I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real number that is neither positive nor negative. It is neutral.
Why the negative association? Humankind has long harbored strong feelings toward zero; it was even banned in some places at one point. Xenophobia and ideology held back this powerful concept. Yet today all of mathematics is based on this number.
In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon. The penultimate book that Twain published in his lifetime, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), asked his readers to consider how few solid biographical details existed about Shakespeare the man, and how much critics had inferred from so little. They had built, Twain wrote, “an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.” The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.”
Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain (1835–1910) was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. Twain therefore presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself. Forced to choose, as Yeats wrote, “perfection of the life, or of the work,” Twain left the former a total shambles—and then for good measure was struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man.
Ron Chernow is best known for “Alexander Hamilton,” his 2004 biography that inspired the popular hip-hop musical. Chernow, who has also written books about George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, is especially good as a popular historian, placing his subjects within a sweeping canvas of their times. That sensibility also informs “Mark Twain,” Chernow’s new biography of America’s most famous writer.
In true Chernow fashion, this is a book about not only Twain, but also the modern celebrity culture that nurtured his career – and that he helped in large part to create. It’s also the story of how Twain’s emotionally austere father shaped Twain’s hunger for attention, which took a strange late-life turn.
The subtitle of Shubin’s latest book suggests its scope — his quest to put polar science into a larger context for understanding our world and beyond, both in space and time. Readers who expect detailed narratives about his own research journeys will be disappointed; instead, the reward is a compendium of both historical and very recent scientific discovery at the poles — and its meaning for the future we face. As he says in his prologue, “In this book, polar science will be our lens to see the natural world and the extraordinary ways we have come to know it.”