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From October 2009 to February 2010, Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science hosted the first ever exhibition of Steampunk Art in the world. Steampunk artists, loosely defined, are those who, “in imagining a Victorian future that has not come to pass”, cast an oblique light on the present and create magnificent pieces of imagination. Their art is bejeweled with the mechanical and the fanciful, the historical and the contemporary, reveling in the ingenuity and absurdity of mechanism and the art of making. The art creates a sense of wonder, with a bit of fun.

The exhibition featured works of numerous artists, including Kris Kuksi, Eric Freitas, Daniel Proulx, Amanda Scrivener, and Molly Friedrich. Curated by Arthur Donovan, a steampunk artist himself, it gathered much attention in the media and proved to be a grand success according to the officials of the museum. Indeed, it was a visual delight.

The pictures in this photo essay have been tweaked to look at the same exhibits in a slightly different light.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. Akshat is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

Clash of the Titans

Misawa’s spinal cord severed by a routine headdrop;
uploaded months ago, his Emerald Frosion ‘absolutely kills’.

Related videos: Coulter owns Paxman, Paxo pwns Coulter;
gouts of purple prose incur a nine-page thread

as a typo-addled slave is forced by the flames to admit
she knows he knows she’s bound by garlands of her own.

Like the Harris levels, our moans don’t represent real doom.
Through the pre-dawn hours I learn to follow, follow to learn

the hurt of you poured forth with the red. The yellow brick road
is paved with eggshells – you scratch my wound, I’ll scratch yours.

**********************************************

Obsessive-compulsive

Although I have picked
my keratinized thumb
smooth and hard
as a thimble

or a circumcised glans
it’s what’s inside
that counts –
it must be I think

each turn of the knob’s
less than whole,
less wired
than a licked index;

five twists
leave me grasping
for the plot,
about the point

of inarticulacy
suspense builds
this room
that’s basically sound

**********************************************

Lemmings

The sprites are tiny but our villainous
leather swivel chair encompasses
a hundred lemmings headed off
a bitmapped cliff – an unhappy few

hold back. No wonder we admire those
who cliff-dive, shattering from above
fear’s terrible glass ceiling;
no wonder we admire,

smelt from downwind, doesn’t keep
the scent of the cliff-edge,
the sea whose calculable peaks and troughs
are the teeth of a side-on hacksaw blade.

**********************************************

Vidyan Ravinthiran is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. His pamphlet, At Home or Nowhere, was published in 2009 by Tall-Lighthouse; other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Magma, Poetry Review, The North, The Times Literary Supplement, Ambit, Stand, and Horizon Review.

Michael Pollan
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
Penguin, 2010
160 Pages
£4.99
ISBN 978-0141048680

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It is often said that one should remain skeptical of any field that feels the need to attach the word “science” to its core subject area. In his delightful book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan takes aim at the often conflicting claims of “nutritional science”. And with good reason: despite the dramatic recent expansion in public understanding of nutrition, Americans alone still spend up to $1.5 trillion a year treating preventable chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and obesity. Using a combination of humour and keen scientific knowledge, Pollan outlines 64 relatively easy dietary steps to reverse these troubling epidemiological statistics. His insights range from the straightforward (“avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce”) to the humorous (“don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the colour of your milk”) and to the unexpected (“avoid food products with the word “lite” or the terms “low-fat” or “nonfat” in their names”).

Pollan corroborates his pronouncements with some remarkable findings, drawing on a wide array of disciplines. Although his book is admittedly not “anti-science”, he is careful to acknowledge the limitations of scientific endeavour and is not afraid to consult unorthodox sources like anthropologists, nurses, and great grandmothers. Who knew that the Kenyan Masai, with a diet composed of cattle blood, milk, and meat, tend not to suffer from Western diseases? Who knew that the ancient Jewish saying—“The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead”—was actually true?

Although Pollan’s astute analyses are primarily directed at individuals from the United States, his findings broadly apply to all nations that have adopted the “Western diet”: a highly processed meal selection of meat, refined sugars, salt, and non-whole wheat grains, with little vegetable and fruit consumption. Pollan shows that his 64 steps can be broken down into three further categories that capture the essence of his simple (but not simplistic) thesis, described as Eat food, Not too much, and Mostly plants. This book is clever, engrossing, and broadly relevant—it should not be missed.

Joel Krupa is reading for an MSc in Environmental Policy at Mansfield College, Oxford.

1. The revolutionary future of publishing (Matt Wills)

2. Phone booth bookshops (Sarah Puello)

3. The heroic life of Atlantic salmon (Alex Barker)

4. Blogging the High Court of Australia (John Maloney)

5. Writing by Free Appropriation (Amy Waite)

6. Jorge Luis Borges’ lost translations (Stephen Ross)

7. Chiropractics and libel laws (Will Kolkey)

8. Science Blogs (Akshat Rathi)

Martin Amis
The Pregnant Widow
Jonathan Cape, 2010
480 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0224076128

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Martin Amis’s new novel, The Pregnant Widow, takes its title from the Russian writer Alexander Herzen’s observation that after great social change “the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.” Long and painful in its own gestation, this novel targets the narcissism of the 1970s “Me Generation”, the sexual revolution unleashed by its members, and the traumas it engendered. Since that revolution, Amis argues, surface has superseded essence. Detecting a “dissociation of sensibility” between feeling and thought akin to that infamously diagnosed in 17th-century English poetry by T.S. Eliot, he tracks a fault line in generational mindsets and lifestyles.

Though disastrous for the novel’s hero, Keith Nearing, a runtish English literature student, this generational break proves even more catastrophic for the female characters. In a misguided attempt to “turn boy”, they plunge into predatory promiscuity and ultimately miss their chance to have children. They lead lives of sorry proxy or just end up dead, like Keith’s sister, Violet, who “dates” football teams and whose fate in the novel sadly parallels that of Amis’s own sister, Sally. In the sexual competition inaugurated by the 1970s revolution, the book concludes, “the boys have won again”.

The novel begins with Keith—an occupant of “that much-disputed territory between five foot six and seven” (and the latest, incidentally, in a line of unfortunates bearing that name in Amis’s fiction)—settling into an Italian castello for the long hot summer of 1970 with Lily, his sharp-tongued girlfriend, and the toffish, glamorous Scheherazade, whom Keith secretly schemes to seduce. Inevitably Keith’s plans, which involve spiked drinks (a trick learned from his current reading matter, Richardson’s Clarissa), go comically awry. He is then unexpectedly enticed by an icy Scottish house-guest, Gloria, into a 13-hour sexathalon, an obscurely dislocating experience that pitchforks him into a dismal “Larkinland” of sexual inadequacy for years to come.

The book then takes us up to the present day. Keith, one more drop in the “silver tsunami” of pre-Alzheimers Boomers, is left grappling with disappointment and fear of death, “the dark backing a mirror needs before it can show ourselves”. The key question on your deathbed, he concludes, will be: “How did it go for you with women?”

Big meaty themes then, and you cannot fault Amis for lack of ambition. If successful, he could perhaps have achieved that still unattained goal, the Great Boomer Novel. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

In his attempt to craft his Boomer masterpiece Amis has clearly been inspired by several of his literary heroes. Among the influences detectable in the novel is that famous lepidopterist and lexical conjurer, Vladimir Nabokov. Unfortunately, grasping after Nabokovian magic gossamer, Amis cannot resist complicating his narrative with leitmotifs and fine-spun webs of imagery. The list of motifs goes on and on: Narcissus and Echo; mirrors and windows; hermaphrodites; flowers; birds; and insects—including, of course, butterflies. There is enough clever image-mongering here to keep an army of semioticians and graduate students industrially employed for a generation.

Amis’s surface has indeed superseded essence. In this novel, symbol repeatedly trumps character, plot, episode, and action. It is impossible, for instance, to fathom the precise details of what went on in the pivotal sexual encounter (it seems to have involved dressing up as Elizabeth Bennett and something called the “Sinister Refinement”) or see what was so awful about it that it kicked Keith into touch, sexually speaking, for so long.

On his symbolic chessboard, Amis shunts the characters about like pawns until they lose all credibility and conviction. Take Gloria: even if you can swallow the icy Scot’s sudden sexual volte-face in the bathroom with Keith, her final chance meeting with Keith in a London pub as a stout, born-again, veil-wearing Moslem beggars belief. We are expected to swallow that she is in fact much older and more foreign than she seemed, having been born in Cairo in the 1930s, who to atone for her sins, has re-embraced her natal religion.

The “Me Generation” undoubtedly has a fixation with sex and death (funny, incidentally, how the Boomers, having thought themselves the first generation to discover sex, now think the same about dying), and Amis captures this well. He is also illuminating on the role of “subliminal nuclear war” in their early development. But he leaves a lot out. Sexual liberation began at least half a decade before 1970 and, pace Philip Larkin, probably before 1963. Indeed a credible case could be made that the unmooring of the Me Generation resulted not from their own sexual experimentation but the relationship breakdowns and parenting failures of their own fathers and mothers of the wartime generation. Amis himself has noted that his own parental circle “were all at it” as he was growing up, and his book Experience (2000) tells how it was the sudden savage break-up of his parents’ marriage that sent him spinning off course as a teenager.

Absent too are other key fixtures of the Me Generation. Apart from a solitary slab of hash, drugs never make an appearance in the novel. Nor are politics mentioned, not even Vietnam. And as an account of the Boomers’ legacy it is similarly myopic. The Boomers, for good or for ill, ushered in a whole raft of changes: the digital revolution; gay liberation; feminism; a concern with personal freedom, human rights, and the environment; AIDS; a drugs epidemic; the death of deference and the dismantling of large chunks of the existing social structure. Little of this is reflected in the Pregnant Widow. While it would be absurd to expect all of these to be represented in one novel, there could have been suggestions there was more to the Boomer revolution than sex.

But a judicious sense of balance isn’t, of course, what Amis is about. One has only to consider his wackier recent pronouncements: his proposal in the launch interviews for this book that walk-in suicide booths be opened on every street corner where Alzheimer sufferers could off themselves, or his statement in this novel that the only way to deal with a wild child like Violet would be Islamic or Mediterranean honour code repression.

Amis wants to have everything both ways. He claims to be on women’s side but consistently writes about them in a disparaging way. He patronisingly introduces stereotypical Islamic characters, then adds injury to insult by finding merit in the most illiberal and distasteful aspects of their culture.

Often you can’t help feeling that all Amis really wants to do is make a bigger splash. In Experience Amis summoned his younger self, the green velvet suited dandy strutting in his loons and platforms up and down the King’s Road trying to look cool and pull the birds. That adolescent dandy, albeit more wrinkled and thinner on top, is still stepping amongst us.

There are good books and bad books; there are also good bad books (entertainingly bad ones) and bad good books—into which sad category The Pregnant Widow falls. For there are many fine things within it. Amis handles his dialogue deftly, cleverly catching the way the young in conversation click and ricochet like billiard balls off one another’s surfaces without ever really connecting. Amis still has all the moves. No one can skewer you with a sentence like him. One of our finest literary essayists and autobiographical writers, he still has talent and to spare. What a pity he has blown it in this novel.

Apparently, writing The Pregnant Widow freed Amis from a long writer’s block, and he now has two new novels under way, the first featuring a crook who wins the lottery and his cohort, a Jordan-like celebrity called Danube. This sounds promising and may herald a return to the Swiftian disgust of Amis’s masterpiece, Money (1984). Amis will tell things stylishly (how else could he tell them). If he also tells them straight and cool and level, who knows, he could yet write the great novel of our times.

Peter Snow read English at University College and is currently a freelance writer based in Oxford.

John Lanchester
Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
Allen Lane, 2010
240 Pages
£20
ISBN 978-1846142857

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If it is possible for anyone to have benefited from the global financial crisis, then book publishers may have a stronger claim than most. Understanding the crisis as it unfolded was almost impossible, given the speed with which a series of monumental events occurred, the amount of new terminology that suddenly sprang up, and the fact that not even those in the stricken banks, building societies, and insurers (never mind the industry regulators and their respective governments) seemed to have a clue what was going on.

In the 18 months since the crisis reached its peak, canny publishers have bailed out befuddled readers with a plethora of new books on the subject, ranging in tone from the sardonic (F.I.A.S.C.O.—note the sardonic use of acronyms) to the self-flagellating (Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender). Given the number of titles, choosing the right tour guide to pick through the debris of the ruined financial landscape can seem an onerous task. It makes sense to choose one of the (surprisingly few) commentators who suggested that such a catastrophe was possible. As such, Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett has emerged from the crisis with her reputation enhanced, and her book, Fool’s Gold, has become the set text on the subprime crisis.

However, another less obvious figure can also claim to have seen what was coming. A novelist by trade, John Lanchester was drawn to the City as a possible setting for a new piece of fiction. Instead, struck by the lack of understanding of modern finance (he describes the City as equivalent to “a far-off country of which we know little”), he dug a bit deeper. He discovered how a combination of mathematical ingenuity and blind-eyed regulation had resulted in the widespread use of financial instruments that were capable of delinking bankers from the risk inherent in their investments. In an essay for the London Review of Books in January 2008 he showed how this moral hazard led to the run on Northern Rock, and concluded that “if our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.”

Within nine months, Lanchester enjoyed the dubious pleasure of being proved right. His latest book, Whoops!, extends the argument of his original essay, plotting the entire course of the crisis, from its origins (which he locates, contentiously, in the collapse of communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s) to the range of unhappy options we face in financing the cost of the bailouts and stimulus. Within 200 pages he manages to cover the behaviour of bankers, governments, regulators, consumers, and even money itself, each of which, he argues, was an important factor in the crisis. Lanchester’s position as a City outsider enables him to adopt the pose of an outraged everyman, as aghast at the more sensational elements of the crisis as his imagined reader, the average taxpayer on the street.

Whoops! aims to break down the complicated elements of the crisis so they can be understood by everyone. Lanchester’s description of the mystery of the City also hints at another, loftier aim: that of making the country’s financial centre less obscure, in the hope that bankers will then be made to be more accountable. To make the economics less daunting, however, Lanchester fills the book with heavy-handed references to pop culture. It seems a stretch to link the financial crisis to The Wire, The Simpsons, and Zoo and Heat magazines, and so it proves. This is a shame, because Lanchester is not only capable of explaining complex financial operations, he excels at it. His coverage of derivatives, an instrument so misunderstood that it broke the entire banking system, is cleverly explained in terms of personal finance, and is delivered with such clarity that it should be photocopied and stuck to the desks of every new investment banker.

Yet this is not to suggest that Whoops! is a dry read. Lanchester’s incredulous response to the crisis is most effective and entertaining when he comes across moments of true absurdity; moments when it seemed that the whole industry had become so focused on maximising profits and divorcing itself from risk that it threatened to separate from reality entirely and float off into space. There are plenty of these moments, but three stand out. First, Lanchester describes how in 2000 the US Congress was so seduced by the country’s banking sector that it passed legislation to exempt credit-default swaps (CDSs, contracts whereby the buyer assumes the risk of the seller defaulting on its debt in exchange for a fee) from the kind of regulation that is applied to other, similar instruments, such as options and futures. It also guaranteed that CDSs could continue to be traded over the counter, rather than through a monitored exchange. The result was the Commodity Futures Modernisation Act, “a law that actually banned legislation”.

Another is the development of securitisation, which enables swaps that contain different levels of risk to be grouped together and sold. By interspersing high-risk investments with safer ones, the sting is supposedly taken out. The result was a whole new market for lenders, as investments that were previously considered too risky to touch could now be reconsidered. Suddenly, the age-old relationship between lender and borrower was reversed. Potential homeowners no longer went to the bank for a mortgage, the bank came to them, and it came in the hope of signing them up to unusually high interest rates so that the debt that they had created could be pooled and sold on. That there was no accounting for what might happen if the new owners couldn’t pay leaves Lanchester “reeling with incredulity”.

The third moment was a change in the way that ratings agencies were funded. Before the mid-1970s, ratings that assessed the riskiness of different types of debt were accessed through a subscription service. However, the US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, decided that the debt-issuer should pay the agency for its ratings. This meant that the more ratings the agency produced, the more it earned. In addition, agencies were paid three times as much for assessing mortgage-backed securities as for regular corporate bonds. Furthermore, “the banks were not shy about saying that if an agency would not give them the rating they wanted, they would go shopping elsewhere.” Unsurprisingly, this led to the highest grades being awarded to the riskiest debt, a complete perversion of the rating system.

Lanchester’s pose as an outraged taxpayer enables him to examine the crisis from almost every angle, but he is weaker on possible macroeconomic factors. The idea that sub-prime mortgages were only made possible thanks to a prolonged spell of low US interest rates, which in turn was enabled by the purchase of enormous amounts of US government debt by China, is dismissed in a couple of paragraphs, although he does confess that the China-US relationship “gives me the willies”. In fact, part of the trap that befell US house buyers is that low interest rates caused house prices to rise, which meant that buyers not only had to take on bigger mortgages, but also that property came to be regarded as a risk-free investment. Both of these are among the many factors responsible for the crisis. To lay the blame, however, at the door of Asian central bankers for failing to encourage consumption instead of saving would run counter to Lanchester’s argument. For him, the crisis is an indication of the need to re-examine Western ideology and to learn to recognise when we have had ‘enough’. The motivation to do this is provided by this concise but stirring account of the crisis.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for The Economist.

R.D. Williams
The Aeneid
Bristol Classical Press, 2nd Edition, 2009
170 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-1853997143

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Disillusioned with poetry’s ability to influence politics, W.H. Auden attacked the ancient Roman poet Virgil:

No, Virgil, no
Not even the first of the Romans can learn
His Roman history in the future tense
Not even to serve your political turn
Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.
(“Secondary Epic”)

Virgil’s epic, Aeneid, first published in 19 BCE, is notorious for its “political turn”. Written in Rome during the reign of Augustus, first emperor in all but name, the Aeneid traces the legendary origins of Rome back to Aeneas. Escaping from the cinders of burning Troy with his young son and his father, the Trojan hero travelled to Italy with divine guidance and founded Lavinium, the antecedent of Rome.

For Augustan Rome, old tales provided opportunities to accommodate and flatter the new political situation. Popularised in the first century BCE was a version of the story in which the son of Aeneas, Ascanius, takes the name “Iulus”. This conveniently made him the ancestor of the house of the Julii, to which Augustus (Octavian), as the adopted son of Julius Caesar, belonged. The “Iulus” version therefore legitimised the house of Augustus as the rightful rulers of Rome, with the added bonus of divine descent from Aeneas’s mother, Venus. This is the story told in the Aeneid. In a series of passages, the glorious future of contemporary Rome is predicted as the Trojan hero makes his way to Italy. When Aeneas goes down to the Underworld in Book 6, he sees the spirits of future Romans, “all the descendants of Iulus”, waiting to be born, among them Augustus:

Here is the man whose coming you so often hear prophesied, here he is, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, the man who will bring back the golden years…and extend Rome’s empire beyond the stars. (Aeneid 6.791-6)

Roman history in the future tense, then, and inescapably propaganda.

Virgil’s “political turn” did not raise the hackles of Auden alone. According to Servius, a fourth-century CE grammarian, Virgil wrote the Aeneid precisely in order “to praise Augustus”. This “political turn” became an increasingly vexed issue as the epic assumed a place of immovable prestige in Western culture. As T.S. Eliot put it, Virgil’s epic became “the Classic of all Europe”: until a generation ago, the Aeneid was a standard text in many European schools, inspiring our most influential writers, from Dante and Milton to Seamus Heaney. Yet there is a darker side to this influence, most recently foregrounded by the poem’s strong associations with Italian fascism. In an age when so many books were banned, the power of Augustan Rome was held up as an ideal, and Virgil celebrated as the regime’s poet. Mussolini subsidised publication of the Aeneid by the Roman Academy “Iussu Benedicti Mussolini”, “by order of Benito Mussolini”. And in Britain, the title of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech uneasily evokes a famous line from the epic.

What might seem paradoxical in light of this troubled history is the fact that the Aeneid has also been celebrated for its sensitivity to “the tears of things” (lacrimae rerum), and in particular to the horrors of war. For Alfred Lord Tennyson, Virgil was “majestic in thy sadness/ and the doubtful doom of human kind”. The German writer Theodore Haecker went so far as to declare in 1940 that “Virgil, who was so often able to express the horror of war, would today be speechless in a concentration camp.” This so-called “pessimistic” aspect of the poem was cited by those eager to rescue it from charges of being propaganda. In particular, a group of critics associated with Harvard University saw in the poem a “voice” attuned to the disturbing aspects of its age, one that challenges its otherwise propagandistic message.

In Britain, the so-called “Harvard School” has among its spokesmen Oliver Lyne, the late Oxford scholar and fellow of Balliol. For Lyne, the Aeneid is full of dissenting “further voices” beneath its nationalistic overtones, which ultimately undercut its pro-Augustan message. Lyne’s view is the one most readily accepted in England—talk to most undergraduates at Oxford reading classics about Virgil and you will probably hear something similar. Besides Lyne, R.D. Williams is most responsible for promoting this reading of the poem in Britain. His two-volume commentary on the whole of the Aeneid remains the standard work on undergraduate classics reading lists; and for those who don’t read Latin, Willams has extended his reach with a widely used commentary based on translation.

Bristol Classical Press has republished Williams’s introductory guide to the poem, first published posthumously in 1987. The press aims to reach a broad audience, targeting “students and teachers of literature and knowledgeable non-academic readers”. It includes a new foreword by James Morwood, former head of classics at Harrow and then Grocyn Lecturer at Oxford, which will help to promote Williams’s book in schools (though Morwood’s adjectives of choice, “first-class” and “splendid”, will not do much for its popular appeal). There are two existing guides, however, which it would thereby aim to replace: W.A. Camps’s An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1969) and Philip Hardie’s Virgil (Greece and Rome, 1998). In combination, these already provide a broader and deeper view of the epic. Camps is clear and insightful on the key aspects of the poem without being patronising, while Hardie is sophisticated and particularly informative on the epic’s critical reception in the 20th century. Williams, by contrast, makes virtually no references to secondary works, not even those that clearly inform his views.

Above all else, this volume shows Williams to be a proponent of the “further voices” reading of the Aeneid. For Williams, Virgil’s epic has both a public voice, “an optimistic vision” of Rome’s greatness, and a more conflicted “private voice of sympathy and sorrow over the fate of the lonely individual…or the warrior who loses his life in a war which is seen in the poem to have been, in the end, senseless.” Williams’s reading, then, promotes an attractively humanist Virgil. But it also has agenda, one which the commentary mostly conceals.

Virgil has always been what his readers want him to be, from Mussolini’s poet of the glory of a nation to the poet of the senselessness of war. As a result, Williams’s book, with its unambiguous espousal of the “Harvard School” reading, is also in danger of oversimplifying the matter. The Aeneid is a political poem, but its “political turn” manifests itself in more ways—and more complexly—than Williams allows us to see. Part of the richness of Virgil’s epic lies in the fact that, despite its undoubtedly “political turn”, it has a cunning ability to dodge any single political reading.

Nora Goldschmidt is reading for a DPhil in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Alwyn Scarth
Vesuvius: A Biography
Terra Publishing, 2009
342 Pages
£24
ISBN 978-1903544259

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It is an intriguing irony that many of the world’s most beautiful landscapes are also its most deadly. The same geologic forces that gave rise to Japan’s Mount Fuji, America’s Yellowstone, and India’s Deccan Plateau also unleash catastrophic volcanic eruptions. And although many volcanic hotspots are located on distant continents, some powerful volcanic landscapes also lurk on the fringes of Europe.

Alwyn Scarth explores one of these, Italy’s Campi Flegrei (the “burning lands”), and its vital core, Mount Vesuvius, in Vesuvius: A Biography. Refreshingly, Scarth’s lens is the landscape itself; his project aims not merely to give readers a geology or history lesson, but rather to show how the region’s human and natural histories are deeply intertwined. He provides perhaps the best statement of this intention at the end of his preface: “I wrote [Vesuvius] for all those who would welcome a thorough study of the changing relationships between Europe’s most violent volcano and the people living around it.”

This is indeed a worthy aim. While the geologic and ecological characteristics of landscapes, more than almost anything else, inform the human stories that play out on them, few chroniclers possess the vision and breadth of knowledge to attempt a simultaneous human and natural history of a region. But Scarth’s is an exhaustive history of volcanism in the Campi Flegrei, and a compelling account of its impact on human lifestyles in the region. All in all, it is an excellent exercise in geography, blending human and natural histories.

Though it has few true practitioners, geography in its truest form attempts to understand human phenomena (societies, economies, etc.) as spatially distinct—people and the things they build differ from place to place, and they differ because places themselves are diverse. It’s a simple point, but one rarely taken seriously by practitioners in a field of increasingly specialized scholarship.

The modern discipline of geography is divided into human and physical geography; the former sits distinctly within the social sciences, the latter in the earth sciences. As a result of this division, few authors attempt to tell the story of a place in terms of both people and landscapes, ordinarily choosing one lens and neglecting the other.

Scarth deploys an expansive intellectual arsenal to attempt to bridge this divide, combining detailed descriptions of the geologic record with meticulously researched first-hand human accounts of the region’s volcanic activity. Particularly impressive are his own translations of a number of Roman sources, and his description of the impact of the Pompeii disaster on Roman history. One of the most vivid accounts of this disaster comes from the Roman historian Dio Cassius:

Suddenly, a portentous crash was heard, as if the mountains were falling down in ruins. First, huge stones were hurled aloft, rising as high as the highest mountains. Then came a great quantity of fire and endless smoke, so that the whole atmosphere was obscured and the Sun was entirely hidden, as if it had been eclipsed. Thus, day was turned into night and light into darkness.

Yet, for all its value as a work of scholarly synthesis, Vesuvius is also something of a cautionary tale for those who might undertake projects with such a broad scope. While Scarth displays an impressive command of the geological processes below Vesuvius and the human history above it, the book itself has a ponderous feel, as if unsure of its true character. Vesuvius awkwardly tests the boundaries of genre, oscillating between textbook and popular history. The former character is suggested both by the “Further Reading” section which concludes each chapter, and by the numerous text boxes that seem chiefly of academic interest, such as “The Spanish Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies” and “Alfred Lacroix observes a lava flow at its source in 1905.” In navigating between the academic and the popular, Scarth seems most determined to cobble together a historical narrative.

This would not present any problems, of course, but for Scarth’s intensive focus on constructing an observational record of volcanic activity rather than relating his material to broader historical trends. While Scarth’s broad perspective—both scientific and humanistic—is illuminating, the point of this perspective remains to construct a narrative larger than the sum of its parts. A geologist might produce an exhaustive account of Vesuvian volcanology; an historian, a rich tale of the peoples who live in its shadow. United, the geologist-historian is able to tell us not only about Vesuvius, but also about why it looms so large in the European imagination, and how it resonates far beyond Italy’s Campania.

This, however, Scarth fails to do. In his chapter on William Hamilton, who made important contributions to the field of volcanology during his tenure as British envoy in Naples, Scarth repeats Hamilton’s observations of Vesuvius in great detail, but gives short shrift to his influence on the natural sciences in the Age of Enlightenment. Though Scarth displays an awareness of his subjects’ relation to such broader historical trends, he seems unnecessarily intent on relating these to Vesuvius, rather than the other way around. Though Scarth’s geologic-historical perspective may be sound, his literary handling of this admittedly difficult synthesis is far from deft.

The promise that connections will be made to broader themes is suggested by the book’s final chapter, “The Future: the Eruption to be Avoided.” Here, Scarth takes stock of Vesuvius’s impact on the psychology of Campanian people, and how it has affected their preparations for future eruptions. From his exhaustive history Scarth is able to draw some interesting lessons for such preparations. Based on past experience, he says, “The Campanians would probably place more trust in ministers of religion than in ministers of government.” Better, then, to enlist the region’s priests in making plans for evacuation and emergency management than the famously factious provincial and central governments.

It is to be hoped that we will see more works of a scope and ambition similar to Vesuvius. So much of modernity would have us believe that we are masters of the natural environment, that it is merely a sort of chessboard on which we impose our own designs. But this could not be further from the truth: human history is shaped by, and in many cases at the mercy of, natural forces. Vesuvius is a powerful testimony to this fact, and a warning to take greater heed. If its substance is flawed, its form is not: an integration of the anthropological and the ecological, places and the people who live there.

Scott Moore is reading for an MSc in Environmental Change and Management at Merton College, Oxford.

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This past week, members of the Oxonian Review editorial staff visited the Albion Beatnik Bookstore on Walton Street. We had a chance to chat with Albion’s owner, Dennis Harrison, and to take some photos of his elegant, whimsical shop. Albion opened in 2008 and features, in Dennis’s words, “interesting fiction of the 20th century, with an emphasis on alternative culture and the beatnik life—travel, poetry, popular music, and jazz.”

Indeed, Albion boasts world-class collections of both “Beat” literature and jazz-related writing, and hits most other 20th-century avant-garde and counter-cultural high points along the way. With its extensive offering of modern British, American, and European poetry and fiction and its well selected (and cheap!) secondhand section, Albion represents a bold and refreshing gesture of indie vitality in a city whose independent book and music store scene has barely a pulse.

Dennis spoke with us for about 45 minutes, while we all sipped coffee and listened to Miles Davis. The wood-floors, book-lined shelves, and jazzy atmosphere made Albion a lovely place to spend an afternoon. The following is a brief excerpt from our conversation:

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OR: How did you choose the name Albion Beatnik?

DH: Albion is an old word for England, and beatnik is an American slang word introduced by Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s (he claimed from the word “beatific”). I just liked it, really. Though, “beatnik” on the sign outside probably looks worse to a passersby than “jazz” would!

OR: It looks like you order a lot of your books from American publishers. I noticed, for instance, that you carry the American editions of Kurt Vonnegut…

DH: I try more and more to order books from the US because they’re so much nicer, and different. The Vonneguts, for instance, have such wonderful covers, and I don’t understand why a book shouldn’t be pleasant to look at as well as to read. And quite often they’re on acid-free paper, so they’re going to last longer.

OR: Do you see the bookshop as providing a cultural service to Oxford?

DH: Well, that’s what I’d like to do. But as I’ve said, this shop is also self-indulgent. It’s not about me being a magnanimous and tremendously good fellow; it’s about doing more than just having a bookshop. That’s why I enjoy being a bookseller in my other shop [Wendover Bookshop], where I put on jazz concerts in the shop and in the local church. People love it, and that’s great, you know. It’s better than watching TV.

OR: You opened Albion in Christmas 2008. How long have you had your other bookshop?

DH: About 21 years.

OR: And how would you categorize Albion?

DH: Well, I’m not going to say it’s a niche bookshop, but it’s not a general bookshop either. You wouldn’t come in here and buy a gardening book. I don’t sell children’s books. Albion focuses primarily on interesting fiction of the 20th century, with an emphasis on alternative culture and the beatnik life—travel, poetry, popular music, and jazz.

OR: So you aren’t just trying to sell the latest bestsellers. I see, for instance, that there’s a stack of House of Leaves and Infinite Jest on the shelf right there…

DH: Yeah, because they’re more interesting. I mean, I’m not sure I’d personally want to read House of Leaves, but…!

(Laughter.)

OR: And finally, one last question: do you have a favourite author?

DH: Joseph Conrad.

OR: Thank you.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Stephen is the editor in chief at the Oxonian Review.

Sarah Leyla Puello is reading for a DPhil in Modern Languages at Wolfson College, Oxford. Sarah is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. Akshat is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and author of many books, most notably A People’s History of the United States, died on 27 January of this year. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, the son of two immigrant factory workers, he worked at a naval shipyard and served as a bombardier during World War II before embarking upon a career in academia. An activist and sometime playwright, his interpretation of U.S. history emphasised the agency of ordinary people at the expense of political, commercial, and military elites, aiming to overturn what he perceived as the unremitting narrative of American greatness presented in the country’s textbooks. His approach proved wildly successful. Published in 1980, A People’s History sold more than a million copies and became a standard text for left-leaning American activists looking for a usable past to inform their present-day struggles.

Professor Zinn was himself a committed activist and his historical interpretation was a function of his engagement with contemporary political contentions. That engagement was deep and sustained. In 1963 he lost his job at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, as a consequence of his involvement with the civil rights movement. And during the Vietnam War he called for civil disobedience. “Thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace”, he observed. “We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.” He drew on his experience of civil rights activism to highlight the importance of persistence in the pursuit of social justice and of keeping faith in the possibility of fundamental societal change. Fittingly, he cut short his final class in order to join a picket line, encouraging his students to join him.

Mention of A People’s History’s appearance in the 1997 blockbuster Good Will Hunting has been a ubiquitous, wearying fixture in Zinn’s obituaries, but it is illustrative of the broader purchase that the book has had amongst a popular readership. Few historians have garnered such an extensive audience beyond the academy. Few have held such celebrity cachet. And few have had their position as an historian so contested. In the wake of his death there has been some controversy over just this issue: could Professor Zinn properly be named an historian? Conservative critics were understandably perturbed by Zinn’s rejection of the moral superiority of the United States and his seeming dedication to pull apart the fabric of the nation’s political narrative. Jingoism and militarism, Zinn argued, were the inevitable corollaries of nationalism, evidenced, in his view, by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Zinn sought to debunk national heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and denounced American territorial expansion in the 19th century as little more than a glorified land grab.

In short, his historical interpretation was a function of his political convictions rather than the other way around. The people were inherently progressive, and if reaction prevailed this could only mean that the popular will had been subverted by perfidious elites. That this jarred with right-wing sensibilities is obvious, yet Zinn was hardly a darling of the left. In one of the more notable critiques of Zinn’s work, Michael Kazin criticised him for not asking “the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?” Rather than historicising the left’s struggles with capital, authority, and power, Zinn offered no more than a “Manichean fable…gilded with virtuous intentions”. And if Kazin is right—if the American left does really understand itself in terms of such an uncompromising binary of good and evil—it is no wonder that it struggles to effect change in the world.

The go-to term for those looking to defend Zinn’s reputation at the hands of his critics (and there are many) is “polemicist”. The charge that Zinn had little interest in producing an objective portrait of the past is acknowledged, but blunted by the counter-assertion that he was merely offering a corrective to a dominant, even hegemonic, interpretation of the American past. Moreover, his defenders point to his broader intent: he sought to inspire protest and discontent in a world still marked by injustice. To this end, Zinn promoted a pragmatic and sober approach to political organisation, preaching patience and perseverance as favourable alternatives to zeal and enthusiasm. In this endeavour he undoubtedly achieved some success. As a further defence, Zinn’s sympathisers contend that all historical interpretations are conditioned by their political context. Professor Zinn wanted to challenge the hegemony of an equally narrow, jaundiced, America-as-beacon-of-liberty presentation of the past.

In 2010, writing history from the bottom up is hardly news, but this was not the case in the late 1970s. By challenging curricula on this score, Zinn’s long-term significance is secure. Yet the fact that he aimed for neither objectivity nor neutrality does nothing to suggest we ought to take him seriously as an historian. The question can be fairly asked: do the conscious, deliberate omissions in his account of American history—modern conservatism, for instance, or the popular anti-Catholicism of the middle decades of the 19th century—fatally undermine his claim to be read as an historian?

Certainly, A People’s History evinced a willingness to favour a unitary narrative over complexity and nuance in the interest of prosecuting a present-minded political case, but perhaps more damning is the thin sense of the people themselves that emerges from his work. This shortcoming is intimately connected with Zinn’s idiosyncratic conception of power and its distribution in the American republic. On the one hand, his oppositional, totalising, elites-versus-people model compelled him to emphasise the fundamental goodness of the American people and their ability to improve their world. Abolitionists, opponents of American aggression in the Philippines, civil rights activists, and the (sometimes violent) protesters of the Vietnam War: these are Zinn’s heroes, offering the hope of substantive, progressive change to the American body politic. As historian Christopher Phelps writes, these are the people who acted “as if change is possible in the face of decidedly unfavorable odds”, and in doing so, reshaped the historical trajectory of the United States. “The People”, the great unwashed masses, understanding perfectly their own interests, wield power.

Yet despite the power that inheres in the people, the American republic looks as it does. We can dispute the 2000 Presidential electoral returns, but 50 million people still voted for George W. Bush. Only the smallest fraction  will be corrupting, decadent millionaires set on frustrating the progressive evolution of American history. And perhaps we can assume that some had their vote “bought” under any reasonable understanding of that term, but surely this could only represent a minute number. But the majority are not, and did not. Bush was elected—twice—and it is dismissive and condescending to assume that “the people” got their own minds wrong somewhere along the line. Kazin’s point about the people accepting the legitimacy of the capitalist republic can be taken further: the people have actively colluded in building that republic, and they have done so in light of a rational assessment of their own interests. Professor Zinn pronounces upon the morality of this, and of course that is a proper subject for debate, but he does little or nothing to lay bare the power structures of the American state, family, or workplace. For this his work suffers.

In an interview conducted near the end of his life, Howard Zinn said, “The really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not the lies that are told, but that things are omitted”. By this standard, Zinn deceived his readers. But perhaps the application of this standard is too harsh. A People’s History was almost certainly meant to be read alongside the conventional accounts it sought to challenge. Ultimately, we can accept this partial defence but still find his interpretation dissatisfactory. Perhaps we expect more nuance and more honesty from historians of the left: they are supposed to speak truth to power. When they replicate the modes of narrators of the right, constructing noble lies to live by, we are disappointed.

David Sim is reading for a DPhil in History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Photograph © Penguin Books Ltd.