Intelligent books
Intelligent books are just as rare as great books. Good books are happily fairly common. Take for instance the hundred best sellers we have each year: some make you roll your eyes, some are just not for you, but I bet you can read two good books a month, whatever your taste, because that is what I do. A week later, I don't remember the author, the title or the story, but I had a good time.
Intelligent books are rare. I do not mean books about intelligent people: I could show you 20 terrible books about Einstein. I mean books who make you smarter. I find one every five years or so. Books you remember for the rest of your life because they travel in life with you. The subject, I think, does not matter, it is your relationship with the author. Here are a few examples.
Owen Gingerich, The book nobody read.It is the story of a historian of sciences who wonders how many people have actually read the book Revolutions by Copernicus, when it was published, five hundred years ago. Who knew then that maybe the earth is not at the center of the universe? It is at first a good subject for a small scientific paper. But as this scientist is very competitive and wants to be thorough, he starts visiting all the libraries of the world where there is a copy of the first edition of the book. It includes difficult trips to Communist countries during the cold war. Because he is very precise,meticulous and particular, he starts making notes on what makes every copy different: from notes in the margin to the size of the pages to the small holes created by bookworms. Then he tries to find who wrote the notes in the margins, and which are the copies of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler? And of course he gets interested in the second edition...So in time he becomes the world expert in such books, that could sell for a million dollars and discovers a few fakes and a few thieves. If a man like that can win your heart, this is the book.
In time he can show that teachers of 500 years ago wrote notes in their copy of the book; such notes were faithfully copied by their students,who in turn became profs. It is how a new block of knowledge started traveling around in what Gingerich calls the invisible college. Just like nowadays: scientists learn from each other and fine tune their findings independently of where they work: just by meeting colleagues with the same interest all over the world and sharing what they know. It is an important find, worth all these trips and a long career. It makes a convoluted but delightful book.
Peter Jackson: France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy Making 1933-1939 I am like most of you: the subject does not attract me. That is because I am prejudiced against French intelligence. When I lived in France, for about thirty years, we were more concerned about leaks of secrets outside than about the quality of what the French intel brought in. Now this is an excellent book, not just well documented: it is also very smart. I have not seen clear thinking like this since ...George Bernard Shaw. And that was half a century ago.
George Bernard Shaw:Complete Plays The man made my education;everything he said was on that thin line that separates inconvenient truths from outrageous thoughts. For instance, he remarked that we ask more morality from the poor than from the rich (Where is that? I think in Pygmalion (the undeserving poor have as much need as the deserving ones). I laughed at the forced conversions to Christianity described in Androcles and the Lion. But my preferred play is the forgotten Misalliance,where the young heroin falls in love with an aristocrat and asks her rich father: "Papa, buy the brute for me." Misalliance is a welcome relief after the Jane Austen of this world.
Simon Garfield: Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World
This is a small delightful book about the invention of a dye. It will teach you more about Victorian times than a whole library of textbooks.
Jorge Semprun: The long voyage Semprun is the best French novelist of the second half of the 20th century (it has been a terrible time for French literature, no surprise that the light came from Spain). The book is about the travel in train of war prisoners from France to the concentration camp of Buchenwald. If members of your family have seen terrible things during any war, Vietnam or Iraq, you know that they do not talk about it. Not for ten or twenty years. It happened to Semprun after WWII: he did not talk about the camps until 1963, and even then, in this beautiful novel full or restraint, he does not talk about Buchenwald: he just describes the long voyage to the camp. It is horrible enough. Semprun is above all a great writer, with style, strong images and a good sense of composition. This book is about learning "to stay inside yourself",as he says, true to yourself. Semprun is not translated enough. He had an interesting career, as a young communist aristocrat (when he was 16), a resistant,years of intellectual misery when he discovered what communism really was, then as a Minister of Culture in the Spanish government. What is left for us is an incomparable writer.
Quincy Jones The Autobiography of Quincy Jones This is a very intelligent book: don't classify it with celebrities bios. It has an uncommon architecture, and it is very bright. Unlike other bios of the kind, there is no doubt it is also very true. It leaves you pondering the mystery of a young guy without parents, without education, without money, who wants, not only "to be a musician" like all our young neighbors, which is the easy part, but to learn how to write music and the secrets of orchestration. I am very impressed by Quincy Jones.
Arthur Honegger I am a composer As we talk music, here is another composer who made music for great movies. Honegger is a master of Protestant music (my preferred piece is Le Roi David (King David)) just like Messiaen represents a branch of Catholic music (I like the Dawn Chorus and Birds songs more than the religious pieces). I am a composer is a small book that greatly influenced me. I still remember, fifty years later, that Honegger wrote that "writing music is like climbing on a ladder without leaning it on a wall."