The joy of non-fiction

I recently had a discussion with a friend about fiction versus non-fiction books. It was his view that fiction was far more interesting than non-fiction. I don't agree. I wonder if this somewhat common viewpoint comes from the boredom many of us experienced in school when we were required to memorize useless data... length of the Amazon river?????

Personally, I like both types of books but lean toward the real stuff. I did the math on my Shelfari library and roughly 70% of the 600 books on my virtual shelves are non-fiction. This is probably why my kids often refer to me as Cliffy after the character of Cliff Claven on the TV series Cheers who constantly spouted (what many thought were ) useless facts. Personally, I enjoyed his random comments about little-known historical and scientific details.

One of the cool things about e-readers is that it's easy to highlight and store things and to save them for later review or use. Here are some of the items I found interesting in a couple of recent books I've read. I think you will find that truth is indeed, at times, stranger than fiction.

Decision Points (George W. Bush)
Lincoln's Civil War letters to the survivors of slain soldiers:

“I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming, but I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

 At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson)
Mice and other rodents consume about a tenth of America’s annual grain crop—an astonishing proportion. Each mouse voids about fifty pellets a day, and that results in a lot of contamination, too. Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two fecal pellets per pint of grain—a thought to bear in mind the next time you look at a loaf of whole grain bread.

 ***

No one has ever suffered more in the quest to get rich than Ferdinand Magellan and his crew as they sailed in growing disbelief across the Pacific in 1521. Their provisions all but exhausted, they devised perhaps the least appetizing dish ever served: rat droppings mixed with wood shavings. “We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit but powder of biscuits swarming with worms,” recorded one crew member. “It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard… and often we ate sawdust from boards.” They went three months and twenty days without fresh food or water before finding relief and a shoreline in Guam—and all in a quest to fill the ships’ holds with dried flowerbuds, bits of tree bark, and other aromatic scrapings to sprinkle on food and make into pomanders.

***

Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses. Eighty-four percent of people who die in stair falls at home are sixty-five or older. This is not so much because the elderly are more careless on stairs, but just because they don’t get up so well afterward. Children, happily, only very rarely die in falls on stairs, though households with young children in them have by far the highest rates of injuries, partly because of high levels of stair usage and partly because of the startling things children leave on steps. Unmarried people are more likely to fall than married people, and previously married people fall more than both of those. People in good shape fall more often than people in bad shape, largely because they do a lot more bounding and don’t descend as carefully and with as many rest stops as the tubby or infirm.

***

The (Chicago) fire destroyed 18,000 buildings and made 150,000 people homeless. Damages topped $200 million and put fifty-one insurance companies out of business.

 ***

Shellac is a hard resinous secretion from the Indian lac beetle. Lac beetles emerge in swarms in parts of India at certain times of the year, and their secretions make varnish that is odorless, nontoxic, brilliantly shiny, and highly resistant to scratches and fading. It doesn’t attract dust while wet, and it dries in minutes.

Decision Points (George W. Bush)
Thursday, March 13, we learned that Bear Stearns, one of America’s largest investment banks, was facing a liquidity crisis. Like other Wall Street institutions, Bear was heavily leveraged. For every dollar it held in capital, the firm had borrowed thirty-three dollars to invest, much of it in mortgage-backed securities.

 ***

For years, I listened to politicians from both sides of the aisle allege that I had squandered the massive surplus I inherited. That never made sense. Much of the surplus was an illusion, based on the mistaken assumption that the 1990s boom would continue. Once the recession and 9/11 hit, there was little surplus left.

***

By the summer of 2008, I had publicly called for GSE reform seventeen times. It turned out the eighteenth was the charm. All it took was the prospect of a global financial meltdown. In July, Congress passed a reform bill granting a key element of what we had first proposed five years earlier: a strong regulator for the GSEs. The bill also gave the treasury secretary temporary authority to inject equity into Fannie and Freddie if their solvency came into question.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson)

When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex—up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can’t find a female, he will happily—or at least willingly—find relief in a male. Female rats are robustly fecund. The average adult female Norway rat produces 35.7 offspring a year, in litters of 6 to 9 at a time. In the right conditions, however, a female rat can produce a new litter of up to 20 babies every three weeks.

***

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas. These foods weren’t just incorporated into foreign cuisines. They effectively became the foreign cuisines. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without eggplant, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without chilies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava. There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.

***

... the British never had much success in the East Indies, and in 1667, in the Treaty of Breda, they ceded all claims to the region to the Dutch in return for a small piece of land of no great significance in North America. The piece of land was called Manhattan.

***

With no immunity to many European diseases, the (North American) natives sickened easily and “died in heaps.” One epidemic, probably viral hepatitis, killed an estimated 90 percent of the natives in coastal Massachusetts. A once-mighty tribal group in the region of modern Texas and Arkansas, the Caddo, saw its population fall from an estimated 200,000 to just 1,400—a drop of nearly 96 percent. An equivalent outbreak in modern New York would reduce the population to 56,000—“not enough to fill Yankee Stadium,” in the chilling phrase of Charles C. Mann. Altogether, disease and slaughter reduced the native population of Mesoamerica by an estimated 90 percent in the first century of European contact.

***

Sweet tea became a national indulgence. By 1770, per capita consumption of sugar was running at 20 pounds a head, and most of that, it seems, was spooned into tea. (That sounds like quite a lot until you realize that Britons today eat 80 pounds of sugar per person annually, while Americans pack away a decidedly robust 126 pounds of sugar per head.) As with coffee, tea was held to confer health benefits;

***

Jethro Tull

Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil. (Note: I thought Jethro Tull was a rock group!!!)

***

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

***

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists.

***

It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.

***

In consequence of the unrelentingly dire conditions, (England's) mortality figures soared wherever the poor congregated. In Dudley, in the Midlands, the average life expectancy at birth at midcentury had sunk to just 18.5 years, a life span not seen in Britain since the Bronze Age. In even the healthiest cities, the average life expectancy was 26 to 28, and nowhere in urban Britain did it exceed thirty.

Who knew?