Stranger than Fiction

This book is divided into four sections, each one for one of the cities, and further divided into three chapters. The four cities are presented in chronological order from oldest to most recent: Ç atalhöyük (Turkey), 7500-5700 BCE; Pompeii (Italy), 700 BCE-79 CE; Angkor (Cambodia), 800-1431 CE; and Cahokia (United States), 1050-1350 CE. Newitz travelled to each of these places and spoke to archaeologists on site as well as other experts on each area through visits or telephone interviews. She certainly was thorough in her research. The information given is an overview of each site itself, its history, a description of what it’s like today, and reasons it eventually became uninhabited (not “lost”). Despite the title, Newitz explains in the introduction that these cities are not “lost;” this was just the viewpoint of European explorers who later “discovered” them. Each city was known by the local population even after the inhabitants abandoned it. While Newitz gives detailed informat...

I love the subtitle of the book, Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way , by Michael Bond, 2020, referring to wayfinding as both an art and a science. And that is what Bond covers in this book. There is information about how people and animals navigate, with interesting examples, as well as different reasons people walk, get lost and find – or don’t find – their way back. This book also gave me a better idea of what it is to be lost – both geographically and psychologically. The introduction starts: “If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be lost, my advice is, don’t try it. The experience is terrifying and often traumatizing. People who are truly lost are usually incapable of making decisions that could save their lives, and they may even think they are going to die. They lose their minds as well as their bearings. It is something of a miracle that we don’t get lost more often. The physical world is infinitely complex, yet most of us are able to...

This book, The Alice Behind Wonderland , by Simon Winchester, 2011, is claimed to be about the girl who inspired Charles Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . However, the title is misleading – there isn’t much about Alice Liddell except for basic facts about her life. Most of the book focuses on Dodgson’s photography, with background information about the development and state of photography at the time. By the end of the book (only 110 pages with index) I didn’t really know what it was about. There were too many “tidbits” given about the Liddell family, Dodgson’s work, his photography, and descriptions of photos that the reader doesn’t see. But there is no connection among them – they read like a list. I had read Simon Winchester’s book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (see my post of March 17, 2021), also known as The Professor and the Madman in the USA and Canada, and liked his writing style and attention to detail. But the information and s...