Page 12
Thursday, January 24, 2013
The Rhinoceros Times Greensboro
Uncle Orson Reviews Everything Maps, Collapse, Great Books, Blindness by orson scott card
My love of maps is well known and of long standing, so it’s no surprise that I was drawn to Simon Garfield’s book On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. Along the way, however, I also picked up the same author’s book Just My Type, a history of typography – a field about which I know considerably less, but about which I wanted to know a great deal more. I was frustrated, however, by the haphazard way that Garfield approached the history of typefaces. While the individual anecdotes were often quite entertaining, the author seemed grimly determined to be clever about how he said things. This is forgivable if, and only if, accuracy is not sacrificed and the cleverness is actually clever. Let us only say that Garfield was hit and miss in the latter category. I could not judge the accuracy of his statements because the book failed to do the obvious thing: Provide a full alphabet of each typeface as it was discussed. Where samples were given, I was suspicious of some of the statements made about them. But I had not given up; it was simply a matter of coincidence and convenience that I found myself in a hotel room, beginning to read On the Map while Just My Type languished at home beside my bed. I was scarcely 30 pages into On the Map when I had to thumb back and forth to be sure I had not misread. Did he really say that Herodotus “saw the Caspian Sea – accurately – as a vast inlet, unlike many of his successors”? Yes, that’s what he said, right there on page 25. The Caspian Sea is definitely not an inlet, vast or otherwise, but rather an inland sea with no connection to any ocean. Was it possible that Garfield simply didn’t know what “inlet” meant? The question became completely baffling on page 28, when Garfield spoke of the map of Eratosthenes: “There are giant inlets of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, both of which erroneously flow into
N L R B
M A R A I U N R B I E I B E T
N U D E
B R A W L S
R A T I O N
F O U R N I N E T W O
J O B H O P E A E E F I V S O M A C R A N T H E M A M I E A D S N N I A L T A T I L I G H T Y O O H C N L E E S A R E A L S S T L E A Y E S O N S T H I T A I S H I O T Y N
O P E R E T T A
O K S U P E A S S E V E P E R D I C A L E T R A U S A G 8 1 6 3 5 7 4 9 2
I B C A C A P R H O R I D E P S D D U P N F I D A S T A
P B E O N B C Y E A V N E G R E T M A I I N C R E A A R L T A L G E Y A Z O N T E T O U T O I L T O F I E L P S E S
350A
Distributed by The New York Times syndicate
(c) PZZL.com
Solution sudoku_350A
From last week’s issue O S H A
4
Sudoku Solution
Crossword Solution C A T T
the oceans.” While the version of the map of Eratosthenes shown on pages 30 and 31 does have a narrow connection between the Caspian Sea and the northern ocean (perhaps an error drawn from reports of the mouth of the Volga), it is not “erroneous” to show the Persian Gulf as a “giant inlet” of the Indian Ocean. Our fleets sail through the straits of Hormuz into and out of the Persian Gulf whenever policy requires. It is a hard thing to charge Eratosthenes with an “error” that sailors have made, without running aground, for thousands of years. Since Garfield is touted as a wonderful writer, I am puzzled by his statement that Stravo “was born in 63 BC in Amasia by the Black Sea, and survived long enough to straddle the Common Era.” I think he meant to say “survived into the Common Era.” Since the Common Era is not yet over, and by our system of reckoning cannot ever end, it is impossible to straddle it. To “straddle” means to be on both sides of something at the same time. One can only straddle the division between the negative dating of the years BC and the years ... Wait. Not only does Garfield not know what straddle means, he mixes his nomenclature. “BC” means “before Christ,” and the time on our side of the boundary is tagged “AD,” meaning “Anno sudoku_350A Domini,” or “year of our Lord.” Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented by Will Shortz However, since this annoys nonChristians, most scholars 2 now speak of our 5 time as the “Common Era.” But then the term for the years before is not “BC,” but “BCE” – “Before Common Era.” 2Then there’s 9 the head-scratcher 7 3 on page 27, where map 2 Garfield says Eratosthenes’ 8 3 1 shows “three recognizable continents – Europe to the northeast, Africa 1 2 ... beneath it and Asia occupying the eastern half of 1 the map.” But ... but ... Eratosthenes shows Europe 4 3 5 6 2 to the northwest. Does Garfield’s 9 publisher not have 8 any editors on staff to catch errors like these?
From last week’s issue
L O O S E T E A
U L N A
C E L I N R E O L T L E B A A L R A F T L A A D
E I G H T O N E S I X
S T O I C S
Y E S B U T
S A T I
E T A T
E V I L
E S E L L S Y
L E N D
K E E L
A N T E
4 8 2 6 3 5 9 1 7
7 3 5 2 9 1 4 6 8
6 1 9 7 4 8 3 2 5
3 6 8 4 1 7 5 9 2
2 5 7 9 6 3 8 4 1
1 9 4 8 5 2 7 3 6
8 7 1 3 2 9 6 5 4
9 2 6 5 7 4 1 8 3
5 4 3 1 8 6 2 7 9
350A
Apparently not. But you don’t even have to be an expert on cartography to catch these mistakes. You only have to pay attention, which neither Garfield nor his publisher seem to have done. These may seem small things, mere annoyances. But I don’t think so. This carelessness and/or ignorance, so obvious in the first chapter, completely destroys any idea I might have of believing anything Garfield has to say. So muddy is his thinking that, even though he gives Eratosthenes full credit for a very good attempt at a measured estimate of the size of the Earth as a sphere, he is still capable of writing that his grid lines “affirmed the common belief that the earth’s length from west to east was more than double its breadth from north to south.” I think what he meant was that it was a common belief that the land mass of Europe, Asia and Africa was wider from west to east than from north to south (which is actually truish, if you are measuring only “habitable lands” as defined by the Greeks). But Eratosthenes, who believed – and demonstrated – that the Earth is an orb, could hardly have believed that the earth was longer from west to east than north to south. When you’re writing about something as precise as map-making – and commenting on accuracies and inaccuracies in ancient maps – don’t you then have a responsibility to make sure your writing is precisely accurate? I don’t usually review books that I don’t read all the way through. But, just as I sometimes write a review explaining why I walked out of a movie, I write this view to explain why I am setting this book aside – and Just My Type as well. I don’t insist on rigid accuracy – in my own work or in the works of others. People make mistakes all the time. But Garfield purports to be informing us of facts, and to be commenting about two fields in which fine distinctions matter very, very much. After all, it was for want of complete, precise maps that Lee failed to destroy McClellan’s army during the Peninsula campaign in the Civil War. And we’ve all had our GPS glitches when a tool we relied on gave us false information. Garfield’s sins are not those of vagueness or approximation. Rather he makes statements that are false, misleading or completely incoherent. Life is short. Brainspace is precious. Why should I spend any more of my time putting the language and ideas of such a careless or ignorant writer into my head? I think of books of pseudo-scholarship like Garfield’s to be only just a little shy of being hoaxes and frauds. People buy such books thinking they’re going to learn something.
.... Contrast Garfield with a serious writer like Jared Diamond. Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a valuable work of historical analysis – a very long essay with examples. Diamond’s point, in that essay, is that when you step back from the particulars of history, you discover that great empires and great civilizations, while they are certainly the product of human choices and human endeavors, only arise in places where there are resources enough to support a sufficient population, with surpluses enough to support a leisure class. In a way, the point is obvious – I was taught this, more or less, in junior high. But Diamond gives the facts in a way that illuminates and expands our understanding of history. He asks us to include whole new ranges of geographical and other knowledge in our attempts to explain why civilization throve here and withered there. Now, that doesn’t mean that his work is error-free, or that his conclusions are completely correct. And in Guns, Germs, and Steel he is careful to point out that his thesis does not replace history and does not explain everything. Rather he is merely asserting that certain physical conditions must be met before a great civilization can arise. These conditions don’t guarantee the rise of a civilization and they don’t, except in the broadest sense, determine the form that civilization will take. Guns, Germs, and Steel was a great book. Unfortunately, Jared Diamond is also a true believer in the religion of environmentalism, an apocalyptic belief system in which humans always seem to foul not only their own nest, but the nests of every other creature. So he followed up Guns, Germs, and Steel with his testamentary book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The subtitle suggested a discussion of the many ways that individual nations and empires, or the broader civilizations they may represent, make choices that determine the duration, resilience and dominance of their culture and of their polity. But the book is not that at all. Instead, it’s a bit of a screed limited solely to discussion of the ecological mistakes that can lead a society to defeat itself. Alas, this is almost a trivial topic, unless you’re a True Believer. Why? Most societies, cultures and polities fail, when they fail, for reasons having nothing at all to do with ecological mistakes. It is true that some societies have collapsed because of ecological disasters, but most of these are not human induced. And over the vast sweep of history, the persistence of this or that culture rarely has (Continued on page 24)