Henry Petroski 的書都值得一讀。
牙籤
Henry Petroski 的"小東西群眾運動"台灣翻譯了約2/3
這篇提到晚近許多本"旁門左道"談文明的通俗名著 中文可能翻譯一半強
可以把這篇當學習英文的讀物 有空再注
Essay
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From time to time, society itself is called upon to intervene when someone it admires goes astray. Whether it is rehab for Lindsay Lohan or a decisive thumbs down to Michael Jordan’s ancillary baseball career, we must periodically take our brightest stars aside and read them the riot act. No, we do not want any more songs like “Dandelions Don’t Tell No Lies.” No, we do not want any more movies like “Battleship Earth.” No, we will not be requiring your services as talk-show hosts, the Messrs. Chase and Sajak.
In a loftier milieu, such intervention may now be required in the case of the redoubtable Henry Petroski. A professor of civic engineering and history at Duke University, Petroski has made quite a name for himself by publishing a series of delightful books in which he explores the history of such indispensable yet taken-for-granted devices as the pencil, the flashlight, the doorknob and the kitchen sink. These exhaustively researched, disarmingly affectionate books celebrate the genius of the quotidian, the elegance of the functional, the romance of the ubiquitous.
But now, with the publication of “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture” (Knopf, $27.95), Petroski is literally tossing in the kitchen sink he has previously only written about. Originally projected as a single chapter in an earlier book, in which the “engagingly simple device ... would serve to illustrate some basic principles of engineering” and “help reveal the inevitable interrelationships between technology and culture,” “The Toothpick” swelled into a 443-page tome that (unlike the object it concerns) fills a need that does not exist, sealing up a void whose vacuity was a source of distress to no one. It is not so much a book as a threat: If you liked “The Toothpick,” wait till you get a load of “The Grommet.” If “The Pencil” was Petroski’s Sudetenland and “The Evolution of Useful Things” his Anschluss, then “The Toothpick” can only be characterized as his invasion of Poland. And just as France and England were compelled to belatedly intervene back then, literate, sane people must now step into the breach. This thing about things has gone far enough, Mr. Petroski. Knock it off.
The very existence of “The Toothpick” is a testimony to the perils of inhabiting a permissive society, for just as the unchastised teenage shoplifter, mistaking society’s indulgence for applause, will evolve into a bloodthirsty hired killer, it is inevitable that the author of “The Pencil” will one day morph into the author of “The Toothpick.” Quite rightly, he assumes that society is simply not paying attention anymore.
“The Toothpick” is animated by the dubious proposition that the venerable mouth-cleaning device in and of itself is worthy of our consideration. Yet, as Petroski himself admits: “With a toothpick, what we see is what we’ve got — inside a toothpick is the same wood that we see on the outside.” Despite amusing anecdotes about the preposterously gauche Roman emperor Nero turning up at a feast with a silver toothpick dangling from his lips, and the novelist Sherwood Anderson fatally puncturing his liver with a toothpick buried inside an olive, none of this makes the toothpick itself any more riveting: John Wilkes Booth is interesting, not his pistol.
Asserting that “picking one’s teeth is believed to be the oldest human habit,” Petroski suggests that the toothpick may be two million years old. Be that as it may, the toothpick cannot hold a candle to the much younger fork or spoon, and finishes far out of the money behind such ingenious inventions as the laptop computer and the iPod. The toothpick is perhaps slightly more interesting than the staple, the washer and the index card, somewhat less fascinating than the screw or the bolt, but infinitely less exciting than the hydrogen bomb, the semiconductor chip or the microbe. The toothpick lacks the anthropological panache of the toupee, the bustle or the collateralized mortgage obligation, the flash and brio of the cuirass or the monstrance, the epochal influence of the stirrup, the shoelace, the ace of spades and the espresso machine, and it most assuredly cannot lay claim to the esoteric charm of the baritone saxophone and the tea cozy, much less the enduring mystery of the French maid’s flouncy apron. Petroski has mistakenly assumed that merely because he could assemble a huge amount of information about the rise and fall of the toothpick industry, such data was worth compiling in a 443-page book. Did you know that boxes of early machine-made toothpicks were labeled with “a caveat about imitators” to prevent consumers from falling prey to 19th-century gray-market toothpicks? Or that a remarkable Norwegian transplanted to Duluth once patented a toothpick dispenser “mounted on the back of a stylized metal turtle”?
Reviewers of “The Toothpick” will automatically lump Petroski’s work in with “Salt,” “Cod,” “How Soccer Explains the World,” “A History of the World in Six Glasses” and other volumes that view society through an odd prism. These books argue that without cod, salt, booze or the penalty kick, we would not be where we are today. This is true, though the same could be said about tuna, cocaine, beavers, coriander, the infield-fly rule and the “going out of business” sale. These books settle arguments no one is having. It’s like writing a book called “How Annoying Roommates Changed the World.” Yes, annoying roommates — Robespierre, Marlon Brando, Al Gore— have changed the world. So what?
Moreover, comparing “The Toothpick” to these other works is inappropriate. Books of the “How Longitude or Beer or the Irish or Something Changed Civilization” sort are mostly the work of journalists. No strangers to harmless hyperbole, these writers desperately want to close the deal but are aware that unless they keep hawking their wares, the reader may nod off. So they never stop with the balloons and the firecrackers, never stop pushing the merchandise. That’s why their books are fun to read.
“The Toothpick,” by contrast, is the work of a maddeningly sober pedant who is anything but a crowd pleaser. “It would appear that in America the use of toothpicks has become largely a matter of class,” he writes in a passage that expertly captures his infatuation with the obvious and the insignificant. “Unlike in the late 19th century, when the urbane crutch-and-toothpick brigade proudly chewed its toothpicks on the steps of fine hotels and restaurants, now it is more the rural and less educated who openly chew theirs in the parking lots, if not at the counter itself, of big-box stores and fast-food establishments.”
Where books like “Guns, Germs and Steel” or “Rats, Lice and History” examine overlooked trends or inventions and demonstrate the decisive role they have played, “The Toothpick” is basically a paean to our irrepressible friend, the toothpick. Petroski assumes that once they have overcome their initially blasé attitude, people will be mesmerized by the tale of how an inexpensive oral-particle-removing device came out of nowhere to take the world by storm. He has forgotten the hoary dictum: Never send a toothpick to do a pencil’s job.
It’s possible that “The Toothpick” is inspired satire, a deliciously subtle send-up of a genre Petroski helped to popularize. A more plausible explanation is that the author was so emboldened by the public’s giddy response to his earlier work that he decided to go for broke. If this is the case, then we, the reading public, bear the greatest responsibility for this misfortune.
There is no telling where he will strike next. But an ominous hint of his intentions is contained in the preface, where he writes: “I have never been a regular user of toothpicks, though there has always been a box or two of the little wooden things about the house. Occasionally they have come in handy for applying a dab of glue or oil to a small part, cleaning dust out of a tight crevice, plugging up an empty nail hole or two, serving as shims, testing the doneness of a batch of brownies and the like.”
If Petroski is already fulfilling one clever historian’s prophecy that as academics retreat from the world writ large, they will teach us more and more about less and less, it is safe to suppose that his next books will include such titles as these: “The Dab: A Closer Look,” “The Shim That Time Forgot: A Short History of Those Little Wooden Things” and “Dust and the West.”
All of which would be merely a warm-up for “The Doneness of Brownies.”
Joe Queenan writes for Barron’s, The Guardian, Men’s Health and The Weekly Standard.
Henry Petroski 的書評
- Aug 03 Sun 2014 10:06
氣爆、空難，管線與裂縫
牙籤
這篇提到晚近許多本"旁門左道"談文明的通俗名著 中文可能翻譯一半強
可以把這篇當學習英文的讀物 有空再注
Essay
Consider the Toothpick
Illustration by Stephen Savage
From time to time, society itself is called upon to intervene when someone it admires goes astray. Whether it is rehab for Lindsay Lohan or a decisive thumbs down to Michael Jordan’s ancillary baseball career, we must periodically take our brightest stars aside and read them the riot act. No, we do not want any more songs like “Dandelions Don’t Tell No Lies.” No, we do not want any more movies like “Battleship Earth.” No, we will not be requiring your services as talk-show hosts, the Messrs. Chase and Sajak.
In a loftier milieu, such intervention may now be required in the case of the redoubtable Henry Petroski. A professor of civic engineering and history at Duke University, Petroski has made quite a name for himself by publishing a series of delightful books in which he explores the history of such indispensable yet taken-for-granted devices as the pencil, the flashlight, the doorknob and the kitchen sink. These exhaustively researched, disarmingly affectionate books celebrate the genius of the quotidian, the elegance of the functional, the romance of the ubiquitous.
But now, with the publication of “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture” (Knopf, $27.95), Petroski is literally tossing in the kitchen sink he has previously only written about. Originally projected as a single chapter in an earlier book, in which the “engagingly simple device ... would serve to illustrate some basic principles of engineering” and “help reveal the inevitable interrelationships between technology and culture,” “The Toothpick” swelled into a 443-page tome that (unlike the object it concerns) fills a need that does not exist, sealing up a void whose vacuity was a source of distress to no one. It is not so much a book as a threat: If you liked “The Toothpick,” wait till you get a load of “The Grommet.” If “The Pencil” was Petroski’s Sudetenland and “The Evolution of Useful Things” his Anschluss, then “The Toothpick” can only be characterized as his invasion of Poland. And just as France and England were compelled to belatedly intervene back then, literate, sane people must now step into the breach. This thing about things has gone far enough, Mr. Petroski. Knock it off.
The very existence of “The Toothpick” is a testimony to the perils of inhabiting a permissive society, for just as the unchastised teenage shoplifter, mistaking society’s indulgence for applause, will evolve into a bloodthirsty hired killer, it is inevitable that the author of “The Pencil” will one day morph into the author of “The Toothpick.” Quite rightly, he assumes that society is simply not paying attention anymore.
“The Toothpick” is animated by the dubious proposition that the venerable mouth-cleaning device in and of itself is worthy of our consideration. Yet, as Petroski himself admits: “With a toothpick, what we see is what we’ve got — inside a toothpick is the same wood that we see on the outside.” Despite amusing anecdotes about the preposterously gauche Roman emperor Nero turning up at a feast with a silver toothpick dangling from his lips, and the novelist Sherwood Anderson fatally puncturing his liver with a toothpick buried inside an olive, none of this makes the toothpick itself any more riveting: John Wilkes Booth is interesting, not his pistol.
Asserting that “picking one’s teeth is believed to be the oldest human habit,” Petroski suggests that the toothpick may be two million years old. Be that as it may, the toothpick cannot hold a candle to the much younger fork or spoon, and finishes far out of the money behind such ingenious inventions as the laptop computer and the iPod. The toothpick is perhaps slightly more interesting than the staple, the washer and the index card, somewhat less fascinating than the screw or the bolt, but infinitely less exciting than the hydrogen bomb, the semiconductor chip or the microbe. The toothpick lacks the anthropological panache of the toupee, the bustle or the collateralized mortgage obligation, the flash and brio of the cuirass or the monstrance, the epochal influence of the stirrup, the shoelace, the ace of spades and the espresso machine, and it most assuredly cannot lay claim to the esoteric charm of the baritone saxophone and the tea cozy, much less the enduring mystery of the French maid’s flouncy apron. Petroski has mistakenly assumed that merely because he could assemble a huge amount of information about the rise and fall of the toothpick industry, such data was worth compiling in a 443-page book. Did you know that boxes of early machine-made toothpicks were labeled with “a caveat about imitators” to prevent consumers from falling prey to 19th-century gray-market toothpicks? Or that a remarkable Norwegian transplanted to Duluth once patented a toothpick dispenser “mounted on the back of a stylized metal turtle”?
Reviewers of “The Toothpick” will automatically lump Petroski’s work in with “Salt,” “Cod,” “How Soccer Explains the World,” “A History of the World in Six Glasses” and other volumes that view society through an odd prism. These books argue that without cod, salt, booze or the penalty kick, we would not be where we are today. This is true, though the same could be said about tuna, cocaine, beavers, coriander, the infield-fly rule and the “going out of business” sale. These books settle arguments no one is having. It’s like writing a book called “How Annoying Roommates Changed the World.” Yes, annoying roommates — Robespierre, Marlon Brando, Al Gore— have changed the world. So what?
Moreover, comparing “The Toothpick” to these other works is inappropriate. Books of the “How Longitude or Beer or the Irish or Something Changed Civilization” sort are mostly the work of journalists. No strangers to harmless hyperbole, these writers desperately want to close the deal but are aware that unless they keep hawking their wares, the reader may nod off. So they never stop with the balloons and the firecrackers, never stop pushing the merchandise. That’s why their books are fun to read.
“The Toothpick,” by contrast, is the work of a maddeningly sober pedant who is anything but a crowd pleaser. “It would appear that in America the use of toothpicks has become largely a matter of class,” he writes in a passage that expertly captures his infatuation with the obvious and the insignificant. “Unlike in the late 19th century, when the urbane crutch-and-toothpick brigade proudly chewed its toothpicks on the steps of fine hotels and restaurants, now it is more the rural and less educated who openly chew theirs in the parking lots, if not at the counter itself, of big-box stores and fast-food establishments.”
Where books like “Guns, Germs and Steel” or “Rats, Lice and History” examine overlooked trends or inventions and demonstrate the decisive role they have played, “The Toothpick” is basically a paean to our irrepressible friend, the toothpick. Petroski assumes that once they have overcome their initially blasé attitude, people will be mesmerized by the tale of how an inexpensive oral-particle-removing device came out of nowhere to take the world by storm. He has forgotten the hoary dictum: Never send a toothpick to do a pencil’s job.
It’s possible that “The Toothpick” is inspired satire, a deliciously subtle send-up of a genre Petroski helped to popularize. A more plausible explanation is that the author was so emboldened by the public’s giddy response to his earlier work that he decided to go for broke. If this is the case, then we, the reading public, bear the greatest responsibility for this misfortune.
There is no telling where he will strike next. But an ominous hint of his intentions is contained in the preface, where he writes: “I have never been a regular user of toothpicks, though there has always been a box or two of the little wooden things about the house. Occasionally they have come in handy for applying a dab of glue or oil to a small part, cleaning dust out of a tight crevice, plugging up an empty nail hole or two, serving as shims, testing the doneness of a batch of brownies and the like.”
If Petroski is already fulfilling one clever historian’s prophecy that as academics retreat from the world writ large, they will teach us more and more about less and less, it is safe to suppose that his next books will include such titles as these: “The Dab: A Closer Look,” “The Shim That Time Forgot: A Short History of Those Little Wooden Things” and “Dust and the West.”
All of which would be merely a warm-up for “The Doneness of Brownies.”
Joe Queenan writes for Barron’s, The Guardian, Men’s Health and The Weekly Standard.
Henry Petroski 的書評
An Inventive Hollywood Star
"Hedy's Folly" chronicles important moments in the filmstar's life—from filming nude scenes for 'Ecstasy' in 1933 to devising radio-controlled torpedoes meant to foil German defenses in World War II. Henry Petroski reviews.![[bkrvestonia]]()
![[bkrvestonia]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-QZ318_bkrves_A_20111213141404.jpg)
December 16, 2011
In his new book, Richard Rhodes, the author of acclaimed histories of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, tells the story of a 1940s Hollywood bombshell and her fascination with military-weapon design. Yet even though "Hedy's Folly" ostensibly concerns, as the subtitle has it, "the life and breakthrough inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman in the world," the book is equally about the role that chance and coincidence can play in the development of technology.
Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, was the only child of Jewish parents. Emil Kiesler, a successful banker, was a doting father; her mother, Trude, a former concert pianist, was less indulgent, "concerned that such a pretty, vivacious child would grow up spoiled unless she heard criticism as well as compliments," Mr. Rhodes writes. Trude taught Hedy to play the piano, and Emil conveyed to his daughter a consuming interest in technology.
Hedy dropped out of high school at 16 to pursue an acting career in Berlin. At 18, after appearing onstage and in a few small film roles, she was cast by Czech director Gustav Machaty as the lead in "Ecstasy," a movie that contained two brief nude scenes and much sexual symbolism. Even though she was billed by her real name—the change to Hedy Lamarr would come in Hollywood—her association with a movie so daring for its time would, the author says, "both promote and plague her professional career."
The actress captured the attention of Fritz Mandl, a wealthy and powerful Austrian arms manufacturer. After she married him at age 19, her new husband tried, unsuccessfully, to buy up every print of "Ecstasy" so that no one else could ever view it again. As Mandl's wife, hosting dinner parties for his business associates, Hedy became familiar with the technology of war. Like much of this most unusual book about a Hollywood star, Mr. Rhodes relates the Austrian chapter of Lamarr's story with engaging efficiency.
As Europe in the mid-1930s was roiled by Hitler's rise, Lamarr, a Jew, resolved to flee her homeland and her marriage. Her controlling husband had Jewish roots—his father had converted to Catholicism, his wife's religion—but Mandl was also a proponent of fascism. In London, the actress met the MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract and insisted on a new screen name. The rest is Hollywood history—with a twist.
Hedy's Folly
By Richard Rhodes
(Doubleday, 261 pages, $26.95)
(Doubleday, 261 pages, $26.95)
As Mr. Rhodes relates, Hedy Lamarr was hardly an intellectual, but she was a indefatigable tinkerer. Among her inventions was a sort of bouillon cube that, when dissolved in water, produced a cola-like drink. Another was an attachment for a tissue box to hold used tissues, a convenience that anyone with a bad cold can appreciate. But she also turned her attention beyond the domestic. Even as she was starring in movies such as "Boom Town" (1940), Lamarr applied her inventing talents to trying to combat German submarines preying on ships in the North Atlantic. She had an idea for radio-controlled torpedo delivery that could not be foiled by the enemy.
Enter George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer whose works were known for using unorthodox instruments such as player-pianos, airplane propellers and sirens. He also wrote music for movies and, like Lamarr, tinkered with ideas for inventions. His signature composition from the 1920s, "Ballet Mécanique," prompted him to develop a way to synchronize multiple player-pianos.
Ever scrambling to piece together an income, Antheil wrote frequently for Esquire magazine—including articles on endocrinology, particularly female hormones, that happened to catch Lamarr's attention. The actress told a friend who knew Antheil that she would like to meet him. When they were introduced at a dinner party in August 1940, she asked Antheil if he knew how she might make her breasts bigger. Mr. Rhodes reports that Antheil recalled, in his autobiography, "Bad Boy of Music," suggesting "various glandular extracts" that would help the pituitary gland, with the added benefit that "the bosoms stay up."
Antheil and Lamarr eventually moved on to talking about the war in Europe. She wondered if her knowledge of munitions and secret weapons projects from her time in Austria could help somehow. She also described an idea for a remote-controlled torpedo: A radio transmitting directions and a receiver implementing them would be synchronized so that their frequencies could be changed simultaneously in a random manner. This constant retuning would make it difficult for the enemy to jam the signals. Lamarr termed the technique "frequency hopping," a forerunner of the spread-spectrum technology that is used today in communications applications such as Wi-Fi.
Antheil lent his experience with synchronizing player pianos. The two refined the idea, then consulted with an electrical-engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology, who confirmed that the concept would work. U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for a "Secret Communication System" was issued to Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil in 1942. (Markey was the surname of a husband she had divorced in 1940.) The frequency-hopping technology was not put to use in World War II, but it was employed in 1962 during the blockade of Cuba.
Today, when innovation is often identified as essential for revitalizing an ailing economy, politicians demand more science funding as an incentive. They would do well to note the story of Hedy Lamarr and remember that innovation comes in many forms, often from unlikely sources, who all have one thing in common: a love for ideas and an urge to find out if they'll work.
Mr. Petroski is a professor of engineering and of history at Duke University. His latest book is "An Engineer's Alphabet: Gleanings From the Softer Side of a Profession."