not just dry facts; Larson fleshes out many of the passengers from the memories of survivors and from their own journals. He brings a bit of the story of President Wilson – his wife’s death, his subsequent courting of another, and his new marriage – into the history of WWI, and without saying so explicitly, how his personal life interfered with the country’s needs.

A crucial part of the story of the catastrophe was the work of Room 40 in England, a secret corner of British Naval Intelligence, where they would receive 20,000 intercepted U-boat messages during the war. They knew their paths, their quadrants, their codes, each commander, and his kills. They knew U-20 was directly in the path of the Lusitania, that it had already sunk 3 other ships that day, and that 23 other merchant vessels had been torpedoed and sunk by U-boats in the previous 7 days along that portion of the coast.

A message was sent to many ships to use the safer northern passage, which was free of U-boats. But it was not sent to the Lusitania.

The head of Cunard ship lines rushed to the Admiralty after reading about the 3 sinkings that day, requesting that they do everything in their power to keep the Lusitania safe. In war time, he was not able to give orders to his own ship; the Admiralty was in charge. They sent two conflicting messages to the ship, neither of which was to the point.

There were naval destroyers nearby, but they were not summoned to escort the ocean liner, even though the crew expected it.

“… the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?”

“...naval historian, the late Patrick Beesly, who, during World War II, was himself an officer in British naval intelligence. . . . ‘As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy,’ he said, ‘I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather {than} to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship.’ But, he said, ‘on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.’ . . . No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy.”

A fascinating story of that piece of history, engagingly told.

Thunderstruck is the story of the invention of wireless telegraphy.

With excellent pacing, Larson tells how Marconi became the one credited with this invention; the tedious steps through which he blundered or researched his way from the beginning of his quest to its fulfillment.

Within the larger story of wireless telegraphy, lies the story of a crime, with the capture of the murderer clinching the public perception of the usefulness of the Marconi system in 1910.

Larson is an excellent story teller!

I'm a big fan of Erik Larson's writing, too! Very nice reviews of both of those.

I'm a big fan of Erik Larson's writing, too. Those are nice reviews of both Dead Wake and Thunderstruck.

>22 countrylife: Another Erik Larson fan here. I'll be reading Dead Wake for a book club meeting later this year and am looking forward to it even more after your review.

Great to see the Erik Larson love! I will be reading Dead Wake next month for the Bodies of Water portion of the GeoCat.

I only read the one Larson for the challenge. My review of Thunderstruck follows, sorry if it is too much of a good thing. Thanks to this challenge I finally finished the book which I had started about 2 years ago and abandoned. I am glad to have finished it this time.

To fit in with this month's theme I read Erik Larson's Thunderstruck which is about Marconi and the invention of wireless communication. I went through a museum in Chelmsford this past summer and found out that was where Marconi had his factory. Very intiguing display but no photography allowed. This was my first book by Larson and I was interested to see how he set up the intersecting stories of Marconi and his wireless and that of Crippen who tried to escape to Canada with his mistress after the murder of his wife. It is hard to make real life suspenceful when the outcome is known but Larson did it and made the reader aware of how Marconi almost failed and how Crippen almost got away.

Have to hurry and find/read a book for this theme for March. Have several from which to choose, but with Easter time will be the factor.

>29 Tess_W: Hope you have time to fit your challenge book in around your Easter celebrations, Tess.

Reporting in late but I read two books for the March challenge - both recommended.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua - a graphic novel which imagines what would have happened if Charles Babbage had built his difference engine and analytical engine. It's very funny but it's also clear the author has done a lot of research into both Lovelace's and Babbage's lives as well as other famous Victorians.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm - a near future science fiction novel which imagines what would happen if cloning became the only viable way to ensure the future of the human race.

In addition to the biography of Prince Henry the Navigator in >17 CurrerBell:, I also finished Lawrence Durrell's Nunquam, which involves a "Stepford Wives" type of android.