Scientific revolutions

Ian Pindar, John Dugdale and Vera Rule on The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death | Hitler's Piano Player | The Wreckers | Kuhn vs Popper | Other Routes

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, by John Kelly (Harper Perennial, £8.99)

While the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded cleanliness as a civic virtue, Europe's body-loathing Christians were a stinky lot, afraid to disrobe lest it provoked improper thoughts. Because of this, writes Kelly in this lively investigation, human fleas played as prominent a role in the spread of the black death as rat fleas. Poor sanitation, famine and war were the three major causes of the plague that swept Europe from 1347-51, but that didn't stop the moralists from claiming that God was upset with everyone. If the Jews weren't to blame, it was women. One pious chronicler objected that Englishwomen "dress in clothes so tight, they have to wear a fox tail hanging down inside their skirts to hide their arses". For a book about unremitting death, The Great Mortality is a remarkably good read. Kelly has a novelist's empathy for ordinary people and excels at fleshing out their daily lives. But he has worrying news about medieval Englishmen: apparently, instead of saying, "I have a liking for the moon" (a strange enough statement in the first place), they pronounced it, "I hava leaking for the moan," which sounds like something out of 'Allo 'Allo!.
Ian Pindar

Hitler's Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Confidant of Hitler, Ally of FDR, by Peter Conradi (Duckworth, £8.99)

Ernst Hanfstaengl (known as "Putzi") fell under Hitler's spell after hearing him speak at a Munich beer cellar in 1922. An impromptu performance on a rickety piano outside Hitler's flat led to him becoming "Hitler's mood maker", playing Wagner to warm him up before a speech. Putzi composed a "Hitler Songbook" in 1924, but eventually lost faith. "It is a terrible thing," he said during the war, "when you think you got on a bandwagon and it turns out to be a dustcart." Putzi thought saying "Heil Hitler" was silly, and very soon Goebbels and Göring were plotting his death. Conradi's account of Putzi's flight to Switzerland has all the elements of a gripping thriller, and this well-written, non-judgmental biography perfectly captures Putzi's predicament. Wanted by the Gestapo, the Harvard-educated ex-Nazi returned to America and got his revenge by providing US intelligence with a detailed psychological profile of Hitler. One of his observations was that the Führer always gesticulated with a whip when talking to women, which "seems to be connected with a hidden desire for some state of erection, which would overcome his fundamental sexual inferiority complex".

The Wreckers, by Bella Bathurst (Harper Perennial, £8.99)

"For as long as there have been ships, there have been wrecks, and for as long as there have been wrecks, there have been wreckers," writes Bella Bathurst, though exactly what wreckers did, down the ages, is a moot point. Were they a prototype RNLI, saving lives and indulging in a spot of "pro-active beachcombing" only as an afterthought? Or were they booty-crazed brutes, luring ships on to the rocks and drowning any sailors unlucky enough to survive? In an attempt to find answers Bathurst braves the most hazardous shipping routes around the British coast, from the treacherous Goodwin Sands off Kent to the terrifying currents of the Pentland Firth. She writes about the sea with compelling grace and shows a fierce regard for the endurance and "blood-born navigational skills" of the communities that survived on its fringes. Wrecking offered many "a form of fishy Marxism", with stolen trophies making the difference between destitution and survival. Here moral boundaries - as clear, perhaps, to a landlubber as a coastline drawn on a map - prove on closer inspection quite as nebulous as the true border between land and sea.
Harriet Castor

Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science, by Steve Fuller (Icon, £7.99)

You'd be forgiven for thinking this prickly, provocative study is modelled on Wittgenstein's Poker, focusing on Karl Popper's 1965 London clash with the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions just as the earlier book centred on his brief spat with Wittgenstein. Its publishers naughtily encourage that assumption, highlighting the London debate on the jacket. Steve Fuller, however, makes only glancing references to this encounter. A sociologist with a philosophical bent, he's concerned instead with the respective conceptions of science embodied in Kuhn's notion of "paradigm shift" and Popper's insistence on "falsifiability". Kuhn won the debate "in the court of public opinion", he concedes, but argues that Kuhn's ideas were shaped by the cold war, providing a rationale for blinkered toilers in America's military-industrial complex. And just as mistaken as the perception of the younger man as a 60s radical is Popper's reactionary image: he became a grumpy old man, but the self-critical methodology he set out in the 30s shows him to be the real radical, preaching science as continual revolution.
John Dugdale

Other Routes, edited by Tabish Khair et al (Signal Books, £14.99)

I felt sorry for the writers in this anthology of 1,500 years of African and Asian travel writing. Not for their transitory vicissitudes, since they were a decidedly robust lot, from the medieval Korean official who was blown so far off course on a ferry crossing that he ended up unwanted in China, to the Nigerian child slave even further adrift in Georgian Cornwall (he liked the port of Fowey, and it liked him). But because they've been extracted, so that the reader gets only a day out with such terrific companions as Ibn Battuta and Sei Shonagon, voyagers with whom you would happily share a cabin for months. And even more so because of the prissiness of some of the editors' introductions: Queen Emma of Hawaii and Dean Mohamed (of Patna by birth, but of Cork and Brighton by taste and inclination) seem to have existed mostly so that academic points could be made about whose view of where should be permissible. Skip the intros and instead read Basho on the road or the Moghul ruler Babur on the gardens of Samarkand.
Vera Rule