Book Reviews

The kids aren’t reading. Across the western world, Gen Zers are reading far fewer books than their parents. Many can barely read at all. In the US, 40 percent of fourth-graders have “below basic” reading abilities, while the same percentage of American adults reported reading no books at all in the previous year. Professors at elite US universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a 30-page extract. In the UK, the National Literacy Trust found that just 33 percent of schoolchildren enjoyed reading in their free time, a 36 percent decrease since 2005. Does the rise of the postliterate society amount to a death knell for liberal democracy?

In his fourth book on Napoleon, after Napoleon and Wellington (2001), Waterloo (2005) and Napoleon the Great (2014), Andrew Roberts focuses on the emperor’s relations with his 26 marshals. Writing with the dash and vigor of a cavalry charge, having walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields, Roberts analyzes campaigns and battles from Italy in 1796, through Austerlitz, “the greatest victory in the history of France,” and the retreat from Moscow (ten marshals served in the Russian campaign) to Waterloo in 1815. Accounts of marches and battles are interspersed with frequent quotations from the emperor’s letters, sent day and night to his marshals to micromanage their campaigns, as well as from the marshals’ personal correspondence with each other.

It took six years, starting in the summer of 1784, for the Board of Ordnance to establish the baseline of its triangulation of Great Britain. First they used wooden poles, then glass tubes. After much clearing of furze bushes and anthills, the baseline ran for more than five miles from Hounslow Heath to Hampton Poor House. The maps of England and Wales were complete by 1870. Scotland had to wait until 1887. The delay was rumored to have been caused by the superintendent’s concern that surveyors would get in the way of the late summer deerstalking. As a wing of the military, the Ordnance Survey had extraordinary powers. The Surveyors’ Act of 1841 allowed it to trudge, clamber, squelch, measure and interrogate wherever necessary.

The elegant, charismatic and narcissistic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wasn’t the average adventurer that Alaska attracted in 1912. When he arrived in Seattle from the Gold Rush port of Nome, he told journalists that he had discovered “a lost tribe of whites” in the uncharted High Arctic. He also sold politicians the vision of an undiscovered land rich in gold, raw metals and oil that, only nine years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, would soon be covered with airfields. The Canadian government quickly offered Stefansson unlimited resources to lead an expedition back to the High Arctic. His objective was to claim what may have been the greatest geopolitical prize for Canada and the British Empire: the mysterious continent at the top of the world.

Almost two decades ago, Jared Diamond cemented his international reputation with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which argued that geography and environment rather than racial differences shaped the rise and conquest of nations. Still going strong at 89, he has now written a book on leadership. This is a crowded literary space, but Diamond offers a distinctive approach. A distinguished biologist and polymath, he has little time for the Great Man theory of history popularized by the 19th-century essayist Thomas Carlyle. Altogether too subjective, he says, never mind the absence of women. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is no better a guide, since it casts individuals as constrained by circumstance, with scant influence over events.