The Summer Palaces of the Romanovs

This is truly a beautiful book. A brilliant collection of photos depict the well-preserved collections of the Russian Tsars in perfect detail. The interiors of the summer palaces are decorated with the finest furniture, carpets, and artwork, rivalling Versailles in every way. But there’s a less positive side to what I see here. Mark Twain once described Russia as a vast expanse of nothing, and while the magnificence of these treasures should challenge such a notion, I think it proves it.

When Catherine the Great started building these palaces, she was really just spending the peoples’ money on them. She was an absolute monarch, and she could do anything she wanted. Most Russians were serfs and that made them property, nothing more. Whatever money she spent on her houses was at the expense of education, so while her magnificent palaces sprang up, the rest of the country was illiterate and starving. Keep in mind that Britain was starting the Industrial Revolution, and the German states were making great advances in science, medicine, and engineering. As for the palaces, they were (to paraphrase the famous saying by Prince Charles) a “minute diamond on the face of monstrous carbuncle.”

The Romanov’s summer palaces were indeed full of beautiful things, every inch a work of great craftsmanship. Furniture and décor mimics the finest British, Italian, and French masters, with fine china, gilding, chandeliers, and other bric-a-brac. But there’s nothing in there to celebrate anything about Russia. The vases depict Chinese people (whom the Romanovs didn’t like) and the statues are the usual gilded cherubs. Almost nothing in there depicts Russian folk tales, clothing, or history, except for miniature paintings of military parades. I expected to see huge paintings the size of a bus, depicting Alexander Nevsky hacking up the Teutonic Knights. Maybe there would be one of Peter the Great, standing proudly on the bow of a ship, bombarding Turkish forts on the Black Sea coast? But no, there was absolutely no celebration of Russian life or history. Was it modesty? Or were the Tsars deluded with grandeur?

My research shows that Russia was making strides by the late 1800’s. The army was becoming a more modern fighting force, and the empire was pushing into the Caucasus. Yet there’s no depiction of that in the palaces. Russia’s poets and musicians were becoming renowned in Europe, yet there were no paintings of Pushkin or Tchaikovsky in there. I even read of a Russian artist named Ivan Billibin who illustrated his country’s folk tales with his beautiful artwork, influenced by Japanese prints. Yet there was none of his artwork in the Tsar’s residence. You’d think Russia’s emperors would have been patrons of the country’s up and coming artists, but they weren’t. Perhaps the Tsar’s palaces are monuments to how ignorant they were as to what was going on?

There is one thing I really wonder about after reading this book, and that is why the palaces are so well preserved in the first place. You’d think the Soviets would have looted everything in there and turned the buildings into hospices for WWII veterans or something. What I suspect is that the Soviets were keeping everything intact in case they ever needed to sell it. Faberge eggs, for instance, were brought to the USA and sold to collectors in the early 1930’s in order to gain foreign currency, and perhaps Stalin figured he could always use the rest of the collections to barter with.

This truly is a great book, regardless of how these monuments came into being. The photographers did an excellent job at capturing the majesty of these palaces, and the writers describe the artwork perfectly. 

The New Artisan Bread In Five Minutes a Day

What Julia Child did to introduce inhibited Americans to French cuisine, Hertzberg and Francois have done for bread. This book gives easy to follow instructions for baking all kind of breads, including rolls, baguettes, pitas, and breadsticks. By eliminating the huge amount of prep work, it makes baking bread far more enjoyable.

Basically, you can mix the flour yeast, and water together, leave it to rise overnight for twelve hours, and then back it. If you like you can leave the dough in the fridge for a week and bake it one the day the guests show up. It’ll have great taste and texture, and nobody will know how you made it. No more bread machines, no more kneading for ten minutes, no more kitchen covered in flour.

One of the greatest points of this book is practicality. Nobody’s going to bake their own bread if it’s too much trouble. Most guys prefer barbecuing, and no housewife wants a messy kitchen. But with food prices going up, and more unemployed people spending more time at home,  and they’ll probably take up baking to kill time.

I discovered the “no-knead” bread recipe long before this book, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. No I can have bread the way I want it, and don’t have to shell out big bucks. You also avoid the unhealthy preservatives and dyes in processed foods. The only drawback to baking is that the bread can go stale quickly because there are no preservatives. But then again, you can always keep the bread in the fridge and throw it in the oven before the guests arrive!

Introduction to Global Health

If only I’d had this book in high school. It doesn’t give you endless statistics about health, but gives you the skills you need to study it on your own. You’ll learn how to collect and measure data, compare health to population size, examine bias in research, and examine health with regard to ethnicity, occupation, and gender.

This book describes Brazil’s fertility rate as an example of the birth rate-health corollary. With the birth rate dropping, there’s less risk of infant mortality. South Korea, with its emphasis on efficiency, has a low fertility rate and high rate of health, partly because women have to put off child bearing until later in life. Though not mentioned in this book, Norway and Argentina have a high percentage of women legislators (Argentina has seats in the government reserved for women) and those two countries have a strong record of free day care and good health. Honduras, on the other hand, has few women in the government and a weak record on everything except banana cultivation.

An interesting chapter here is the one on how toxicology effects health in the developed nations. It uses a table to illustrate how chemicals like arsenic and lead are common in US products, and contribute to health problems in children. It reminds me of how some of the best playgrounds in the city had to be torn down because the wood contained arsenic. There’s also the issue of lead being used in gasoline in the UK, and as late as 1991 there were TV specials on BBC on how leaded gasoline was putting the kids at risk for brain damage.

When you study health you must keep in mind all of the factors you’d learn in social studies, and that includes economy, religion, occupations, life expectancy, population growth, education, gender, equality, stability, war, famine, disease, agriculture, and so on. Introduction to Global Health is the best place to start with regard to this. It gives you just the right skill to get started in your research.

Colorado: A History of the Centennial State

Colorado has an interesting history. It was once nothing but an outpost on the American frontier, then a stopover on the way to California, then a crossing point for prospectors. It was settled late, mainly after the Civil War, and even today it’s sparsely populated. This book makes it clear that the railroads had a lot to do with it. Since Colorado was far from the East Coast, and on the West side of the rivers, it was hard to get to. Until the railroad came along, nobody had any way or reason to go there. Before the Civil War the territory was inhabited by miners. Afterwards, more miners came, followed by farmers.

This book doesn’t gloss things over, on the contrary it makes clear that the native tribes suffered terribly. But it also tells an unusual story about the Native American attitude towards the coming of the European settlers. Some Cheyenne elders could see right away that they’d lose the battle. The “red devils” (the Ute pejorative) had better guns and greater numbers. Yet the younger Cheyenne were eager to fight, and fight they did. But it just made the US Army angrier and the junior officers, eager to prove themselves in combat, used the Cheyenne and Ute as a punching bag. If the modern weapons were not enough, simply putting down roots definitely was. The new arrivals plundered the buffalo, limited the grazing lands for the tribes’ horses, and pacified the region.

This book starts to get funny in the part about Colorado’s colleges. While the East coast had the Ivy League and the seminaries, Colorado had big plans for colleges too, but with a different purpose. The legislators wanted schools to train farmers and mining engineers. They didn’t want the professors teaching ancient languages, and with the state’s meager property tax being put towards the railroad, there wasn’t much money for education. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Denver Cities had frequent fires; the hastily-built wooden buildings were tinder boxes. I imagine it wasn’t cheap to rebuild, since the arid Colorado had few forests and the wood was probably imported.

Reading this book teaches you a lot about US history. Unionization, for instance, was met with harsh suppression by the state militias, not because the governor hated the union, but because he needed the businessmen’s tax money to keep the state going. This happened throughout the US with the railroad strike, Pullman strike, US Steel strike, etc. Then came WWII, which swelled the state’s population with army camps. After the war came racial integration, environmental concerns (no small issue in a state full of mine tailing dumps) and gay rights.

I would recommend this book for anyone studying US history. There’s a lot to learn here with regards to how business plays a strong part in US politics.

The Small Scale Poultry Flock

If you’re thinking about keeping some hens in your backyard, read this book. Whether you’re looking to reduce your food bill, or if you’re just trying to avoid hormone-pumped eggs, it’ll be worth the money and the effort. This book gives practical and easy-to-follow advice on how to buy chicks and raise them to lay big brown eggs (or become roast chicken if you prefer.)

Harvey Ussery starts out with basic reasons for keeping chickens, the first one being health. There’s a picture of a commercial egg business, with thousands of chickens in rows of cages, nothing to do all day but lay eggs. These chickens never leave their cages, and if you’re wondering why they don’t get sick, the answer is they do! They get pumped full of antibiotics to ward off disease, but that means you end up with an overdose every time you eat eggs and chicken. With all the antibiotics in those chickens, there’s probably an unknown bacteria out there that’s immune to the drugs. We could be in trouble.

With the health issue aside, Ussery guides the reader through building the chicken coop, selecting the chicks, caring for them when they first arrive, and keeping them happy at all times. He describes chicken rearing as no harder than keeping any other pet, but far more rewarding. It’s wonderful to hear that more Americans are being encouraged to keep chickens and grow their own food. You’ll have plenty of eggs all year round, not to mention lots of fertilizer too.

New Heavens and a New Earth

Back in the 1970’s, Israel’s Chief Rabbi announced that he wanted to change the blessings of the new moon. The old one no longer made sense to him, now that the USA had sent astronauts to walk on the moon. How could he say “as I dance before you but I can’t touch you” if it was now possible to touch the Moon? The other Rabbis all said “Rabbi Shlomo Goren, have you gone crazy?” But Rabbi Goren stuck to his guns. Next come the morning prayers. There’s a prayer that goes “thank you Lord for not making me a woman” while at the same time the women say “thank you Lord for making me according to your will.” Some say the prayer is sexist. Others ask which verse has to be said if the reader is a transsexual. Does she say “thank you for not making me a woman” if she is now a woman? Is it appropriate for her to say “thank you for making me according to your will” when she’s been made according to her own will?

When it comes to Judaism, science can open up a long line of endless debates. Is organ donation allowed? Is it acceptable for women to get tattoos? Can a man or priestly descent, forbidden to be in the presence of the dead, dissect cadavers in medical school? The list goes on and one, but in this new book, New Heavens and a New Earth, we focus on one debate only; the Heliocentric Theory. It was not a Jew but a Polish clergyman, Nicholas Coppernick (or Copernicus if you prefer) who decided that the planets revolved around the Sun. Some Rabbis argued in favor, others against. In Judaism, the calendar is based on the cycles of the Moon, so it would’ve come as a shock to some that the great shining star would now be the center of the galaxy.

One unusual Jewish scholar who argued against it was Isaac Cardoso. His family was Portuguese Marranos who were publicly Catholic, but Jewish in secret. After attending medical school in Spain, he moved to Venice and began living as a Jew. What was unusual about him was not that he “came out” as a Jew, but that he went from being pro-Copernican to anti-Copernican. He first argued in favor, citing practical evidence; if the Earth was so tiny compared to other heavenly bodies, it did not make sense to him that the satellites could be greater than the mother planet. Then he argued against it, claiming that the rapid movement of the Earth would prevent bullets from hitting their targets.

A pattern emerges in this book regarding the geographics of the Jewish scholar and the Heliocentric theory. Most of the Jews discussed in the first part are Sephardic, while Ashkenazi Jews factor in later. The Jews of the Mediterranean world appear to have been on the receiving end of all the great scientific knowledge of the world at the time, though it’s understandable, as the Jews of Poland and Lithuania were further away. Later on you have German Jews, like Raphael Levi in Hanover, who argued in favor of Copernicus, in concert with non-Jewish scholars. Another pattern can be clearly seen in this book; the astronomers were all amateurs and hobbyists. Cardoso was a physician, Copernicus was a priest, and Levi was a banker. Nobody went to college to study astronomy in those days, it was the work of mathematicians, and the mathematicians were either bankers or engineers. Perhaps there was even less debate of their work as nobody was truly an expert in the field?

New Heavens and a New Earth is a serious study, but funny as well. I enjoyed reading about how the Jewish community became more accepting of scientific trends, and it reminds me even more of today’s debate over things like grafted fruit trees, genetically modified cattle, and the use of robots on the Sabbath. 

Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling

Germany has always been a nation of great thinkers, and it gave us some of the greatest mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. During the 1800’s, you had a time when the thinkers, in this case Fichte and Schelling, were applying mathematical logic to philosophy, and it shows here in their correspondence. Fichte discusses the difference between focusing on what’s directly before you, as opposed to everything in your view (including the surroundings.) It made me think that if Fichte has played baseball, he would’ve written a whole book on using tunnel vision to pitch and hit! But the Germans weren’t big on sports at the time, so his philosophy clearly shows the effect of solitude. He doesn’t seem to have been influenced by communal living.

Schelling, on the other hand, is much more reflective. He studies his own habits in his writings, and stresses the understanding of the self, with emphasis on looking into the mirror to gauge your own strengths. He also discusses the use of language in communication and as a self- imposed barrier.

Correspondence is an important tool for studying history. There were no phones in the 1800’s, so people had to communicate through letters. Printing was more expensive too (no Xeroxes or even mimeograph machines) so the writers had to be selective about what they published. When you look at their letters, you see a whole lot of stuff that never made it to the books, and even more that they didn’t want anyone to see. It’s like opening an ancient box of hidden treasure.

Practical Paleo

Designer diets have been all over the news in the past decade, and most of them stress meat, meat, and more meat. We’ve had the Atkins Diet, the Zone Diet, the South Beach Diet, and the Paleo Diet. I’m not going to say what I think of them, except that no diet works if you can’t have the foods you like. Worse, a diet that involves too little food can’t possibly work, because you’ll get hungry anyway and feel the urge to binge. Practical Paleo is a book that fills the gaps, by showing you how to fix healthy meals that allow balance.

The Paleo diet stresses fresh meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, while eliminating all refined starches and processed foods. That means no cold cut, no hot dogs, and most breads. By doing this you cut out the starches, which mess up your blood sugar, and salts, which retain water. Come to think of it, all processed foods contain salt in some form or another, so you eliminate the great American heart disease inducing mineral right away. By cutting processed foods, you also cut the artificial colorings.

One of the greatest examples of the Paleolithic diet combined with the modern one if the savory baked chicken legs recipe. It’s a simple one, with liberal use of seasonings, but adds an unexpected twist; you’ll need either butter, bacon fat, or coconut oil. These modern foods (unavailable to cave men) may not seem healthy, but one tablespoon over three pieces of chicken won’t do any damage. That’s another problem of a lot of these diets, in that they think that any measure of butter will ruin you. But ingredients like butter, bacon, or coconut are essential for flavoring. If you can’t make them taste great, they won’t work.

The illustrations are all beautiful photos, and that’s another essential facet of eating that many of us ignore. Food tastes better when it looks great and well presented. People are attracted to nice colors, just like men are attracted to beautiful women. It’s a natural instinct. Serving the meal on artistic crockery adds vibe to what you’re eating. Think of the restaurant that has the worst food, but gets great reviews because of the atmosphere.  If you’re willing to spend a little extra time to select the ingredients, and a little extra time to prepare your meal, you’ll enjoy it more.

It’s like the old saying goes, you are what you eat!

Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs

Ancient India and Persia considered pearls to have medicinal properties as a love potion. They were the teardrops of the moon. Crushed and dissolved, they were considered intoxicating if you drank them. Nowadays, we know this is hokey, and although pearls are still used in traditional Chinese medicine, they’ve been scientifically proven to have few medicinal properties. Regardless of science, it’s not hard to see why pearls were considered an aphrodisiac. They have a beautiful spherical shape, a smooth texture, and they feel great against the skin. Early man must have been fascinated by their feel and image, and their delicate nature probably appealed to the desire for females.

Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs is an entertaining and thoroughly engaging book. The photos and illustrations humorously document the real and phony sex aids all over the world, ranging from chocolates and wines to kooky things made from animal parts. It contains hundreds of legends about sex, love and life from primitive and more advanced cultures, though the more “advanced” ones are often no better. It’s as much a book about folk attitudes towards gender as it is about herbs and foods that will cause arousal.

A number of shellfish are covered in this book, and it’s not hard to see why they’re thought to get women excited. First off, they taste great and they can be a primer to desire other things, like chocolates. If you’re trying to reach the woman’s heart through her stomach, oysters are your best bet. But there’s another reason that’s clear from the illustration; the seam of an oyster resembles a vulva! Exotic hot peppers also have phallic appearances, and anyone familiar with Georgia O’Keefe and her phallic flower paintings will probably know what I’m talking about. In Turkey, there’s was a combination of spices and bitter green herbs known as the “Sultan’s Paste” that were once used on frigid women in the Harems. The drug’s powers are obvious; spices can stimulate the heart and raise blood pressure, and even cure depression.

Spanish Fly, the infamous cantharides beetle shell, gets several pages, though its reputation is all myth. Beetle shells all seem to cause temperatures and sweats, so they’re used worldwide in traditional medicines. All it does is irritate the urethra, causing a burning sensation that some might mistake for arousal. What you might end up with is an unwanted erection from the blood flowing in there, and you might end up going to the hospital to have it drained. Even without that, keep in mind that it’s an insect, and you could easily have an allergic reaction.

Reading this book was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It should be put in the section of the library labelled “erotica” and makes better reading on a summer night than most romance novels. I bet this book could be made into a documentary, narrated by some smoky-voiced actress and with reenactments in place of illustrations. Not with any naughty stuff, we already had that with Emmanuelle and the five or six sequels. I’m talking about a more historical bend. It could start with Cleopatra’s crushed pearls, and progress to the Marquis de Sade drugging his party guests with Spanish Fly and turning the soiree into an orgy that shamed the entire aristocracy.

Maybe the French Revolution was the work of pissed-off peasants who didn’t get to go?