Posts
I was trading comments with carolina, below/above about Bill Bryson's At Home and I offered that I had wondered about a few of his assertions, and didn't need to wonder about a couple of others. Now mind you, I'm not saying the guy's full of it, or that nothing he says can be trusted. I certainly didn't look up everything he asserted. But when he opens throwing out all the wondrous stats about the Crystal Palace and follows up with all sorts of architectural and scientific hoo-hah, then I spots a couple of things that I was pretty sure weren't kosher. So I did indeed check them (though there wasn't much checking to do, actually).
For example - in his screed about whaling, in support of the stuff about the oil industry & what-all, he mentions whaling as a source of the original wealth of such New England towns as Salem and Nantucket. Well, nevermind that Nantucket is more commonly referred to as an island rather than a town, but my eyebrows rose a la Spock at the notion that Salem's wealth arose from whaling. Not the case - Far East trade, all the way. I knew this, but checked anyway, and nary a mention of a whisper of a whale in the wealth of Salem.
In several places (at least two, then) he is fundamentally confused about the relationships of weights and measures. He is convinced, for example, that a litre is smaller than a quart, as he cites a bushel as 32 US quarts (which it is), then converts that to 35 litres - which it ain't, since a litre is bigger than a quart. 32 quarts is a little over 30 litres.
This is more a math error, but he states that before fossil fuel, in the woodburning days, an average home required 20 cords of wood to heat. He doesn't (I don't think) state whether that's a winter season or year-round, since wood-fueled existence really needed wood year round, but for my money 20 cords is reasonable. But then says that 20 cords would be a stack of wood 80 feet wide by 80 feet tall by 160 feet long. And even he acknowledges that "that seems like a lot of wood" and that's true because it's about an order of magnitude out of whack from 20 cords, which would be a stack of wood 4x4x160 (you don't multiply all 3 dimension by 20 to get the volume of 20 cords). Picky picky, but...
He speaks of family fortunes that arose out of America's industrial success, the era of the rise of the robber barons and financiers. And as is his wont, he needs to cite a laundry list of examples - and along with Morgan and Carnegie and Vanderbilt and the DuPonts he lists "the Astors." Well the Astors were rich before anybody got industrialized; their wealth arose from the 18th century fur trade and expanded into New York real estate.
So all this mightn't add up to the proverbial hill o'beans, except that when someone is attempting to dazzle you with these lists and all the impressive data, and some of it ain't so, when he mentions that the fogs in London in the mid 19th century were so bad (pea-soupers we all love from Sherlock Holmes) that "one night seven people in a row walked into the Thames" - I wonder if it's true. And if I can wonder whether that's true, I guess the impact of the rest of it is diminished. But I do enjoy his style, and I'm willing to believe that - on the whole, and in the grand scheme of things - most of what he says is true enough.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Well, I'm glad you posted this, we ladies should know where our baleen's come from. If B.B. wanted to get matters up to date, he could have called Nantucket corset stays as 'ACK racks'
ReplyDeleteAside from the fact that "ACK" needs special knowledge to decode (I'm a fan of MHT meself) the reason I hesitated was that I didn't want to seem too picky & pedantic over Bryson's missteps & misstatements. Yet, I do want to convey the "But still..." factor.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you shouldn't, but one can also view it "statistically", more so than the average. Although I haven't read the book, "At Home" seems to be, among other things, a description of home through a compilation of "facts" which have been referenced in some way or another. Often in medical studies, where the conditions are pretty clearly defined, there are such concepts as "false positive" and acceptance at certain probabilities, which are not quite certain. I wonder in the case of this book, while it does not necessarily ruin the reading enjoyment, whether the reader is experiencing this effect here and, further, does it cast a shadow over the entire credibility. Some of the errors are logically ridiculous as you indicated, some are editing or oversight problems. I wonder also, to the degree that a book is "statistical", if one can expect common statistical inaccuracy and, further, to what degree the author intentionally imposes that condition. Interesting question, no?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that's part of it - though the book isn't really a statistical study, more pop history with social & economic/technological observation/investigation supported by "examples" rather than "data." And you're certainly right, some of the stuff needs to be laid at the feet of the failure of the publisher to provide good copy editing (the litres/quarts silliness for example). So I'm less concerned about that and the humongous stack of firewood than I am about the fact that in least a few cases the "examples" piled on in support of an assertion or observation aren't really accurate or applicable.
ReplyDelete