Steven Johnson

I first became aware of Steven Johnson when The Beloved Spouse and I watched his six-part miniseries, How We Got to Now on PBS last fall. (How we became aware of the miniseries eludes me.) By Episode 3 I had already placed the companion book on my Wish List. TBS doubled down at Christmas, buying both that and one of Johnson’s earlier books, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Johnson has two great gifts. His engaging personality conveys well on screen, and in his writing. He approaches weighty subjects with respect but no fear, making what might have been difficult concepts less intimidating though his easygoing prose. He makes no pretense of having figured out any of what he writes about on his own. In fact, that’s an underlying theme of both books: no one (hardly) ever figures out anything on his or her own. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who came before in order to see farther than their predecessors. Others are working on similar things at the same time; knowledge spills over. He even has a term to explain why things work this way: the adjacent possible. (Which term he lifted form someone else and uses to good advantage.)

Johnson’s other, and most compelling gift—there are lots of personable people in the world who aren’t good for fuck all else—is an ability to tie things together, and to see where they came from. Charles Babbage was a genius of inestimable insight. His mechanical forerunner of the modern computer anticipated virtually every aspect of computing we have come to take for granted, yet he could never build one; it wasn’t practical without vacuum tubes. The electric light bulb has come to symbolize an inventor’s “Eureka!” moment, yet Edison did not have such a moment when working on his bulb. Edison did not, in fact, invent the first bulb. He didn’t even invent the first practical bulb, not on his own. What Edison invented was the process—not unlike an assembly line—that allowed his teams of engineers and scientists to create the first practical bulb. While it may seem prosaic to the average person, that’s the invention that has more lasting implications: creating a process than can be scaled and duplicated.

Where Good Ideas Come From ends with an attempt to quantify how the major scientific and technological advances of the past several hundred years came to be. Conventional Wisdom, at least in this country, holds these advances are the work of entrepreneurs working with profits foremost in their minds. Looking at the origins of key advances shows they are far more likely to come about through non-market-oriented collaborative networks, in part because market-driven innovation creates knowledge silos, and doesn’t continue down roads that do not appear to be profitable. The collaborative approach avoid both pitfalls.

I can get down a rabbit hole talking these books; they fascinate me. You’ll have a lot more fun, and learn exponentially more, by reading them yourself. Johnson now occupies a unique position in my reading rotation: the only non-fiction writer on it. I have every intention of reading everything he writes, which means I should never run out of fresh material. Johnson’s 13 years younger than I.

February Reads

February was another good reading month, with non-fiction still taking up the best spent of my time.

How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson. The companion to PBS’s excellent mini-series, with a few things PBS didn’t have time to include. I’m glad I read Where Do Good Ideas Come From? first, as some of the terminology used here was introduced there, but readers should have no trouble jumping right into this one. Fascinating, page after page.

The World of Raymond Chandler, Barry Day. Chandler never wrote a memoir, so Day has culled what he could about Chandler’s life and thoughts from Chandler’s own writing, including fiction, non-fiction, and letters. In doing so, he opens the door to much I didn’t know, and addresses some criticisms that have crept up as modern day sensitivities look back on Chandler’s work. Having read this, I don’t think I would have liked Chandler much as a person, but I have even more respect for his writing, as Day’s compilation of the best bits heightens the impact.

Courier, Terry Irving. Courier hung around near the top of my To Be Read list for four months; something urgent kept knocking it down a notch. I’m glad I got around to it. I’m not a thriller guy, but, having met Irving at a reading, his historical cred was impressive. The book reflects that, weaving its story into Watergate-era events in a way that put me in mind of James Ellroy’s use of historical events. The motorcycle scenes are particularly effective. Irving knows what he’s talking about, and does a nice job of avoiding the conventions send too many modern thrillers over the shark.

400 Things Cops Know, Adam Plantinga. I’ll have more about this one on Thursday. Suffice to say, every crime writer needs a copy of this book.

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett. Holy shit. It had been at least ten years since I last read this. (My records only go back to 2006.) The seminal crime fiction/PI story. I finished it and didn’t want to write that evening. Comparing what I do to what he did is like putting a Little Leaguer up against Ted Williams.

January Reads...and Breaking News!

This was to have been the routine recounting of the best books I read last month (and I read some good ones), but Declan Burke’s review of Grind Joint has me chuffed. An excerpt:

Rooted in the Slavic ethnic heritage of western Pennsylvania, Dana King’s style – this is his fourth novel – has been compared to the work of the late Elmore Leonard, and it’s easy to see why: Grind Joint is a compelling tale of small-town gangsters and cops rooted in vernacular dialogue and blackly comic in the way the bad guys’ ambitions easily exceed their abilities. Grind Joint reads more like a proto-Leonard story, one more reminiscent of George V Higgins, whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle exerted a major influence on Leonard’s style.

There is a chilly and occasionally unsettling quality of realism to King’s unflinching appraisal of the devastating impact of economic downturn on the small-town United States, which leads its protagonists to perform increasingly convoluted moral gymnastics.

The entire review can be read on the Irish Times web site. (No, Grind Joint is not the “affecting psychological thriller” referred to in the title, though that sounds like a hell of a book, too.)

Now we resume our regularly scheduled program.

January was spent reading the Christmas gelt, which was primarily non-fiction, but what great non-fiction it was.

Hooked, Les Edgerton. I’ve loved Les’s fiction since I first read The Bitch, and I spent three days at the Creatures, Crime, and Creativity conference last fall tripping over unsolicited raves for this book. They were right. It hits the right tone throughout and has a lot of things I hadn’t thought of, and—thankfully—confirmed some others. I liked this book so much I bought another copy to give to my writers group, for those who struggle with their beginnings.

Where Good Ideas Come From (The Natural History of Innovation), Steven Johnson. I became aware of Johnson by watching his excellent PBS mini-series How We Got to Now and adding that book to my Wish List; The Beloved Spouse doubled down on him, and I’m a better person for it. Johnson explores concepts such as the adjacent possible (in short, why some ideas can’t take off because they’re too far ahead of their time), wrapping up with a compelling argument that most advances aren’t generated for profit, but are done in the spirit of finding things out; then someone figures a way to make money from them. Highest recommendation, though the proofreader should be shot.

The Poisoner’s Handbook (Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York), Deborah Blum. Another book I became aware of via PBS, The Poisoner’s Handbook traces the origin of forensic toxicology in the United States, as begun by the first New York City medical Examiner (Charles Norris) and his master chemist (Alexander Gettler). Starting with the time of the wholly corrupt coroner system, the book traces the careers of Norris and Gettler through the heyday of death by poison, and their struggles to not only find out how poisons killed (and prove when they had, or had not, been used), but to get the powers that be to take them seriously. Highest recommendation, especially for the corollary value of learning firsthand where government regulation come from and what life—and, too often, death—was like without it.