November was a good month for Shaking the Family Tree. Although a snowstorm kept me away from a scheduled reading at the Steamboat Springs Library, I was able to hit the Denver JCC’s Book Festival as well as the San Gabriel JCC’s Book Festival in beautiful (and so not-snowy) Glendale, CA! I loved meeting those wonderful women who put on that event – thanks again to all who came out for it.

Colorado Public Radio (KCFR-Denver)’s Ryan Warner and I had a nice interview for his morning show, “Colorado Matters,” and you can listen to it here.

I’ve also seen a number of libraries, from Dallas to Portland, Oregon, recommending SFT for their holiday readers. Thanks, United States of America! I love you!
xo

We don’t know exactly what the last great Egyptian pharaoh, Cleopatra, looked like, but we can pretty sure she didn’t look much like any of the 20th century actress who have played her (including Beyonce as Foxy Cleopatra in “Austin Powers”). Cleopatra’s ethnicity was Macedonian so she probably had dark hair and relatively light skin. Angelina Jolie is in talks to star in the film version of Stacy Schiff’s new Cleopatra biography, which I reviewed in last Sunday’s Boston Globe. You can read it here or below. Enjoy! I did.

At the end of most biographies the author assembles a trophy case of primary sources but in CLEOPATRA: A Life, Stacy Schiff begins with a litany of research deficits that would intimidate anyone hoping to say something original about the Egyptian queen. “We have little idea of what she actually looked like,” she states at the outset (though she does remind us that, as the descendant of a line of Macedonian Greeks, Cleopatra was probably quite light-skinned).[4] “Our most comprehensive sources” – the ancient writers Lucan, Appian, Plutarch, Dio – “never met Cleopatra.” [5] “No papyri from Alexandria survive… We have, perhaps and at most, one written word of Cleopatra’s… a royal decree with the Greek word Ginestho, meaning, ‘Let it be done.’” (6) This brief, confident edict must have been a touchstone for Schiff in her own approach to recreating a life enshrouded in “a conspiracy of silences,” (6) because, despite the obvious problems with sources, she forged on.
CLEOPATRA explodes with scents, images, and intrigues that manage to perpetuate the two-thousand-year-old image of Cleopatra as the first human being to conjoin the words “rich” and “famous” even as she attempts to dismantle many of the myths associated with her name. Schiff steeped herself in very recent scholarship on women in the Hellenistic period (which began with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. and ended when Cleopatra died in 30 B.C.E.), and this is essential to her portrait of a woman remembered “for the wrong reasons.” [2]
“A capable, clear-eyed sovereign,” Cleopatra was one of the most powerful women who ever lived, but in fact even plebeian women in Alexandria during her reign enjoyed greater freedom and real power than most women have since. [2] Egyptian women were entitled to inherit money, divorce their spouses, control their own property, and serve as priests. [24] Imagine her shock when, in 46 B.C.E., Cleopatra first traveled to Rome, “a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens.” [105] It’s no wonder that Egyptian women and their power “astounded the foreigner.” [24]
This book is as much a biography of the city of ancient Alexandria as it is of its last pharaoh and much of Schiff’s prose is devoted to extolling the sophistication, wealth, and sumptuousness of Alexandria in contrast to “squalid and shapeless” Rome, “an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shuttering-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer.” [108] Alexandria “was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism,” with twenty-foot-wide paved avenues equipped with sewer systems and nighttime lighting. [67-68] The four-hundred-foot Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, guarded Alexandria’s harbor and the pyramids were already ancient by the time Caesar arrived in 48 B.C.E. Yet when Cleopatra got to Rome, the Coliseum did not yet exist and neither did the Pantheon. “Rome remained provincial,” a civilization with a talent for possessing and plundering great cultures but still refining its own. [109] “Even in Cleopatra’s day there was such thing as ancient history,” Schiff writes, and her country “had been in the hospitality business long before the rest of the world so much as suspected gracious living existed.” [78-79] Cleopatra arrived in Rome bearing gifts including “jars of Nile water” – thought to have magical healing properties – “shimmering fabrics, cinnamon, tapestries, alabaster pots of fragrance, gold beakers, mosaics, leopards,” and possibly a giraffe. [98] Few of these items had ever been seen in Rome – certainly not the giraffe.
Schiff is clearly inspired by the drama of Alexandrian culture but, like the great city itself, her imagery is sometimes too rich for its own good. Her descriptions of “a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons” [171] in which “no flower… ever completely stops blooming” [68-69] lose impact after 300 pages of similarly fecund prose. I’ve often wondered why every Roman period play or film must be enacted with the intonations of Laurence Olivier (if we’re going to impose a modern speaking style on Cicero, why not an Italian accent – he lived in Rome, after all) and, strangely, I got the same sense reading this book, the voice of Judi Dench popping into my mind each time I plunged into a sentence such as, “The Romans had the temperament of wolves,” [3] or, “There are cities in which to spend a fortune and cities in which to make one; only in the rare great city can one accomplish both.” [171] Most of the time I was too overwhelmed by towering ivory sphinxes and gilded palm trees to question whether it could actually be true. I don’t want to be too critical of Schiff’s writing, though; merely contemplating a biography of Cleopatra required audacity and Schiff more than succeeds at reframing her misunderstood queen in a way that is both scholarly and entertaining.
Schiff makes a strong case for Cleopatra’s political genius and her ability “to turn the implacable Roman tide to her advantage.” [3] Throughout one of the Roman republic’s most chaotic periods, Cleopatra repeatedly managed to navigate a favorable course for her country. “She got a very good deal right” in the political firestorm of her era, Schiff argues, “and one crucial thing wrong:” her fatal loyalty to Marc Antony. [302] When Cleopatra died, much of ancient Egypt’s glory died with her. All the great ancient monuments of her day – the Library of Alexandria; the Pharos lighthouse; Cleopatra’s palace – disappeared. “A great deal that Cleopatra knew” – knowledge of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, technology – “would be forgotten for fifteen hundred years,” [301] Schiff writes, and “[w]ith her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.” [3] With this biography, Cleopatra manages to recover some of her own dignity, as well.
Buzzy Jackson is the author of Shaking the Family Tree: Blue Bloods, Black Sheep, and Other Obsessions of an Accidental Genealogist. Email her at AskBuzzy@gmail.com.

Thomas Edison with one of his best ideas – an invention that came to signify inspiration itself: the lightbulb.

In today’s Boston Globe I review the new Steven Johnson book, WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM: The natural history of innovation (Riverside: 2010). The one point I did not have space to make in my review was the unsung debt owed by Johnson (and many others) to the great James Burke, best known for his BBC television series, CONNECTIONS. Johnson’s new book is in many ways a streamlined, sexier book version of CONNECTIONS, a show which traced the incredible paths of various scientific innovations from ancient times to the present. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

My review of Johnson’s book can be found on the Boston Globe site or, for your convenience, below.

MOTHERS OF INVENTION
Since there’s no copyright on book titles, Steven Johnson could have called his new book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions even though Thomas Kuhn used it in 1962. Instead, he went with Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Although indebted to Kuhn, Johnson is interested in much more than just scientific revolutions. This book covers everything from the history of reading to the influence of Brian Eno on hip hop producer Hank Schocklee. But mostly it’s about Charles Darwin.
Where Good Ideas Come From begins and ends with Darwin, the intellectual hero of our day (and yesterday and presumably tomorrow), the genius whose insights into everything from the formation of tropical atolls to the process of evolution underlie so much of modern life. Darwin is the perfect foil for Johnson, both for his creative ideas as well as his creative habits. If that sounds confusing, consider how Johnson describes his book “This is a book about the space of innovation… If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context. Darwin’s world-changing idea unfolded inside his brain, but think of all the environments he needed to piece it together: a ship, an archipelago, a notebook, a library, a coral reef. Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor.” [15]
“The space of innovation” is a pretty abstract concept. Johnson knows it and equips himself with an entire ordnance depot full of examples in order to explain. He’s not interested in merely recounting the well-known tale of how seventeenth-century coffeehouses fueled the European Enlightenment; no, this is a rapid-fire tour of “spaces” large, small, mental, physical, and otherwise — we’re talking reefs, webs, brains, networks, platforms, and quadrants. Johnson steps back now and again to remind us of the bigger picture. He’s distilled seven patterns or properties and assigned a chapter to each: The Adjacent Possible; Liquid Networks; The Slow Hunch; Serendipity; Error; Exaptation, and Platforms. “The more we embrace these patterns,”Johnson argues, “the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.” [15-16]
Johnson has been interested in these ideas for a long time – nearly every book he’s written addresses an aspect of human innovation or the properties of intellectual networks, from his very first book, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (1997) to The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008), and it’s clear that his research on the subject runs very deep. Where Good Ideas Come From may be the ultimate distillation of all his thinking on these issues and at times that’s the book’s challenge: it can read less like a book and more like a series of interesting concepts. Take the first five paragraphs of the Exaptation chapter, for example, in which Johnson leaps from Pliny the Elder and the invention of the screw press (for making wine) to fifteenth-century Rhineland and the bubonic plague to a first-century C.E. Chinese blacksmith named Pi Sheng (the inventor of movable type) and finally Johannes Gutenberg, who “took a machine designed to get people drunk [the Greco-Roman screw press], and turned it into an engine for mass communication.” [151] One admires the intellectual athleticism of Johnson’s maneuvers here, yet one can’t help wishing for a bit more time with each of these fascinating characters and their inventions. Distillation is a fine thing, but it’s also nice to sit back and slowly enjoy a tumbler of whiskey.
Johnson achieves a more pleasing balance of story and factoid in the chapter entitled The Slow Hunch. Here, he constructs a dramatic and chilling set piece about the “Phoenix Memo,” the unheeded July 2001 warning from an Arizona FBI field agent named Ken Williams who tried to alert the U.S. government to the presence of suspicious foreign students enrolled in American flight schools. Johnson threads the tale of the Phoenix Memo throughout the chapter, visiting along the way with (naturally) Charles Darwin’s journals, John Locke’s indexing system, a Victorian England how-to book entitled Enquire Within Upon Everything, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, and the corporate environment of Google. Although packed with wide-ranging details, the narrative shadow of the doomed Phoenix Memo is always present, adding weight and a sense of foreboding to Johnson’s larger argument about the power of the “slow hunch.” It’s one of his most important ideas: that great innovations do not usually appear in a flash of inspiration but instead they accrete “by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.” [79] By the end of the chapter, I was convinced.
Steven Johnson must occasionally wonder why he’s not Malcolm Gladwell; that is, why his bestselling books haven’t become zeitgeisty pop blockbusters in the manner of Gladwell’s. Surely “The Adjacent Possible” is just as catchy a concept as “The Tipping Point”… then again, maybe not. While Johnson and Gladwell write about many of the same issues (they’re equally obsessed, for instance, with “the strength of weak ties”) and bring their ideas to life through the use of capsule biographies, Gladwell lingers on the unexpectedly interesting quirks of a high school basketball coach or a forgotten nineteenth-century scientist (and yes, sometimes he lingers too long, but that’s another review). Johnson, meanwhile, speeds through the connections between the coach, the scientist, and fifteen other seemingly disparate people across time to make his point about creativity, about communication, about idea-making. Johnson’s concepts are strong and his explanations are credible. But after a while one tires of explanation. Ultimately, good ideas come from people. Johnson is most convincing when he slows down to let us spend time with them.

~ image copyright Ian Dingman~

I’m a big fan of self-publishing in principle – let the workers control the means of production!, et cetera – and lately I’ve been considering it for one of my own writing projects (more to come on that).

Today The Awl ran a nice piece on a recent success in the world of self-publishing, an illustrated book of short stories called To Slow Down the Time, written by Matthew Allard and illustrated by Ian Dingman. It looks beautiful and it’s hard to imagine that a *real* publisher could have improved on the final product. Allard’s already made some $$ off the book, which is pretty incredible in the world of letters.

Check it out.

Tomorrow I’ll be appearing on a local (Denver) morning show: Channel 9’s Colorado & Company… and it’s LIVE!! If you can’t tune in between 10-11AM tomorrow, you can either watch the live feed or possibly watch a video of it in a few days on their site (more details on that to come.)

In the meantime: what to wear??

I do. I visited Edinburgh with my father a long time ago, when I was in fifth grade. What I remember most: Edinburgh Castle; eating baked apples; the story of Greyfriar’s Bobby (a cute and heroically loyal little Skye Terrier – hey! I was in fifth grade!)… you get the picture. I loved the trip and still have the kilt my dad bought for me way back then.

Today I was reminded of just how much I love Scotland when I read this review of my book on the ScotGen genealogy blog. Oh, Scotland, you had me at Greyfriar’s Bobby… and now this?

How nice to read the Boston Globe today and see such a nice review of Shaking the Family Tree. I don’t know who this Chuck Leddy fellow is, but he sure seems like a heck of a wonderful guy.

In today’s Toronto Globe and Mail, Michael Kesterton’s “daily miscellany of information” included this at the top of his list:

Can be easy to forget

“The central lesson of genealogy is both banal and profound,” Buzzy Jackson writes for The Boston Globe. “We are all related. The human race is a sea of distant cousins separated only by geography and circumstance.”

So true. I mean, er… it’s amazing how quickly one can forget one’s own writing (this was written just a week or so ago for the Henry Louis Gates review).

Other topics included in Kesterton’s miscellany included the future of predictive policing, fingernail growing as an anger management tool, and the criminal genius of New Zealand’s kea parrots, so I’m in good company.

You can start gold-plating those first editions and wrapping them in that funny acid-free library paper because we’re on to #2!
Thanks, folks, for sending SFT into its second printing. I’m not even tired yet! (Bet that’s what all the young fighters say).

My review of the new Henry Louis Gates book, FACES OF AMERICA, appears in today’s Boston Globe. FACES includes genealogical sketches of a range of American celebrities, from Mike Nichols to Kristi Yamaguchi to Yo-Yo Ma.

Yo-Yo’s chapter includes a particularly nice quote handed down in the Ma family: “It takes the wealth of three generations to make a musician — the first to work the fields, the second to go to school, and the third to master an instrument.” In Yo-Yo’s case, this was prophetic – if you add a few dozen generations.

Bottom line? Thumbs up.