(Im)personal

One thing I like about Barry Cunliffe's popular-science writing is that he does not open his prefaces, introductions, or first chapters with a personal anecdote. He does not, in other words condescend to the reader (and, not incidentally, amplify his own importance) with some forced or touching incident of doubtful relevance to the matter at hand.

That's not to say Cunliffe effaces his personality. Rather, he expresses it through his enthusiasm for his subject. Britain Begins and now Europe Between the Oceans leave me with an impression of Cunliffe's lively intelligence as well as awe and fascination with the range and depth of European geography, archaeology, and history.

Cunliffe's books led me to a book by another author on a related subject that opens with a long anecdote whose point is debatable. The anecdote would make a charming inclusion in a memoir of My Summers in Wales, but its relevance to the subject — population genetics — is questionable.

That's the preface. In the main body of the book, the text abounds with clearlys and significantlys and to summarizes, sure signs that the author lacks confidence in his ability to tell a story so feels he must keep repeating it.

I learned early in my career as a copy editor that even the most cack-handed word-butcher can produce elegant, affecting prose when writing personal memoir. Good writers can make the leap, bringing the freshness and natural flow of memoir to their exploration of other subjects. Cunliffe can; his inferior follower cannot, so I wish he'd stuck to the first until he could master the second. (Of course, with the advent of the god-awful coinage journaling, personal writing may have turned to crap, too.)

A few tips for would-be science writers who feel they must relate to the reader: Don't talk about your long-ago summers. Stay away from crusty but beloved aunts or grandfathers. And never, ever mention idylls, Welsh or otherwise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The longue durée of crime

Sometimes I may reach a bit for a crime-fiction connection in my non-crime reading, but this time the connection is clear: the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe's invocation of the historian Fernand Braudel's three-level scale of time and history, roughly translated, in ascending order of duration, as events, underlying trends, and geography and environment (longue durée), reminded me of a discussion here two years ago about crime crossing national lines in a repetition of ancient patterns.

The authors in question were Sweden's Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, and I noted the multiple border crossings that lay at the heart of their Dagger-winning novel Three Seconds. (The police protagonist's name means border, for one thing.) Here's part of what I wrote at the time:

"I like to think that globalization in their world (and in that of Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl, where Lithuanian streetwalkers are part of the Danish human landscape) is neither new nor monolithic, but rather a reawakening of old, even ancient economic ties previously obscured by wars and revolution. In this case, the ties are those that bind the Baltic and North Seas and the nations that surround them. Once they traded herring and salt; today's commodities are methamphetamine and hookers.

"The authors rarely make this point explicitly or didactically, and that's part of what makes their books exciting. They really do take readers into a new/old world."

Discuss without, if possible, submitting an academic-style paper on crime as a medium of economic and social exchange.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas in my newspaper ...

... not here and now also online! My review of Vargas' latest novel, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

My two-part interview with Vargas earlier this month expanded on questions touched on in the review. No surprise there; The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was what made me want to interview her in the first place. Vargas uses her much-ballyhooed quirkiness to good advantage in the book, and she offers a fine explanation for that quirkiness in the interview.

Thanks to Paul Davis for letting me know the review had turned up online.

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In the meantime, I've finished reading Barry Cunliffe's Britain Begins and started his Europe Between the Oceans. It's refreshing to read stories told on such a large scale, combining hard science and informed speculation, told by a master of his subject who is unafraid to admit when the existing state of knowledge simply does not permit a question to be answered.  The man can write, too, and his story is as exciting as any tale of aliens or lost Atlantises, but without the looniness and the unsavory preying on the gullibility of the weak-minded.

Cunliffe takes the longue durée approach to history. That is, he focuses on long-term environmental and geographical structures that underlie and outlast wars, migrations, and other such events of traditional history.  The term longue durée is associated with the Annales School of French historians, coined by Fernand Braudel, author of The Identity of France, the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, and others.

Among the great man's translators was Sian Reynolds, who, when not translating some of the most influential historical writing of the twentieth century, translates the crime novels of — Fred Vargas.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Unmitigated Cunliffe

Relaxing in the corporate-affiliated café of a chain bookstore, having lined up with people ordering 24-ounce ventis.

I'm here browsing more Barry Cunliffe, whose book Britain Begins continues to offer a stimulating, plausible account of the peopling of Great Britain. Among the results of the population movements are those great Neolithic monuments I love to visit. (Call me old-fashioned, but part of me feels the world has been going straight to hell since the onset of the Bronze Age.) A summary chronology: Barrows came first, then passage graves, then the circular "henges," one of which you might know. Historical context only enhances the monuments' power to inspire awe. I now half-expect to visit examples in the Orkneys for next year's pre- or post-Crimefest trip.

Cunliffe also redeems himself for his earlier misuse of mitigate with this entertaining passage:

"The basis of subsistence was now much broader and much more reassuring than in past times, when survival depended on unmitigated reindeer eked out by horse meat."

I don't know about you, but I find unmitigated reindeer beguiling, not least for the images it conjures of Neolithic children complaining: "Reindeer again? This stuff sucks!" Cunliffe's correct use of eke out is a bonus.

All is forgiven, professor.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Goddamnit! plus thoughts on Barry Cunliffe

Barry Cunliffe is a wide-ranging scholar, an eminent archaeologist, a stimulating thinker, and a fluent and engaging writer. But he (or his editors) doesn't know what mitigate means. Here's a sentence from Britain Begins, his history of the peopling of Britain and Ireland, boldface mine:

"A genetically conditioned predisposition to be mobile is, however, balanced by a sense of territoriality which mitigates against wandering."

I knew a professor at the Univerity of Pennsylvania who similarly misused mitigate for militate. Mitigate means to ease, mollify, or alleviate: A nip of schnapps mitigated the surgery's painful aftereffects. Militate means to have an effect, to weigh (against), or, loosely, to conspire or work (against): His insistence on correct word usage militates against the possibility that he will ever be promoted. Militate takes a preposition (against). Mitigate does not.

I don't know what Cunliffe's copy editor was doing the day that sentence came across his or her desk. Dreaming of citizen journalism, self-publishing, and the benefits of overthrowing gatekeepers, maybe.

Cunliffe, meanwhile, is even more impressive than I thought. I'd known of his work on the big-picture issue of population origins, but he's also a nuts-and-bolts archaeologist. I have just learned that he was involved in excavating Fishbourne Roman Palace in England, one of the most moving, because most human, of all Roman remains. This knowledge mitigates, if only slightly, my annoyance at his book's misuse of a word.

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What misuses of words have driven you nuts in your reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013