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 BOY, WITH SOME BOOKS you just know it's a bad
choice before you leave the shop. Sometimes, however, you're right for the wrong reasons. Being, as I am, a citizen of the intellectual Third World, I imagined that this book, subtitled
'The philosophy of Mathematics', was going to be way above my head. In spite of this, the fact that I'd enjoyed calculus as one of the few bits of A-level mathematics that seemed to actually
mean anything pushed me over the edge of rationality to part with £17.99.
If, like me, you're one of those people who read the various introductions, forewords and afterwords before you buy a book, you
should, unlike me, learn to bloody well pay attention to what you're reading. Having suffered the flowery twaddle of the introduction ('campfires glow against the dark...girdle or Orion...swashbuckling
style...elegiac conclusion'), I somehow failed to connect it with Berlinski's glaring self-admission in 'acknowledgements' of 'saying nothing at great length'. Like Spinal Tap's 'shit sandwich' review,
this phrase is probably the most eloquent summary of Berlinski's meisterbaterwerk.
It's true: as far as I can tell 'A Tour of the Calculus' is a gigantic
ego trip. The text is pure fluff and despite numerous impressive diagrams the real mathematics, such as it is, is contained in appendices which are scattered (somewhat oxymoronically, according to
the Concise Oxford) throughout the text. When you're browsing that introduction, of course, these 'appendices' appear as forbidden zones designed for numerate postgraduates, and you imagine that the rest of
us will simply accept the author's dispensation to ignore them. In practice, these appendices are islands of stimulation in a sea of verbal froth.
LET'S JUST SAY that we don't get to the nub of the calculus until
around page 160, by which time I'd had enough. If this were a novel, Berlinski's technique would be called 'suspense'. It's not a novel, so let's call a spade a spade - this is pure self-indulgence and I gave
Berlinski more than enough of my time. Call me vulgar but if it's not entertaining there's an even chance that I'm not going to last the distance. It's not so much that the book's boring (it is), it's just
that you keep wanting to smack the guy in the mouth and shout 'GET ON WITH IT'. Boy, I can't wait to try his other books ('Limitations of Some Mathematical Methods in the Social, Political and Biological
Sciences', for example). GET ON WITH IT! [SMACK]
Jeez. [Editorial note: I sometimes write book reviews after drinking lager.] |
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