Alan Prince

Unraveling the brain’s riddles

by Alan Prince

Professors used to teach that the human mind could never fully understand the human mind, because, as postulated, one cannot define an unknown by means of an unknown. Shaped to support and protect the brain, the skull, by its very design, prevented scientists from closely examining the world's most complex structure until after a person died. In recent decades, however, powerful technology has allowed us to see such wonders as thought taking place in the brain. In An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, Diane Ackerman escorts the reader inside the skull to the 100 billion nerve cells that's right, 100 billion that do the brain's heavy work. It is a fascinating trip.

In addition to telling us which part of the brain does what, Ackerman tackles subjects that most of us ponder from time to time. Who hasn't for a moment inexplicably groped for a word on the tip of the tongue or failed to remember a close friend's name or couldn't recall what we did last weekend and then wondered if these scary blanks are warnings of an early onset of Alzheimer's? Ackerman describes remarkable experiments on both animals and humans that have awesome implications for Earth's featherless bipeds. In one, the intelligence and memory of a mouse were boosted five-fold by enlivening certain molecules for 150 thousandths of a second. She also tells of tests to locate and map guilty thoughts in the human brain, suggesting the possibility that airline ticket-holders some day might be brain-scanned and raising the quandary of how to tell if a suspected traveler is a terrorist with destructive intent or merely a passenger who has fibbed to his spouse.

Ackerman, whose prodigious output of poetry and nonfiction works includes the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses, acknowledges that "nature holds more secrets than we can unpuzzle." One example: the author, who holds a doctorate from Cornell and is consistently brilliant and perceptive in her writing, flunked logic as a college freshman.

Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

Sports

Sports

Running the mile in their shoes

Review by Alan Prince

by Alan Prince

There's a small group of people who measure time in tenths and hundredths of seconds; they are the heroes of The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It. Author Neal Bascomb takes us into the world of track and field and focuses on three superstars who sought to be the first to run a mile in four minutes or less.

For decades, the prevailing thought in the sports community was that the feat was impossible and, even if it were accomplishable, it would so overtax the body that death would result. These notions rested primarily on physiologists' knowledge of the capacity of legs and lungs, but England's Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student, added two factors: heart and head. He devised painful experiments to learn the complex relation between oxygen and exhaustion. In effect, he converted his body into a scientific project, helping him to modify his running technique.

On May 6, 1954, in Oxford, England, with the assistance of two "rabbits" colleagues who set the pace for him Bannister did what most of the world had considered impossible: he ran a mile in three minutes, 59.4 seconds. Indeed, it will be a callous reader who is not stirred by Bascomb's account of the race, even a half-century later. The author enables us to accompany Bannister throughout that entire historic day, to be privy to his doubts, to listen to the conversations on strategy with his coach and his collaborative runners, and then to virtually join them in the race.

We're there for each strength-sapping lap and for the stretch kick; we see the exhausted Bannister collapse "I was prepared to die," he later said and we share the celebration that crowned this immortal moment in human effort. Sports Illustrated rated Bannister's breakthrough with the scaling of Mount Everest as the most significant athletic feats of the 20th century, and a British newspaper declared it to be England's greatest triumph since the realm's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The rejoicing was not universal, however. Rival superstars John Landy of Australia and Wes Santee of the United States were disappointed that they had not been first to crack the barrier. Santee never managed to accomplish the feat, but only 47 days after Bannister's achievement, Landy, who had viewed the four-minute barrier as "a brick wall," lowered the record to 3:58, thus setting the stage for a head-to-head showdown with the Englishman at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver seven weeks later. Racing to beat the clock is one thing, but running to beat a competitor is another, requiring a different strategy. Again, Bascomb, previously the author of Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City, takes us trackside and shares the runners' thoughts and tactics in what was billed as "The Mile of the Century." In that dramatic confrontation in Vancouver, Bannister won by less than a second as both men were clocked in under four minutes clearly supporting the contention that the barrier had been more psychological than physical.

Today, running a sub-four-minute mile is almost routine; about 1,000 people have done it. As its golden anniversary approaches, this excellent book celebrates Bannister's epic triumph and the timeless message that our most difficult struggles are within ourselves.

Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

Memoir

Memoir

A love affair with the Times

Review by Alan Prince

by Alan Prince

One week into his job as an errand boy at The New York Times in 1944, Arthur Gelb got his first taste of big-time newspapering when the Allies invaded France on D-Day. It was the beginning of a love affair that lasted beyond his mandatory retirement as managing editor of the Times 45 years later. In City Room, a memoir that moves as fast as a reporter typing at deadline, he recalls scores of significant events in the life of his city, nation and newspaper.

Gelb takes us from his early days in the city room when a horse-playing managing editor hired bookies as clerks so they would be nearby. We get a firsthand account of how the newspaper battled authorities in developing such blockbuster scoops as the Pentagon Papers, which revealed government deception about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and the Officer Frank Serpico series, which uncovered deep-seated corruption in the N.Y.C. Police Department. Having seen a number of other dailies shuttered by economic pressures, demographic changes and labor strikes, the Times found its own existence threatened in the mid-1970s. Gelb led the way in giving a facelift to the Gray Lady, a nickname adopted by critics to note the newspaper's staid appearance. Using text, headlines and pictures in more imaginative ways than ever before, Gelb helped to create weekly theme sections on such subjects as science, lifestyles and weekend activities. Readers and advertisers responded in large numbers to the revitalized newspaper.

Gelb insists the newspaper always stressed a culture of accuracy and fairness that made the Times the gold standard of journalism in the pre-Jayson Blair years. This fascinating account of the newspaper's recent history, which ought to be required reading for journalism students, is highly recommended for everyone.

Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

Memoir

Memoir

Carl Reiner’s variety show

Review by Alan Prince

by Alan Prince

Some funny things happened to Carl Reiner on his way to the Television Academy Hall of Fame. He's collected them in My Anecdotal Life, a backstage tour of his stellar career as one of show business's most creative minds. Instead of presenting a chronological autobiography with his new book, Reiner offers his reminiscences "in the order that they popped into my head," resulting in what he calls a literary "variety show." While that approach makes it easy on the writer, it also makes it easy on the reader, and as a result we get a breezy and delightful memoir.

In 1939, when he was a 17-year-old machinist's helper, Reiner—proud of his ability to make funny faces and belch at will—enrolled in a free government-sponsored drama class. That was the first step of a career that has reaped a trunkful of Emmys and a Grammy. In this book, he recounts his writing and acting days with zany Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows, which kept TV watchers in stitches during the 1950s. Reiner, who directed numerous films, including Oh, God! and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, also takes a backward look at his creation, The Dick Van Dyke Show, which turned Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore into superstars.

We learn that Reiner and Mel Brooks were dubious about their signature 2,000 Year Old Man routine. It was a howling success at private parties, but they felt its ethnic flavor would limit broad appeal. All doubt vanished when Cary Grant reported that, when the record was played in Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II "roared."

In addition to recalling some tender family moments, Reiner tells how he tried to teach a resisting Mickey Rooney to cross his eyes for the role of a character named Cockeye, and how he led a group that included Eva Marie Saint, Theodore Bickel, Alan Arkin and Jonathan Winters in a serious game of ring-around-the-rosey. These and plenty of other celebrity-filled stories will make the reader smile, chuckle or guffaw—which, after all, is exactly what Carl Reiner always aims to do.

History

History

America’s first WWII battles

Review by Alan Prince

by Alan Prince

In a passage in Moby Dick, Herman Melville offered this counsel to other authors: "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." Rick Atkinson emphatically does both in his newest work, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. This initial volume of his Liberation Trilogy covers the crucial first years of America's involvement in World War II, the most destructive war in the planet's history. The book's main strength is its arsenal of battle-by-battle accounts, which will engross military history fans and have war buffs hovering over their maps for hours.

Complementing the battlefield exploits, Atkinson drawing upon thousands of letters, diaries, memoirs and official and unofficial records has unpacked facts that will lift many eyebrows. For instance, he finds Churchill, in Casablanca for a meeting with Roosevelt, lounging about in a pink gown and sipping breakfast from a bottle of wine. We're told that Patton in front of a mirror practiced the scowl to accompany the salty language that marked his s.o.b. demeanor. Atkinson also reports that throughout the campaign Montgomery kept a photograph of arch foe Rommel hanging above his desk. And we learn that Rommel, after Hitler angrily rejected one of his suggestions, confided to his son about the Fuhrer: Sometimes you feel that he's not quite normal. Although the war ended in 1945, An Army at Dawn is sure to rekindle the debate over the lingering question: Could the fighting have been brought to a quicker end if the Allies had first struck Hitler's forces in Europe? Whatever the answer, Atkinson leaves no doubt he thinks the effort spent in North Africa was critically important because it enabled an inexperienced, bumbling U.S. army to forge itself into an effective fighting machine.

A former Washington Post assistant managing editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Atkinson's book puts him on a fast track toward becoming one of our most ambitious and distinguished military chroniclers. An Army at Dawn takes us as far as Montgomery's defeat of Rommel and the liberation of Africa. Then the Allies as Atkinson will do in his next book looked northward to another continent.

An Army veteran and ex-newsman, Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami.

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

A mineral more precious than gold

Review by Alan Prince

by Alan Prince

The salt industry proudly boasts that its product has some 14,000 uses in hundreds of industries. After reading Salt: A World History, you'll no doubt respond to "Please pass the salt" with a new measure of respect for the substance, since every one of us would perish without it. Author Mark Kurlansky has compiled a remarkable book in which he explores every aspect of the mineral that for centuries was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history, presaging, in a sense, what today is viewed as a dependence on foreign oil.

Kurlansky tracks the impact of salt on the political, military, economic and social lives of societies throughout history. He details, for instance, Mahatma Gandhi's leading thousands of Indians on an exhausting 240-mile march to the sea to make their own salt in protest of a tax on the substance. Gandhi was jailed, but the march was a tool that led to his ending British rule over India without striking a single blow. Another of Kurlansky's heroes is Anthony Lucas, who ignored the advice of geologists and drilled a Texas salt dome called Spindletop. He struck oil in 1901 and thus gave birth to the modern petroleum industry.

Salt deserves a place on the shelf next to Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, which earned Kurlansky a James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, as well as a slot on the New York Times bestseller list. His new book brims with recipes from around the globe. Some of them are hundreds of years old, which just might entice a few adventuresome cooks back into the kitchen. And here's a taste of the countless other items spicing the text: some Lapplanders prefer salted coffee; sauerkraut was valued more than caviar in 19th century Russia; and in the United States, salt workers were considered so vitally important they were exempt from conscription in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

While homemakers and master chefs alike should enjoy this book, it's also likely to consume the interest of those who survive on TV dinners.

Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an ex-newsman and college lecturer.