Recently, I explained the concept of "The Coolness Continuum" in the context of puns involving cosmic carrots and anthropomorphic superheroes. But there is no concept so clear that I cannot run it straight into the ground. So, to celebrate/explain/bore you to tears with "The Coolness Continuum," I hereby designate the whole next month The Coolness Continuum Month At The Best Of Everything.
Which means I'll be naming things that are The Best of Lame/Cool in their category. Still with me? Stay along for the ride!
Today, it's The Best Nonfiction Book About a Topic So Lame It's Cool.
As a general rule, I do not like nonfiction books. That's because I look at books as entertainment, and escapism, and nonfiction by its very definition is not escapist. It's the opposite of escapist. It's capturist, or whatever the opposite would be. Why? Because life is nonfiction. See? Your whole life is true. Your whole life is based on actual events. So when it's time to kick back with a nice hefty book and relax, do you want to read about some guy who works during the day as a lawyer and at night ties together laundry baskets to pull his twin boys around in making 'choo-choo' train noises despite the fact that it's really more of a tugboat type of thing? I think not. You -- and I-- want to read about a kid with a lightning bolt scar flying on a broom, or about Yossarian's bombing missions, or at the very least about Traddles. 
But I do read nonfiction. My general dislike of nonfiction isn't a knock on the genre, because some of it is very good. I just don't read it unless it somehow catches my attention.
And the book I've picked The Best Nonfiction Book About A Topic So Lame It's Cool caught my attention just right out of nowhere. This book was a double, maybe triple, whammy. It was nonfiction, it's about an insanely lame topic, and it was about history. There was almost no chance this book would be good or interesting.
The book is called Longitude.
See what I mean? That is a title guaranteed to put you to sleep. Or so it would seem, because it didn't. I read that title, way back when I bought this book, and almost moved on. But I lingered long enough to read the subtitle.
The subtitle is The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time.
So that made me pause a little more and I looked at the back of the book and saw that it was about a subject that again was almost guaranteed to put me to sleep. It was about the guy who invented the marine chronometer.
Yeah. Let that sink in for a bit.
The cover:
together with the title, that subtitle, and the bit on the back and inside covers about the marine chronometer exemplify my major point here, which is things that are so lame they are cool (remember?) The title, the "lone genius" stuff, the marine chronometer, all soooo lame that they moved entirely around the circle and became almost irresistably cool. They were so aggressively lame that they dared me to ignore them, and of course, I could not, because they had moved right around the continuum to cool again, as I would find out.
I would find out because I bought that book and I read it all in about two days. Granted, it's short, but also it's about the guy who invented the marine chronometer, so that counterbalanced. But it was -- is -- a phenomenal book. It was astoundingly interesting. I could not put that book down.Longitude tells the story of William Harrison, who was an uneducated carpenter guy who began working to build a marine chronometer -- a clock that works at sea. That problem is far more complex than it sounds, because Harrison built the clock in the days when there were no electronics or electricity or other modern conveniences. So he had to build a clock that would keep accurate time for months at sea, and do so despite the fact that the ships they traveled in back then were smaller and lighter than your average SUV and rolled around and got wet and mildewy. And that would keep time while being wound.
And this was all incredibly important stuff, as the author, Dava Sobel
explains right at the outset by explaining how an entire fleet ran aground because they didn't know where in the world they were; clocks are used, as it turns out, to figure out your longitude -- figuring out where you are on the east-west continuum of the world is tougher to do than you might imagine, and if you guess wrong, the whole fleet ends up on the beach.
Sobel also explains little tidbits along the way like why pirates have eye patches (looking into the sun to get accurate sightings to figure their position) and how Harrison [SPOILER ALERT] got gypped out of his prize, and also [EVEN BIGGER SPOILER ALERT] how Harrison actually invented more than one marine chronometer, each better than the last one, and Sobel explains why each was better and the ingenious things that Harrison did, like [THIS MAY BE A SPOILER IF YOU ARE A SCIENCE NERD LIKE I WISH I WAS] use different kinds of metal that would expand and contract in the same temperatures, so that one would contract and the other would expand and the result would be that the clock continued to work.
The end result is a book that takes a seemingly minor part of history and explains why it's not minor at all, and also a book that points out the shortcomings of our educational system, because I made it through high school and college and was in my first year of law school before I ever even heard of William Harrison, or that there was a problem with longitude at all. And even then I only heard about it because I happened past the "New Nonfiction" shelf at the bookstore. What's wrong with teachers? Why did we spend 50 weeks a year on the Gilded Age, and never even touch on the fascinating story of how people figured out where they were in the world before GPS? If there were more books like this in schools, kids might learn something and actually like reading.I liked Longitude so well that I bought the original book and then got the illustrated version when that came out, too. I can't think of any single book that got me so excited that I bought it and read it twice. Writing about it right now has made me want to go read it all over again. There's something both thrilling and humbling about the story -- I wanted Harrison to succeed (and was pretty sure he would, given the title, which should probably have "Spoiler Alert" in it)and at the same time I was also reminded that after 19 years of school, I am barely capable of filling my gas tank, and this guy was able to build a fantastically complicated clock from scratch.
Dava Sobel has taken a too-little-known piece of history and turned it into one of the great works of literature of our time. Longitude should be required reading in our schools; until they put me in charge, you'll just have to go buy The Best Nonfiction Book About A Topic So Lame It's Cool and read it yourself.P.S. In my own so-lame-it's-cool way, I have contributed to science. When working with my kids to help them in their science class, I taught them the difference between longitude and latitude by reminding them that while lines of longitude run up and down the globe, latitude lines run across. My handy mnemonic device: Latitude is flatitude.
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