Category Archives: Non-Fiction

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

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The fair in question was the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, more formally known as the World’s Columbian Exposition in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus visiting the New World. The book provides a lot of information about the fair that I found very interesting, especially the new technology that was introduced. I found the parallel stories of the fair’s chief architect and a serial killer who preyed on visitors to the fair much less interesting. So I skipped some of it, but not the story of George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., an engineer from Pittsburgh.

He conceived and then built the world’s largest, most amazing Ferris Wheel. People were worried that it would blow over in strong wind, but it remained standing and was the most popular attraction at the fair. It was 264 feet tall and was meant to rival the Eiffel Tower, which had been constructed for an earlier world’s fair in Paris. The Ferris Wheel had 36 enclosed cars that could each hold 60 people. That allowed 2,160 people to ride at the same time. That was some Ferris Wheel.

West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

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This is an oral history of Los Angeles, especially Hollywood. It focuses on the wealthy and powerful Doheny family, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, the troubled actress Jennifer Jones, and an unknown actress named Jane Garland. Some of it was interesting. Much of it wasn’t, which is why I didn’t read every word.

At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

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The book’s full title is At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others. Strike the “apricot cocktails” and that pretty well sums it up.

Sarah Bakewell found some fame and fortune with her previous book How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. I read and enjoyed that one. As usually happens, it made me want to read some of the subject’s writings: the 16th century essays of Michel de Montaigne. 

At the Existentialist Café made me curious about the writings of some of its subjects, but less optimistic about enjoying or even making sense of what they had to say. Reading Bakewell’s descriptions, explanations and quotations of works by Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Sartre left me relatively clueless about what reading hundreds of pages of phenomenology or existentialism would be like.

In addition, except for Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, I didn’t find the life stories or idiosyncrasies of these thinkers especially interesting, certainly not as interesting as Bakewell does.

The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism by Carol Rovane

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I would have to read this book at least one more time in order to feel confident about summarizing the conclusions the author reaches. However, here’s my impression after reading it once. As I understand her aims, Carol Rovane wants to clearly explain what relativism is with respect to science and ethics, and then determine whether we should endorse relativism with respect to either of those domains.

She begins by criticizing what she calls “the prevailing, consensus view” of relativism, which she says relies on the idea of disagreement. This is the idea that relativism arises “with a certain kind of disagreement that is said to be, first of all, ‘irresoluble’ [i.e. unsolvable], but also, second, ‘irresoluble’ for the specific reason that both parties are right” [15-16]. Rovane prefers defining relativism in terms of alternatives, which may or may not involve disagreement, and which are themselves explainable in terms of “normative insularity”.

According to Rovane, relativists believe that some alternative views in science or ethics are cut off from other scientific or ethical views. Logic neither “mandates, licenses or prohibits” inferences between them, so two people can hold alternative views about science or ethics and logic has nothing to say about the alternatives [94]. It’s as if, metaphorically speaking, people can occupy different scientific or ethical worlds. Non-relativists, on the other hand, believe that all truth bearers are logically related, either directly or indirectly. My scientific views aren’t insulated from your scientific views, and your ethical views aren’t insulated from mine. We all occupy the same scientific world and the same ethical world.

Rovane goes so far as to label the non-relativist and relativist positions in terms of how many “worlds” they mandate. What she calls “unimundialism” is the non-relativistic view that there is only one world (in which there is no “normative insularity” between propositions in science or ethics). “Multimundialism” is the relativistic view that there are many worlds (in which there is “normative insularity” between some scientific or ethical propositions). 

I think the conclusion she reaches is that scientific theories apply to a single world, so it’s best not to think of science in unimundial or non-relativistic terms. Reality is one, so alternative scientific theories can’t be equally correct. But unlike scientists, who all study the same world, people grow up and live their daily lives in various social conditions. These social conditions help determine which behavior is morally correct for them. Rovane thinks it’s fair to say, therefore, metaphorically speaking, that people inhabit different ethical worlds depending on their particular social conditions. Hence, multimundialism or relativism is an acceptable view with respect to ethics.

To help justify her relativistic conclusion regarding ethics, Rovane asks us to imagine two women. One woman was brought up in Europe or America and accepts the ethical importance of autonomy, i.e. every individual’s right to make their way in the world according to their own needs and desires while respecting the needs and desires of other people. The other woman was brought up in a village in India and sincerely believes she has an ethical obligation to obey her parents, even if it means giving up her right to pursue her own needs and desires.  Rovane argues that these two women live in very different ethical worlds. Their societies are so different when it comes to ethical issues that each woman is acting ethically, even though they are following very different paths and choosing to obey very different ethical principles.

Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting by William Goldman

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William Goldman is a novelist who became a successful screenwriter in the 1960s. His best-known screenplays include Harper (the Paul Newman detective movie), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men,  A Bridge Too Far and The Princess Bride. He wrote this book in 1982, partly as a memoir and partly as a guide to screenwriting. It’s a bit dated now, but it’s still a wonderful book for anyone who’s interested in how movies get made (and how many movies don’t). 

Goldman lists two key lessons for the novice screenwriter (the Roman numerals and capital letters are his):

I. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (i.e. nobody in the movie business knows for sure what will work and what won’t)

II. SCREENWRITING IS STRUCTURE (i.e. there’s more to screenwriting than telling your story in the right sequence, but you’ll never write a good one if you don’t get the story’s structure right).

The biggest lesson I took away from the book, however, is that screenwriting is extremely frustrating. You can make a whole lot of money at it, if you’re very talented and/or very lucky, but you’ll spend most of your time writing scripts that never get made into movies, and when one of your scripts does get filmed, you won’t have any control over what the director, producers, actors, et al. do with it. Film making is a collaborative medium, but the screenwriter is rarely invited to collaborate after filming starts. It’s unlikely you’ll even be invited to a sneak preview.