Dec 15 2008

City on Fire

On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more than 2300 tons of the substance when a fire below turned into an explosion that produced a mushroom cloud reminiscent of an atomic blast. The Texas City waterfront was also home to chemical plants, and storage facilities for numerous petrochemical products. Many of these also caught fire and exploded in part. Several hundred people died; the exact total is unknown because of the completeness of the destruction at the explosion’s center.

City on Fire, by Bill Minutaglio, tells the story of the explosion with both verve and sympathy. Nor does he skimp on the structural factors that contributed the disaster: Texas City was (and most likely still is) run by and for the corporations who have built industry there; the habits of wartime and the fervor of the Cold War had left people deferential to the government. The companies, for example, fought hard to keep the city from annexing the land where their facilities were, which would have made them liable for local taxes. As it was, they did not even see fit to pay for the upkeep of a fireboat within the harbor. The port of nearby Houston had prohibited shipments of ammonium nitrate; Texas City had not.

Minutaglio follows about a dozen people from just before the disaster into the chaotic aftermath, with some follow-up about each one of them, or the survivors of those who perished. He keeps the book moving at a breakneck pace, writing in the present tense, and in a style somewhat reminiscent of period newsreels. This approach grated at first, and I was never fully happy with it, though I can see why he made the choice, as it is very effective for the dramatic events at the heart of the story.

A little more background would not have been remiss. The book is just over 275 pages, with a very generously spaced layout; surely he could have said something more about the chemical itself, about how the city came to be built, a little more scene setting. In choosing to tell the story through the dozen people he selects, Minutaglio seems to have chosen not to give more context.

It’s too bad, because he writes that he had been interested in the tale for nearly 20 years. I was left wondering where the rest was. Another unfortunate aspect is that the book was published in 2003. It was being written (most likely) in late 2001, early 2002, and the cloud of 9/11 hangs heavily over parts of the story. Faced with writing about a devastating explosion that resulted in numerous casualties, Minutaglio could not have ignored the similarities; but it would have been a better book if he had found a way.

There are European threads to the story: the ship was French, and the fertilizer itself was bound for Europe. Major ammonium nitrate disasters happened in Germany in 1921, and later in 1947 in France. It’s well told. I also suspect that another book, which Minutaglio graciously acknowledges, might have been more to my taste. Not that it’s likely to be found in a Tbilisi library…

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/12/15/city-on-fire/

Dec 15 2008

Premature Evaluation: In Europe

Less than 10 percent of the way into the book (to be fair, my edition weighs in at just under 900 pages), I’m liking In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak a great deal, and looking forward to the rest.

In 1999, Mak was commissioned by a Dutch newspaper to travel around the continent at the cusp of the new millennium, and to take stock of both the present — particularly with enlargement of the European Union in mind — and the century just passing. In Europa was published in the Netherlands in 2004, and an English paperback edition came out in 2008.

So far, I most like the specificity. This is a clear advantage of having newspaper writing as a source material. He spoke with a specific person in a specific place who said one particular thing. From Paris:

At Opéra metro station I start a conversation with Pierre Maillot. With his grey beard and plain spectacles, he is standing in one of the corridors holding a tin can and a cardboard sign: ‘I beg your forgiveness. But I am hungry.’ This is how he earns about a hundred francs (roughly fifteen euros) a day, enough for a bed and a lonely meal with a quarter-litre of wine. The older people are generous, but the young ones tease him. ‘I have my only friend right here with me,’ he says, reaching into his inside pocket and pulling out a bible with a red plastic cover. Then he tells me a complicated story about prison, a divorce, problems inside his head, vanished unemployment benefits and other vagaries of a man’s life.

The art, of course, is in choosing the stories, and in the narration in between. Mak seems to have plenty of art.

I’m also not looking for new theses about the sweep of the twentieth century, though if he has some, I will surely be interested. It’s the details that I think will be interesting; how do his views (from roughly my parents’ generation) fit with the picture of Europe that I’ve built up? So far, so good.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/12/15/premature-evaluation-in-europe/

Nov 22 2008

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

This book was an extraordinary combination of history, prehistory, geography, geology, and anthropology that greatly illuminated my understanding of this vast continent and its people. But precisely why Africa has failed to develop in pace with the rest of the world is left a mystery.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/11/22/africa-a-biography-of-the-continent-by-john-reader/

Nov 14 2008

The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare

When I took Shakespeare in college the professor dismissed this play as silly, but he can’t have been reading the same play. The love story is touching, not just the romantic courtship between the gentlemen and the ladies, but also the friendship between the two gentlemen, and the play is only saved from being a tragedy at the very last minute. There is also a barely averted forcible rape–“I’ll woo thee like a soldier!”–that is rather shocking in an Elizabethan romance. This play is one of Shakespeare’s darker comedies.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/11/14/the-two-gentlemen-of-verona-by-william-shakespeare/

Nov 12 2008

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

This is a wonderful work of imagination on Wells’ part, but it is interesting to me for two reasons that are tangential to the story. The first is that it was written before the close of the nineteenth century, when Britain was thought of as the most powerful nation on earth, so it made sense at the time that the Martians would first attack Britain rather than the United States or Russia or China. The second is the long monologue made by a soldier that seems to profess that it may actually be good for humanity to endure such a cataclysm as an invasion of Martians, as it will toughen the human race and eliminate all the weaklings. This is consistent with the social Darwinist thinking that was prevalent in Wells’ time and is still prevalent with a certain crowd. The story itself is interesting enough, yet for all of Wells’ imagination and scientific speculation he cannot escape the rather provincial sensibilities of a Victorian English gentleman. But this is a book worth reading.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/11/12/the-war-of-the-worlds-by-h-g-wells/

Sep 21 2008

Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Florence Dupont

The author is obviously enamored of the ancient Romans, and I suspect that she projects her own preferences and prejudices onto them. But this is a fascinating book that takes a look at what kind of people the Romans were, apart from the endless wars of conquest and political intrigues that historians typically dwell. Dupont makes them out to be virtuous to an extent that strains the reader’s credulity, but she also accurately describes them as a people whose lives were lived in public and who had very little sense of the solitary or introspective life. As with most classical historians, she tends to focus mostly on the habits of the upper classes; it would be refreshing to get a glimpse into the lives of the common people of Rome, who are mostly neglected by historians. I am probably more Greek than Roman in my attitudes and preferences, but the Romans have never failed to fascinate me, and this book adds much to my knowledge and appreciation of them.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/09/21/daily-life-in-ancient-rome-by-florence-dupont/

Sep 17 2008

In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells

Wells was not a religious man, yet somehow this strikes me as a deeply religious book. He seems to have had a profound conviction that the world we live in is a fallen world that has gone horribly wrong, and he seems to have been equally certain that nothing short of a deus ex machina like a comet from outer space could ever set things right again. From a world of injustice, oppression, inequality, pettiness, and cruelty emerges a new utopia of peace and brotherhood and love. Yet the part of the book that describes this utopia is rather dull and anticlimactic; far more engaging is the earlier account of the narrator as an angry young man with a vendetta against society and a chip on his shoulder against fate. I identified with this bitter young man and his sense of outrage against Things As They Are; I was rooting for him to exact his vengeance when the vapors of the comet suddenly brought peace to the world. Not a great story, but a potent expression of Wells’ vision.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/09/17/in-the-days-of-the-comet-by-h-g-wells/

Sep 06 2008

Caesar: Politician and Statesman by Matthias Gelzer

An excellent study of the crisis of the late Roman Republic, the Gallic and Civil Wars, and Julius Caesar’s personal genius. To put it as mildly as possible, Caesar was a man of remarkable ability, not the least of which was his extraordinary knack for never missing an opportunity, and he was born at the just the right time to take advantage of the festering political situation at Rome. Monarchy hardly seems to most of us like an improvement of the political system, but I would argue that the Empire was better off for the first two hundred years under the rule of the Caesars than it ever had been under the Republic. Caesar may have destroyed the Republic, but he undoubtedly gave the Empire a new lease on life. Modern Europe, which is the heir of the Roman Empire, can thank him for this.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/09/06/caesar-politician-and-statesman-by-matthias-gelzer/

Aug 17 2008

A History of Nigeria by Toyin Falola

A good source of information, if not an exciting narrative, on the largest country in Africa. The story is typically African: colonial exploitation is followed by a brief and heady period of independence, which is followed by a long period of political corruption, ethnic violence, and economic decline. I personally remain as mystified by Africa’s continual failure to thrive as I am by the unparallelled success of the United States. Is Africa under some kind of curse? Nigeria has all of the resources necessary to make it a successful nation, except competent political leadership. I try to remain optimistic, but sub-Saharan Africa has had fifty years of independence in which to get its act together, and its record has not been impressive. Here’s hoping that Nigeria will soon break free of the evil spell it has been under.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/08/17/a-history-of-nigeria-by-toyin-falola/

Jun 17 2008

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Freud doesn’t get a lot of respect these days, but I found this book for the most part lucid and rational, if not exactly scientific. Part of Freud’s thesis borrows from Rousseau in arguing that civilization represents a compromise with the individual for the sake of preserving security, but for Freud this is problematic, because he sees civilized society as repressing the natural instincts of man and thereby causing unhappiness and neurosis. For Freud the conscience, or the “super-ego,” is merely the internalization of society’s condemnation of man’s natural but at times antisocial desires, and as such it is a source of constant anxiety, as these desires are for the most part impossible to eliminate. Freud does not seem to have made his mind up whether civilization is a good thing or a bad thing, but as a psychoanalyst he sees a clear and unfortunate conflict between civilization and the individual pyche. An interesting discussion, if a bit ponderous.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2008/06/17/civilization-and-its-discontents-by-sigmund-freud/