“Measuring the world” – Daniel Kehlmann

What a fantastically funny read! “Die Vermessung der Welt” is two biographies in one, lovingly weaving together the lives of Carl Friedrich Gauß (Gauss) and Alexander von Humboldt, both of whom lived and changed German science in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Both men, as good scientists, had an obsession with knowledge. Humboldt, tiny and possibly homosexual Prussian aristocrat with a famous older brother and a thirst for adventure, without much talent for human interaction, tirelessly and with little regard for his fellow travellers, measured most of South America, in the process accidentally tasting human flesh, forming strange attachments to a stray dog, mapping the canal connecting the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and stealing human corpses. Gauß, from a poor family and reliant on patronage, impatient with the slow wit of everyone else he met, at least partially aware of the social faux-pas he committed, turned his mind to several big mathematical problems at a time and completed his masterpiece, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in his early 20s, and was known as the prince of mathematicians.

Kehlmann’s genius lies in the exclusive use of indirect speech between all of his characters, which creates a comical distance between reality and these extraordinary protagonists although I cannot vouch for the English translation as I read this book in German.

This book has to be taken with a pinch of salt, however, as some liberties appear to have been taken with facts and many anecdotes are so droll they must have been invented by the author. But the alternating (and then joining) chapters of Humboldt versus Gauß are so hilarious and the characters Kehlmann shapes so infuriatingly strange and German that I personally wouldn’t care if it was pure fiction.

“Dragon Hunter” – Charles Gallenkamp

“Dragon Hunter” is the account of Roy Chapman Andrews’ Central Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s and reads like part biography, part adventure fiction. If Indiana Jones is a hero of yours, you should know that Andrews has often been suspected to be the model for this “indomitable archaeologist-adventurer” and you will probably enjoy this book very much.

Andrews  “possessed an entrepreneurial spirit of sweeping dimensions”, which made his career illustrious and incredibly successful, but he was also a hugely popular socialite in New York and in the foreign colony in Peking where he spent many happy years planning and carrying out his expeditions. Andrews’ friendships and acquaintances included those with a Russian prince, the mother of Czar Nicholas II as well as the owner of a high class Yokohama brothel, while his first wife Yvette was a close friend of Prussian princess Viktoria Luise.

While Andrews’ legacy, the Central Asiatic Expeditions, were borne out of his desire to explore the unknown, their scientific validation came from mentor Henry Fairfield Osborn’s racist theory that Asia must be the cradle of humankind and civilisation, as an African origin of man seemed “decidedly unpalatable”. Andrews therefore sets out to find the “missing link” in the Gobi desert. As biographers often do, Gallenkamp states this latent racism and moves on without much judgment. When the expeditions did not turn up any human fossils, this was outweighed by the volume of dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils they unearthed and the lack of support for any theory of human evolution was not considered a failure.

An educational side effect of this book is the insight the reader gains into Mongolia’s history and culture at the start of the last but also preceding centuries. A never-ending tug-of-war between Russia and China along with a rich religious history and the influences of nomads and immigrants make this land-locked country feel like the heart of Central Asia. Despite some unflattering remarks about the natives by the explorers (unmoral, dirty, adulterous, without compassion for the dying), some friendships develop between Mongols, Chinese and the American explorers, but for the most part, the foreigners living in Peking, including Andrews and his fellow scientists, shut themselves away into a happy enclave, remarkably insensitive and oblivious to China’s political upheaval in the 1910s, 20s and 30s and “learned to steel [themselves] against the civil unrest and atrocities that occurred almost daily”, like public executions. Battling Chinese warlords and corrupt Mongolian governments mean the expeditions end after a few years, buried in red tape and xenophobic (or anti-colonial) attitudes.

Andrews’ scientific achievements were significant and some of the fossils found by his multi-disciplinary expeditions shed a lot of light on mammalian evolution. The reason he was so enormously popular in his time was probably due to his “flamboyant nature”, charisma and love of adventure which he managed to convey to a huge audience. Gallenkamp concludes wistfully: “in terms of romance, daring, and sheer audacity, we will never see the equal of his grand adventure again.”

Read this if you have ever wished you were born when there was still a few blank spaces left on the maps of the Earth.

“Madame Curie”, Eve Curie

This is the second biography of a scientist I’ve read, this one written by a family member – Marie Curie’s daughter, who, incidentally, died at the age of 102 while I was reading this book. The close relationship between subject and author had all sorts of implications. Most noticeably, this is probably the most thorough and personal book about the double Nobel laureate anyone was ever likely to write.

Eve Curie, born when her mother was 37 and her father was to live only 16 more months, naturally mentions the scientific achievements of Madame Curie, and goes into great detail on her attitude to work, but the physiochemical ins and outs of the discovery of polonium and radium (or any other of Marie Curie’s works) are largely glossed over. Since I am not well versed in physics or mathematics this suited me fine and from the start I was taken captive by the life of the Polish student who adores her family and her country but is unable to pass the opportunity of studies in France.

I became engrossed as in a novel, waiting excitedly for the chapter entitled “Pierre Curie”, where the serious and hard-working heroine meets the love of her life. The love story between her parents is described tenderly by Curie and if not textbook romantic, it is certainly fulfilling and extraordinary.

It is odd and possibly intentional how the biography progresses when Pierre Curie dies in a traffic accident. Up to this point, Marie’s life was recounted chronologically and in minute detail, while afterwards her years blend into each other. Moods and events in the physicist’s life are described in a seemingly arbitrary order and her sorrow of having lost her husband is palpable.

Coincidentally I was reading this book while in Paris and found myself on an accidental secular pilgrimage: depressed at the street corner where Pierre died, enjoying the view in the street where Marie spent the last years of her life, and even unexpectedly found that their bodies had since been moved to the Panthéon, the resting place of the people France is most proud of.

Eve Curie’s arcane writing style (the book was first published in 1937) throughout evokes the admiration for her famous mother, without euphemising her flaws. Madame Curie is portrayed as a highly intelligent and motivated woman with no great natural skills for housework or personal friendships and no time for leisure. She raised her daughters sometimes controversially (the elder, Irène, also won a Nobel prize later, so her methods can’t have been all wrong) and scorned all publicity and anything that would distract her from science. Her religious views changed from Catholic, raised by a pious mother, to the view expressed in the following excerpt from a letter to her cousin.

“Let everybody keep his own faith, so long as it is sincere. [...] I respect sincere religious feelings when I meet them, even if they go with a limited state of mind.”

In fact, the many examples of Marie’s writing, her direct quotes and letters addressed to her, are among the highlights of the book. As a young woman she writes down the beautiful headstrong motto: “First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events”. At the height of her undesired fame she points out to a journalist how “In science we must be interested in things, not in persons”, and this seems to sum up her character well.

Unusual events from Marie Curie’s life that I had never heard of include her friendship with the royal Belgian couple and her creation of an X-ray lab on wheels servicing military hospitals during the first World War.

Despite this intimate book, Madame Curie remains alien to me, she is unlike anyone I have met in real life. But maybe therein lay the appeal, for me and all those she inspired during her lifetime.

“Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code”, Matt Ridley

I enjoyed this book immensely! Biographies of brilliant people might be a completely untapped source of reading pleasure for me. Surely, a lot of it is due to Ridley’s easy style and entertaining anecdotes; I have only read his “Genome” and can’t remember how I felt about it, but I’ll definitely read more of his works in the future.

But what I loved the most was finding out about this astonishing man, who I always thought had stood in Watson’s shadow, which was apparently not the case at all.

I was so enamoured with Crick by half-way through the book that I was totally shocked by the revelations about his radical views (at least he held them in the 1960s and 70s) on races, eugenics and sterilisation of “genetically inferior” people. I don’t know what to do with this information and it seems like neither did Ridley. It is mentioned dutifully but the author doesn’t really take a position and maybe that is not the job of a biographer. As I uneasily read on about this man with the incredible imagination, admiration gained the upper hand again and by the end I cried when he dies.

The fact that Crick was a raging (yes!) atheist helped, of course, but the main reason for liking him is expressed in this last sentence of the epilogue: “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”