The Black Hole Wars

I listened to Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole Wars on CD in the car, meaning I probably didn't get half of what I was supposed to get, but on the other hand that I might have absorbed more (consciously or unconsciously) than I normally do when reading a book of popular science. The question of what the popular reader actually gets out of a book like this, which is really trying to communicate the content of the science as well as how the science is done, interests me a lot. Something like ten years ago I listened to The Origin of Species on tape while driving, and although again there was a lot that I missed (sometimes while struggling to maintain my alertness on I-5...) the experience of listening to Darwin's arguments "in their entirety" aloud was transformative, something like what I imagine it must have been like for citizens listening to philosophers in the agora. Susskind is attempting to convey the doing of science in the same way. It's a different kind of popular science from either Brian Greene, who as I see it is working to convey the beauty of the vision as a kind of done deal, a vision as it were of how everyone will see the universe working once string theory and its cosmologies have been proven out somehow; and different again from that of Not Even Wrong, whose argument derives from being "inside the argument" but not able to convey all of the things that make the string theorists wrong except at some point in a qualitative way (convincing as one reads long, convincing because of the philosophical holes the author seems to be illuminating in the Landscape theory, the basic weakness of the possibility that it might not be possible to ever verify or disprove the theory).

Nixonland

The town I grew up in, the city of Orange, was very close to Yorba Linda, where Nixon was from before his family moved to Whittier, and I tend to think of it in retrospect as part of "Nixonland." But that would be "Nixonland" in a different sense from that used in Rick Pearlstein's fantastic book of history of the sixties and early seventies. I don't know whether the adjective to apply to this epic is "Tolstoyan" because of its scope and moral vision, or something more comic because the times inherently have an aspect of slapstick and Rabelaisian excess. Either way, the book is an epic, the best recollection of all the insanities of the era I've seen. When I started reading the book a couple of months ago, I read (or skimmed through, rather, looking at the pictures) Barry Miles' book Hippie in parallel. Nixonland was a terrific antidote to the fundamental dishonesty of looking at publicity photographs and self-presentations as history; though on the other hand, the Miles book provided pictures where they were wanting in Pearlstein's, so all in all the less substantial and more one-sided book was still helpful. But Pearlstein's book is a non-fiction novel about both the character of Richard Nixon and the character of American democracy. He allots responsibility between the hippies, the liberals, and the right-wingers in a way that seems to me fundamentally just, though because he does it through storytelling, perhaps being deliberately reminiscent of the sixties' New Journalism (certainly Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson come to mind ) I'm not sure he can claim to have done so as a historian rather than as a brilliant novelist.