History can open up some unexpected vistas

School librarians often tell me they don’t read a lot of nonfiction—it’s not a pleasure that many of you look forward to. Since I read adult nonfiction every chance I get, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of the selections on my night table, and tell you what I like about them.

Last night, I picked up a book by Michael and Ellen Kaplan called Chances Are…: Adventures in Probability (Viking, 2006). This isn’t a cleverly titled math workbook. It’s about the history of the scientific study of probability, and what we’ve learned about odds and predictability. The very beginning of the book opened up whole new vistas to me: before the 1660s, we in the West had only two ways of proving something about the world, either by observing events or by formulating a logical deduction. But an obscure Englishman named John Graunt pioneered a new kind of knowledge. Graunt discovered that if you studied birth and death tables, you could discern patterns and trends in the data—in other words, you could see probabilities. A probability, or trend, is simply a new kind of truth—an evolving pattern or knowledge in motion.

At precisely the same time as Gaunt was laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the disciplines of statistics and economics, mathematicians were developing calculus, which also allows us to make sense of motion—the arc of a ball traveling through space, for example.

I’m also reading The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (Viking, 2007) by Tim Blanning. It, too, begins with a nugget of historical insight that I didn’t know. Europe in the 17th century had two kinds of roads—insufferable, and nearly impassible. Who would have been motivated to create decent roads at that time? Governments didn’t see it as their responsibility, and neither did local citizens, who only needed a way to get themselves, their goods, and their livestock to market. That meant if you were traveling long distances, you took your chances—which is why we have so many folktales about travelers on difficult journeys, and their adventures at the taverns and inns they visited along the way. Only in places like Holland, where there were convenient canals, could people move around easily.

As it happens, Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR, celebrates the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at the end of the year. Last night, as I was thinking about the changes that took place in the 17th century, trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis was on, talking about Bach and jazz. Marsalis thinks that efforts to blend the two forms of music have failed, because Bach’s rhythmic structure is different than most of jazz’s, outside of the very early New Orleans’s marches.

So what was it about the late 17th century that enabled humans to invent new disciplines that captured trends (and not simply facts), build roads that would one day transform Europe, and create the rich counterpoints we hear today in Bach’s music? What new developments in trade, war, exploration, and travel did they experience? I don’t know yet. But I suspect it has something to do with that 17th-century moment of “globalization,” when Europeans were founding colonies in the New World, Asia, and Africa—something that’s similar to what’s happening today. After all, the current buzz is about chaos theory and the number-crunching power of computers, and how they enable us to discover new patterns in nature, even as our lives have become more interconnected.

Nonfiction opens up fascinating pathways into the past that help us better understand the changing present and forecast what our children may experience in the future. What more could any of us want from our reading?