Donald Hall, A Carnival of Losses ** 1/2

My memory of Hall's Essays After Eighty is its calm bucolic tone, with essays not about aging per se but about living a tranquil solitary live. I was comforted by Hall's routine, especially his continued writing and his idyllic New Hampshire home. He appreciates his life rather than appearing rueful.

I approached A Carnival of Losses as something of a sequel to Essays After Eighty. However, most of the pieces in this book are reminiscences rather than reflections. For example, the middle section has short anecdotes about poets Hall has known ("As I enter the last phase [of my life], I change my subject from poetry to poets"). A Carnival of Losses would be better than Essays After Eighty for folks more interested in Hall as a poet, but it was a bit disappointing to this reader more interested in Hall as an eloquent chronicler of later life.

The final two pieces are appropriately autumnal, covering events up to the last month of his life. Even these last days brought him joy, especially when his granddaughter told him she and her husband would move into Eagle Pond Farm after his passing.

Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World *** 1/2

I was attracted to this book by its title, and hooked by Philip Pullman calling it "the strangest and most original book I've read for years." When We Cease to Understand the World is a Sebaldian hybrid of essay and fiction about scientists who followed their theories to conclusions that reoriented reality in strange ways; quantum mechanics is the paradigm case. In Labatut's world, the radical new worldview drives the scientist to madness.

The book is divided into five independent sections. The first, "Prussian Blue," fulfills all the promise of the premise. It starts with the Allied forces capturing Hermann Göring with Germany's entire supply of the opioid dihydrocodeine and ends with Fritz Haber, the creator of chlorine gas, worrying that "his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium" that plants were going to take over the world. In between is a tightly wound meditation on how beneficial and accidental discoveries inevitably come with terrible consequences as well, and how the pursuit of art leads to the machinery of war. At the end of its 24 pages I just said, "Wow."

Alas, the book gets progressively weaker from there. The second section, "Schwarzschild's Singularity" retains the intensity of "Prussian Blue" but lacks its spiraling structure. The third and fourth sections offer fairly conventional depictions of mathematicians and physicists heading down conceptual rabbit holes and coming away convinced they'd seen stark reality. The final section is a short attempt to tie the other sections together.

It was mathematics––not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon––which was changing our world to the point where... we would simply not be ale to grasp what being human meant. ... Even scientists no longer comprehend the world. ... We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.

Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters ***

Kingdom of Characters looks at the modernization of China in the 20th century from the perspective of its language. The Chinese language(s) presented a challenge to the country's participation in the rapidly globalizing world whose terms were set by Western powers. For example, how does one send a Chinese telegram when Morse code is based on the Roman alphabet?

The book is full of interesting insights about Chinese languages and their script, but it is poorly organized and fails to make its central argument that there was a "language revolution that made China modern." For instance, the first chapter tells the story of Wang Zhao, a fugitive who sneaks back into China in 1900 with a plan for simplifying the process of learning to read and write. We learn, though, that others had been attempting to provide simplified phonetic scripts for at least 50 years, and Wang's ultimate contribution was directed at a different problem: the proliferation of dialects. (He got Mandarin recognized as the standard dialect.) 

Kingdom of Characters could approach its subject from one of two angles: as a retelling of history that shows the under-appreciated role of language reform in modernization, or as an explanation of the technical challenges of systematizing Chinese characters and the creative solutions. (Amazon files the book under "Programming > Unicode Encoding Standard", so they clearly expected the latter.) 

Tsu does provide a pocket history of 20th century China, from its subjection to Europe and Japan during the Qing Dynasty through the Nationalist and Communist periods, through the side door of language-related developments. However, the political environment provides the context for the language innovation and not vice versa. The language revolution did not make China modern; China's increasing modernity gave it increasing leverage in shaping global communication standards.