Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

When I want to find some information, I can pull my cell phone out of my pocket and search for it using Google (or some other search engine, but probably Google). I can remember a time when that was not an option. If the information I needed wasn’t in the dictionary or encyclopedia I had at home (which was already of date in some areas), I’d have to go to the library for additional references or—heaven forbid—the morgue of a newspaper office. Getting useful information was not a trivial affair. The generation before mine that saw a pre-Internet explosion of printed information after World War II especially felt the difficulty of keeping up. Evelyn Wood was there with an answer; Marcia Biederman tells her story in Scan Artist.

Evelyn Wood did not invent speed reading. She did not even like the term. However, for decades her name and face was more strongly associated with it than any other person. Though she built her reputation on being a school teacher, she never was not a regular classroom teacher (she was a school counselor) and she was not a reading specialist. She had a master’s degree in speech, earned under the direction of a professor who a studied theater.

Theater may be the lens for looking at Wood’s career. She started writing and staging plays when she was in high school and a college undergraduate. Many of these had religious themes related to her Mormon faith. When she was in Germany, where her husband served as president of the Mormon mission in Frankfurt as the Nazis began their aggressions, she fell in love with the opera and cajoled her way into back stage of the opera house. She began bringing what she learned of stagecraft into her own productions.

Back in the U.S. the Woods put Evelyn’s theatrical skills to work as lecturers on their European experience. They changed their focus as American sentiments shifted from Germany to Britain. They also put a pretty heavy spin on the Mormon relationship with the Nazis and greatly embellished the dangers they face leaving Germany.

Evelyn Wood’s success as a seller of her speed-reading system was largely built on such theatrics and embellishments. She claimed student could read thousands of words per minute; the faster one read the better their comprehension. (The fastest people can actually read is about 900 words per minute. Anything faster is skimming, and comprehension suffers when one skims). She managed to get endorsements from senators and she encouraged, or at least never corrected, the misconception that she was tied to John F. Kennedy and his reportedly fast reading speed. (Ted Kennedy took her course as a senator, and staffers in the Kennedy, Nixon and Carter administrations took the course, including Jimmy Carter himself, though Wood was not the teacher.)

The company she started changed hands and business models several times. A lot of money was made with her name and methods, and in the sale and resale of the company, but the Woods received only a small portion of it. Even so, she was ready to promote herself, her methods and the company that still paid her a consulting fee. She slowed down, but continued to make appearances and accept interview requests even after suffering cancer and a stroke.

While one may sympathize with her, especially in her illness later in life, the Evelyn Wood presented by Biederman is not easy to like. The Wood adopted a teenage girl largely to have a live-in nanny for their natural daughter when they moved to Germany; they never really acknowledge their adopted daughter or even saw her much once she was an adult. Wood was in some ways a con artist who played on the insecurities of her marks, some who were never knocked in spite of the mounting evidence that her program was at best an overprice lesson in skimming.

Wood found a way to take advantage of the insecurity of her day. She built a brand on it. While primarily a biography of Wood, Scan Artist reveals interesting things about America of the time and the obsession with self-improvement. It has not disappeared. Speed-reading apps still claim to greatly increase both speed and comprehension. TED-talkers claim to read a book or more a day. The Internet makes it easy to acquire a shallow knowledge of almost anything quickly, so perhaps people have become satisfied with what they can learn from skimming hundreds of books a year. Deep learning and understanding remains slow and effortful.

Biederman, Marcia. Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World that Speed-Reading Worked. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.

The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley

In 1905, then Secretary of War William Taft and a host of other American dignitaries took a tour of Pacific islands and Asian nations. James Bradley tells the story of this trip, along with the wider contest of President Theodore Roosevelt’s policies toward Pacific expansion and Asia, in The Imperial Cruise.

Roosevelt, with Taft as his right hand, engaged in secret diplomacy with Japan. The Senate would not have approved a treaty with Japan with terms Roosevelt wanted, and his own State Department would have strongly advised against his course. So Roosevelt sent Taft to consummate a secret deal that he could never acknowledge.

By the time Taft set sail, Japan was already responding to interactions with the West. It was remaking itself into an industrialized, militarized country in the western mold. Roosevelt saw in them American-friendly, quasi-civilized people who could expand Anglo-Saxon virtues into Asia without slipping out from under Anglo-American influence. As with almost everything related to the Pacific and Asian peoples, Roosevelt was very shortsighted.

In reading about the early 20^th Century, I’ve been struck by the pervasiveness of racism. Bradley explains how Roosevelt viewed everything through a racial lens. These were racial lenses were proudly worn by white elites at the time. The key to history was racial history. They saw the birth of civilization in the Middle East with the Aryans, who began moving west. Around the Mediterranean, where the Aryans mixed with other races, civilizations degenerated. In Germany, pure Aryans gave rise to Teutons, who inherited Aryan civilizing with values of democracy and individualism. These Teutons moved west and were further perfected in the Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxon civilization leapt across the Atlantic and push aside the savages of North America. To Roosevelt, Manifest Destiny had not closed with the conquering of the continent; it was ready to spread into the Pacific. White men would continue to spread their civilizing influence, subjugating or exterminating lesser, browner races when necessary as white Americans had done to their Indian wards. White elites like Roosevelt saw their westward destiny in this racial history, and it was further confirm by science in Darwinian survival of the fittest.

History and science refute such notions now. Bradley (and I) certainly don’t try to justify the attitudes or actions of Roosevelt, Taft or others. Bradley is plainly critical of handling of Pacific islands and Asia. Roosevelt’s racial views blinded him to the abilities and patriotism of non-whites. He had the hubris to pursue diplomacy on his own, secretly, without advice from the State Department, Senate or anyone else who might raise the slightest objection or concern. He tutored Japan in the ways of western imperialism, but could not imagine how well they would learn the lessons. Bradley places at least some of the blame for World War II in the Pacific at the feet of Roosevelt, whose interventions created the powerful military empire we faced in those waters.

Roosevelt was an astute manager of his image and he understood public relations. Because of this, he sent his oldest (and nearly estranged) daughter Alice on the trip. She was a celebrity, and her presence assured a lot of press coverage. Her presence was also a distraction from Taft’s secret mission.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

First Samuel

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Water by Steven Solomon

Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

German physicist Max Planck was one of the most famous and well-respected scientists of his day. His work formed the foundation of quantum mechanics and is still relevant to physics today. He lived through both world wars, and these resulted in tragedy for his family.

Planck is a brief biography of the man by another physicist, Brandon R. Brown. Brown focuses his book on the last years of World War II, but from there reaches far back to his subject’s birth in 1858 and forward a little to his death in 1947. It is interesting that Brown did not choose to take a chronological approach given that entropy and the irreversibility of time were subjects of great interest to Planck. Perhaps he wants to readers to be somewhat unsettled, no doubt the way Planck must have been unsettled by events of his lifetime and the conclusions younger scientists drew from his own theories.

Brown presents Planck and as a flexible thinker who contributed to physics and accepted new theories at an age when most of his contemporaries were ready to shut the books on what could be learned. Apparently what most of us like to think of as middle-aged (at worst) is ancient for a physicist. His own work on thermal radiation established fundamental concepts of quantum theory, though he didn’t use the term “quanta.” When a young Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, Planck quick promote and build on it. He was slower to come around to general relativity (as wild as it is to us, it was insane to many in that time), and both men suffered philosophical heartburn from the quantum mechanics served up by the generation that came up under them.

Planck was very loyal to his country. His brother Hermann died in the Franco-Prussian War, and the family became intensely patriotic. At the start of World War I, he was hopeful that the war might strengthen and unify Germany. His oldest son, Karl, died at Verdun, and Germany fell on hard times.

Things were more complex when the Nazis took power. At times, his reputation as the nation’s most prominent scientist gave him leeway to resist anti-Semitic policies. At other times he acquiesced, hoping that the excesses of Nazi policies would be smoothed out or even reversed by the necessities of governing and the needs of the nation. He was so hopeful he even encouraged Jewish colleagues to stay. The Nazis saw no need for moderation, so Planck’s influence quickly waned. His son, Erwin, became involved in a resistance movement that hoped to topple the Nazis. He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Though the Planck family appealed to every ear in and around the Nazi regime that might have sympathy, Erwin was convicted and eventually hanged. (Planck survived his first wife and four of his five children).

Brown doesn’t judge Planck too harshly, though some might. He had no love for the Nazis, but perhaps too much love for Germany, its scientific achievement, and its international standing, may have made him reluctant to boldly oppose them. This led to a break in his relationship with Einstein, though the younger eminence spoke very kindly of Planck even many years later. Because of he refused to embrace the Nazis, and he was well-liked by many foreign scientists, the Allies gave him a place in rebuilding the German scientific establishment after the war. The British, French, and Americans reorganized scientific institutes into the Max Planck Society, which is still active in supporting all manner of scientific endeavor.

I think the book is approachable for most adult readers who may have an interest in Planck or his times. Brown does not get so deep so deep into the science that he loses readers; he tries to explain it in a way that will make sense to a general audience. The structure of the book may make it difficult for a young reader to follow.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Brandon R. Brown. Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Alexander Graham Bell is obviously known for his invention of the telephone. He started his career teaching the deaf to speak using a set of tools developed by his father. This career lead the Scotch-Canadian teacher (Bell became an American citizen in 1882) to meet an American girl, Mabel Hubbard, who he would marry. Helen Elmira Waite tells the story of their life together in Make a Joyful Noise.

Mabel Hubbard lost her hearing at the age of five after being ill with scarlet fever. Her parents were determined that she would continue to speak and understand speech. They were encouraged by news from Germany that schools there were teaching the deaf to speak, but there was little support for it in the United States. Even so, they arranged for a teacher who had the courage to try and Mabel learned to speak and read lips.

Gardiner Hubbard, Mabel’s father, was a businessman and politician in Massachusetts. He became an advocate for the education of the deaf, especially oral education (speech and lip reading). As a child, Mabel testified to a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to demonstrate what a deaf child could learn.

Bell set us a school for the deaf in Boston. Here he was introduced to Mabel, whose family hoped his techniques could help her achieve a more natural speech. He began experimenting with the idea of pushing more signals down telegraph wires, which lead to his invention of the telephone. Gardiner Hubbard became one of Bells backers in these efforts. Even though Bell grew to spend more time developing his telephone, and later testing designs for aviation, he always remained active in education for the deaf.

The Bell family authorized Waite’s biography. The advantage of this is that she had access to family records and the recollections of the Bells’ children and grandchildren. The possible downside is that Waite may have been inclined to present the Bells in the best light. Waite may have been inclined to do this anyway. In his preface, Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, mentioned that he and his wife Elsie, Bell’s oldest daughter, had read Waits biography of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan (the Bells knew these ladies and Bell himself encouraged Keller’s parents that she could be educated and connect to the wider world).

Waite does admit to Bell’s stubbornness and sometimes-excessive sense of propriety. If the Hubbards, particularly Mabel, had not pushed, persuaded, coerced, and even tricked Bell into promoting, protecting, and commercializing his invention, he may have tinkered in his shop making a better telephone that no one would use.

Waite’s style is almost conversational; she’s telling a story. I think Make a Joyful Noise is accessible to many younger readers. It is also interesting in that the book is as much about Bell’s private life, particularly his romance and marriage with Mabel, as it is about his invention. In addition, she demonstrates that Mabel was a remarkable and capable person on her own.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Waite, Helen Elmira. Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell. Philadelphia: MacRae Smith Company, 1961.

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

Harry Bruinius takes the title of his book, Better for All the World, from a quote from famous United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  In his opinion, written for a court majority that authorized states to forcibly sterilize some people, Holmes expressed the notion that it was better to sterilize a defective person than to permit them to have defective children who may place greater burden on government systems for justice and welfare.

This legal justification for forced sterilization was just one of the policy victories of the eugenics movement in the America. Eugenicists were also influential in establishing state marriage laws and federal immigration quotas and restrictions.

Even from its start, notions of social engineering and politics tinged the science of eugenics. Francis Galton coined the word that applied to both the study of heredity and the improvement of humanity through selective breeding over generations. Galton established the field based on concepts from his cousin Charles Darwin’s books on evolution, Gregor Mendel’s studies of plant heredity, and his own statistical studies of human characteristics. Though he mostly kept these speculations to himself, he considered the possibility of improving humans through breeding just as farmers improved plants and livestock.

American reformers of all political persuasion welcomed Galton’s ideas; they were looking for reliable, scientific means of tackling poverty and crime. Galton’s method were used to study families and supposedly proved that traits related to poverty, criminality, low intelligence, and the harder to recognize (therefore more dangerous) feeblemindedness. These studies also uncover a troubling pairing in females of feeblemindedness and fecundity. The implication was that the good stock of moral, productive Americans risked overrun by a class of hereditary degenerates. America’s best needed to produce larger family, and its poor and feebleminded needed to be restrained from passing on their inferior traits.

Much of Bruinius’ book focuses on this American eugenics movement. Representing leadership in the scientific community is Charles Davenport. He popularized the work of Galton, convinced the Carnegie Institute to fund a station to study eugenics, and did research that contributed to the early development of genetics. Representing the bridge between science and policy is Harry Laughlin. A Missourian and a protégé of Davenport, his reports and advice to Congress helped to inform restrictive immigration policy and support state programs of forced sterilization of convicts and the feebleminded, ultimately upheld in by the Supreme Court, as previously mentioned, in the case of Buck vs. Bell.

The development of eugenics policy in the U.S. was being watched overseas. In particularly, racial purity laws enacted by the Nazis in Germany explicitly cited American research and legal precedents. Many reformers in America and elsewhere were gratified by the apparent success of eugenics policies in Germany.

Even as it was reaching its peak as a political reform movement, laboratory science was undermining eugenics. Laboratory studies of the mechanisms of heredity, which had discovered chromosomes by the 1930s, were showing that heredity and the expression of traits, especially moral or personality traits, were much more complicated and harder to predict than the eugenicists assumed. Through its association with the Nazis, eugenics became wholly discredited in the public mind, though its effects lingered in American policies for decades.

Our understanding of genetics and heredity has improved a lot. Biotechnology has made a new kind of genetic engineering possible. The eugenicist dreams of eliminating disease and creating better people in future generations is more attainable than ever, at least in limited ways.

If this puts our evolution in our hands, are we ethically and morally evolved enough to use this power? Are humans intelligent animals or are we unique creatures? Are human rights inalienable characteristics of human beings, or are they social constructs, ideas that can rise, fade, or change like other ideas? How does the good of the species relate to the good of the individual? What does it mean to be a parent? The way we answer these questions, and other related to the implications of our science and technology, will establish what kind of people we are, and possibly the destiny of generations to come.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Bruinius, Harry. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

On February 5, 1946, The Adventures of Superman radio program opened with a new introduction:

Yes, it’s Superman.  Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities farbeyond those of mortal men.  Superman, defender of law and order, champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice!

This announced the beginning of the radio Superman’s struggle with post-war social issues, especially a campaign against racial and religious intolerance.  In this adventure, Jimmy Olsen infiltrated the Guardians of America, a fictional stand-in for pro-Nazi groups that were operating in the United States at the time.  This was only the beginning.  Later that year, Adventures would feature a 16-episode story in which Superman took on the Clan of the Fiery Cross, a stand-in for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Behind these fictional stories of Superman were real-life adventures.  The KKK was attempting to launch a new national membership drive, playing on the insecurities people felt after World War II.  There were real infiltrators of the KKK and other organized hatemongers who exposed the workings of these organizations in the media.  Rick Bowers tells the story of these men and the producers of the comic book and radio Superman in Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.

Superman had been dealing with cultural concerns from his beginning.  When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jewish high-school students in Cleveland, created Superman in the 1930s, they pitted him against criminal gangs and crooked politicians.  As Nazi Germany began to rise as an aggressive European power, the hero opposed Nazis at home and abroad.  During the war, he protected the home front.   Though it is not the focus, Bowers describes how Superman has changes with the concerns of the times.

The Klan has roots going back to the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.  It started as a jokey order of former Confederate Army officers in Tennessee who imitated the mystery religion-inspired fraternal orders that were popular at colleges, with mysterious rituals and strange names.  It spawned imitators that secretly gathered in Nashville to organize themselves in 1867.  Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard, who lead the Klan in opposition to Reconstruction, including domestic terrorism against blacks and white proponents of racial equality and Reconstruction policies.  The violence of the Klan members, called Ghouls, eroded the organization’s popularity.

William J. Simmons launched a campaign to revive the Klan, taking it national in 1920.  For Simmons it was largely a moneymaking scheme, though he seemed happy to promote intolerance of blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and anyone else who wasn’t a white, male Protestant.  (I’m a white, male Protestant and I find nothing in Protestantism, or Christianity in general, that justifies the intolerance promoted by the Klan.)  Successors led the Klan to political activism in the 1920s, and it became very powerful, but front-line violence and leadership hypocrisy undermined their position.  The post-war membership campaign, led by Samuel Green who was Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm, was thwarted by law enforcement and equal rights advocates with help of medial like Adventures.

The library helpfully labeled Bowers’ book with a sticker that reads, “TEEN.”  I suppose it is a young adult book, though I think it is within the grasp of many middle school students.  It is an unusual introduction to the history of bigotry in American and the movements that promoted equality, but the tie to a popular superhero might make the subject more appealing to kids in school.  It made me pick up the book, and I’m far passed my school days.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Bowers, Rick.  Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.  Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2012.

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The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of School. 1944. New York: HarperOne, 2000.

I didn’t expect of find apologist C. S. Lewis discussing the Tao. He used it as a term to describe natural law or traditional values, which he defended in the three lectures collected in The Abolition of Man.

This is a hard book for me to write about, though it is short. Lewis wrote as a thoughtful and educated man to an audience he assumed could follow him. I don’t find it easy to summarize his arguments and do them justice, though I will try.

Lewis began by criticizing a trend in education that debunks emotion and sentiment in favor of reason. The particular English composition he used as an example rightly showed students how to see through the shallow sentimentality and factual falseness of bad writing, but failed to show the merits of good writing, worthy sentiments, or deeper truth.

The product of such an education is people without hearts. Instead of mastering reason, students were equipped with shallow reasonableness. By inoculating students against one kind of propaganda, the authors of the text made them more vulnerable to other propaganda.

For fruitful education, Lewis offers the Tao, teaching people to recognize and esteem the inherent value of things. As he puts it, “The right defence against false sentiments is just sentiments.”

Those who reject traditional values, even if not entirely conscious of it as may be the case of the textbook authors, are proposing new values. However, the tools they use to cut down the old work just as well on the new. They must either stick to the idea that values are cultural vestiges or conventions that have roots in unwanted sentiment instead of desirable reason, and lay the groundwork for future reasoners and reformers to overthrow the new values, or appeal to inherent, self-evident values. On this latter basis, the Tao has much history and endurance.


These ideas have real social consequence. This book was first published in 1944, so the Nazi regime in Germany was very much on Lewis’ mind, as well as then-rising Communism. Though the pseudoscience that the Nazis used to justify their racist policies has been debunked, and even the Soviet Union has crumbled, the idea that a more scientific and rational governance and policy will perfect, or at least greatly improve, human society is alive an well.

As we master nature, even human nature, we also give people who acquire and control that knowledge and technology mastery over other people. Successive generations of such people will grow in mastery over others and, raised with no heart or inherently true values, they will have nothing by which to govern themselves except their own appetites and desires. George Orwell’s vision would cease to be merely an imaginative projection of the excesses of socialism and become something close to prophecy.

Lewis doesn’t see reason and sentiment as being natural enemies, only that some have tried to position one against the other. His vision would be people educated to have within them both powerful reason and powerful sentiments, especially ethical sentiments.

My own experience makes this an attractive vision to me. As a child, I had experienced strong emotions, especially anger, that threatened to overwhelm me because I lacked maturity and self-control. As I got a little older, though still a child, I clamped down on my emotions and tried to comport myself according to reason a much as possible; Mr. Spock from Star Trek was my model. This became a problem, too, in that my life and relationships lacked fullness as I deprived myself and others of something important in my connections. Now that I am a man, and I am coming to see what the fullness of that can be, I long to have both a powerful mind and strong heart. To have one without the other sets one up for many falls, but to have them together is a synergistic combination that empowers one to have greater appreciation for and effectiveness in life.

C.S. Lewis also wrote:
The Great Divorce

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Books That Made a Difference to Me

I’m not a regular reader of O: The Oprah Magazine, but when I come across one, I turn to the “reading room” segment. In each issue, they have a celebrity, author or other notable person comment on a few books that they find notable. I enjoy reading and I’m curious about what other people enjoy reading, even if I don’t share their tastes. What follows are books that made a difference to me roughly in the style of the O feature.

The Holy Bible

As a believer in Christ, this book is a touchstone for me. The Bible is one of the ways God reveals himself, and it is the most explicit, specific, definitive and accessible special revelation. Jesus compared the word of God to a mirror, and said those who didn’t do it were like someone walking away from a mirror and forgetting what they looked like. Within its pages, the metaphor of a sword is applied to God’s word. One the great uses of this sword is to, in indelicate terms, cut through the crap.

Simple Pictures are Best
By Nancy Willard
Illustrations by Tomie De Paola

This is a children’s book and I first read it as a boy. It has so influenced me that I sometimes use the phrase “simple pictures are best” in conversation. The moral of this parable is to keep it simple, don’t create unnecessary complications. I’m not immune to mission creep and function overload. However, this book helped me develop an early appreciation for focus, setting priorities and enjoying those things that do one thing very well.

Spider-Man Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

I could carry on for some time about all that is great about Spider-Man. The essence of it is this: the core of Peter Parker and his story is ethics. Behind the mask, he is just a man and he is just as concerned with his family, friends and job as with battling supervillains. Like us, Peter faces the costly rewards of doing what is right and the painful price of choosing what is wrong in a complex world he doesn’t fully understand. What makes him a hero isn’t his power, it is his character.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black

The atrocities of the Nazis were justified, in their minds, as a science-based policy for managing society. The science was eugenics; it originated in American. I was amazed that not only did it start here, but also one of its largest proponents and popularizers worked in my home state, Missouri. Black thoroughly traces eugenics from it roots in an America, both as a science and a policy, to its leap to other nations, its ultimate expression as policy in Nazi Germany and its aftermath, which continues to linger in science and politics. Today, calls for science-based policy are often in the news, but it is important that both policy and science be informed by ethics. (Edwin Black also wrote IBM and the Holocaust.)

The Road to Serfdom
By F. A. Hayek

Hayek devoted this book “to socialists of all parties.” His particular audience was the British intelligentsia (Hayek was an economics professor at the University of London and familiar with German intellectual life from his years in his native Austria). His message was a warning: socialism leads to totalitarianism. Socialism was a popular movement in the time Hayek wrote this book (first published in 1944). Even the United States looked to the communist, fascist and national socialist governments of the world as models to emulate (until we entered World War II and many of these governments became our enemies). Today, socialist ideas and policies are widely espoused, though few would put the socialist label on them, and their proponents seem to imagine, some may be convinced and some may pretend, that a planned society can still be a free one. Hayek demonstrates that socialist government and individual freedom cannot coexist for long.

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. 2001. New York: Norton, 2002.

The stories are horrific. Sick people, men, women and children alike, are mistakenly declared dead by ignorant officials, careless medics and, worst of all, their own families, and confined to the grave while still alive. They wake in their coffins, nailed in, sometimes in time to be saved by a watchful attendant, sometimes to have their feeble cries ignored by the uncaring or hushed by the superstitious, sometimes too suffer a second, more terrifying, death. In these last cases, belated exhumations reveal bodies broken and twisted by impossible efforts to escape. Most of these stories are false.

That is the fortunate conclusion of Dr. Bondeson. His exploration of fear of premature burial spans history, society, literature and medicine over the course of centuries.

Fear of live interment peaked in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a time when medical professionals lost faith in the signs of death and common people lost faith in the medical profession. Such a fear now, in the west where modern medical practice is well established, would be considered irrational, but in those days, it was more reasonable, even if it was unlikely to occur.

In Germany, the view prevailed that only putrefaction was a sure sign of death, and it sparked the building of hospitals for the uncertainly dead, where attendants closely watched corpses for signs of life until sufficient decay confirmed its absence. Similar views later prevailed in France, though it did not build similar mortuaries. Anti-premature-burial was always a minority movement in English speaking nations, but adherents held out the longest in the United States and United Kingdom through ties to spiritualism, fringe medicine and other groups.


Bondeson shows the folly of the sensationalists who stirred live burial fears, but shows some sympathy for the true philanthropists who took up the cause. He doesn’t even rule it out today in undeveloped areas where modern methods for diagnosing death don’t prevail.

Buried Alive contains more than a few page-long paragraphs, but it is very readable. The tone is not academic and Bondeson’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. He handles some of the more lurid and sensational aspects of the history and literature with tongue-in-cheek humor.