Collected Miscellany

John Derbyshire is an interesting fellow. Most bloggers know him as a political commentator for National Review. The literary minded know him as the author of a critically acclaimed novel (Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream). His most recent book – Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics – goes in a different direction: advanced math. Here is a teaser from the dust jacket:

Alternating passages of extraordinarily lucid mathematical exposition with chapters of elegantly composed biography and history, Prime Obsession is a fascinating and fluent account of an epic mathematical mystery that continues to challenge and excite the world. Posited a century and a half ago, Riemann’s hypothesis is an intellectual feast for the cognoscenti and the curious alike. Not just a story of numbers and calculations, Prime Obsession is the engrossing tale of a relentless hunt for an elusive proof — and those who have been consumed by it.

Born and raised in England, Derbyshire it turns out is a mathematician and linguist by education. He has made his home here in the States for the last fifteen years (and was recently granted citizenship) often working as a systems analyst for Wall Street firms. In his “spare time” Derbyshire also writes for the New Criterion and the Washington Times among others.

Intrigued by this new book, I thought it would be interesting to ask Mr. Derbyshire a few questions and he graciously agreed to answer them. The interview below was conducted by email.

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In case you can’t get enough Richard Pipes, Jay Nordlinger has a review of his recent autobiogrpahy (Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger) in the currennt issue of National Review (subscription required). Here is Nordlinger’s take:

It is stirring to be in the company of this mind — Pipes’s, not Butler’s — for 250 pages. They are filled with immense learning and insight. They are leavened, too, by humor and idiosyncratic asides. The story of his marriage to Irene, a tall and warm beauty, is touching. And I happen to find touching Pipes’s notorious stubbornness — often a kind of righteous stubbornness. He tells a funny tale about having to visit the Soviet Embassy after Brezhnev died, and being asked to sign the condolence book. Trapped, he thought fast: and did sign his name, but completely illegibly.

If I wasn’t completely behing on my reading I would be tempted to pick this one up and move it to the top of my reading list.

I just noticed that Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of the New Republic, has a book review posted at TNR Online: Rust Proof. Peretz recommends Growing Up Fast, the first book from documentary film maker Joanna Lipper:

In nearly 400 fast-paced pages of wonderfully evocative prose, much of it in the words of her six subjects, all teen mothers, Lipper has actually conveyed the social and personal history of a growing class of Americans for whom there is little help and less hope. But this class of people has inner lives, and this is what Lipper is so deft at communicating.

Must have made quite an impression for Peretz to review it himself. What is also interesting are the little digs he drops along the way. In describing the rust belt town of Pittsfield, for example, he remarks: “Let’s call contemporary Pittsfield clear evidence of Jack Welch’s industrial statesmanship.” Further along he describes the character’s world and Lipper’s capturing of it:

But in Pittsfield, Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the equivalent of Third World wages and no health care benefits, is an optimal ambition for many. Lipper does not hedge or bow to convention. She tells us what she sees, knows, understands. She follows no party line. She is neither politically correct nor conservatively callous. She tells us the truth as she hears it and grasps it.

A couple things struck me in that paragraph. Are wages at KFC really the equivalent of “third world” wages? If so why is it an optimal goal? I found the assertion that she is “neither politically correct nor conservatively callous” interesting too. Isn’t this a rather unfair stereotype? Are liberals generally PC and conservatives callous, as the sentences seems to imply? I realize it doesn’t have to be read that way but it does sort of hint at it. It read like the middle is the place between overly-sensitive liberals and overly-harsh conservatives.

Perhaps when I read reviews in a political magazine I am overly sensitive to harsh political ideas . . .

Speaking of Russia, interesteing discussion of Russian literature at Slate. It seems that in the land of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov popular novels are now about sex and violence.

To the dismay of traditionalists, pulp writers have become the dominant influence in contemporary Russian literature. Most prominent among them is a former lieutenant-colonel with the police, Aleksandra Marinina, who has written 17 novels featuring a female detective, Anastasia Kamenskaya, who single-handedly takes on the Russian mafia. Vulnerable, harassed, and underpaid, Kamenskaya often dabbles in hypnotism and other esoteric rituals to survive the cruel world of post-Soviet Russia. Victor Dotsenko, who spent 10 years in a Soviet prison after being convicted for rape, is almost as popular as Marinina. The Rambo-like hero of his bestselling novels is a Russian veteran of the Afghan war who does violent battle against the Russian mafia. Both writers use a rough prose style peppered with criminal jargon and allusions to the violent, oligarchic, and hyper-sexed world of ’90s Russia. They seem to have hit upon a winning formula: Dotsenko has sold almost 20 million copies, and Marinina is not far behind.

Is this a case of American decadence bringing down the Russian Soul? No, not really. Rather it seems to reflect the chaotic changes that ripped that country after the fall of the Soviet Union:

These writers are popular because they depict the reality of a country that morphed into a violent mobster state in the years following the Soviet collapse. Contract killings were rife, prostitution was ubiquitous, former state enterprises were taken over by the mob, and conspicuous consumption was the defining character trait of the new Russians. Frankfurt’s thesis is similar. The fair’s organizers argue that the ’90s in Russia were so disorienting and frightening that average citizens didn’t want to deal with fantasy at all. Reality was crazy enough, and so they craved books that spoke to their fears and their newfound desires and that made sense of the confusing world around them.

Fascinating profile of Richard Pipes in the Boston Globe by Sam Tanenhaus. Pipes, eminent Russian historian, has recently authored a short autobiography entitled Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. It should be a great read as Pipes has lived a fascinating life. Pipes escaped Nazi occupied Warsaw at the age of 16; served in the US Army during WW II; and eventually received his PhD from Harvard. Pipes stayed on at Harvard and became a tenured professor in 1958. His early scholarship was respected and viewed as mainstream but in the sixties things began to change:

“Guilt-ridden” establishment figures like George F. Kennan drifted leftward “and became more tolerant of the Soviet Union.” Meanwhile, a younger academic cohort, some of its members tutored in the antiwar movement, insisted that capitalism and communism were not really so different and that the two enemy superpowers might be headed toward “convergence.”
Pipes, as a staunch anticommunist, came under attack and responded in kind. “He was courageous to write at the time when the dominant school was revisionism,” says Walter Laqueur, a historian of modern Europe and a recent biographer of Stalin. “He thought that the Soviet experiment was a disaster, and of course this was vindicated.”

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There is something about the first sentence of a book. The great ones compel you to read further and stick in your mind. The bad ones you forget almost instantly (perhaps the really bad ones stick with you too?). Well, here is a great one from the book The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth
:

Do you realize there is some possibility that before you complete this sentence, you will be hoofed insensible by a wayward, miniature Mediterranean ass?

If that doesn’t make you want to keep reading I don’t know what will . . .