NONFICTION
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist
by Thomas Levenson
$25
Sir Isaac Newton — bookish, asexual, harboring an uncool obsession with alchemy — doesn’t sound much like Humphrey Bogart. But after his famous apple-beaning inspired a mechanical portrait of our universe that would stand unchallenged for 200 years, the godfather of the Enlightenment used his plush sinecure at the Royal Mint to wage a war on counterfeiters that demanded very real gumshoeing.
Thomas Levenson’s “Newton and the Counterfeiter” presents the physicist’s vendetta against “coiner” William Chaloner as a battle of wits between a genius polymath trying to reform the British Empire’s monetary policy and a dastardly native of London’s criminal underworld circa 1695.
A pop-science writer who has made Einstein, acoustics and meteorology intelligible to the right-brained, Levenson transforms inflation and metallurgy into a suspenseful detective story bolstered by an eloquent summary of Newtonian physics and stomach-turning descriptions of prison life in the Tower of London.
Soon after abandoning his Cambridge library for the filthy metropolis, Levenson writes, Newton “managed incredibly swiftly to master every dirty job required of the 17th-century version of a big-city cop.”
Like “Heavenly Intrigue,” the 2004 book that posits that great astronomer Johannes Kepler murdered greater astronomer Tycho Brahe, “Newton and the Counterfeiter” humanizes a legend, transforming him into a Sherlock Holmes in pursuit of his own private Moriarity.
NONFICTION
Imperial
by William T. Vollmann
$55
“Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America.” On this eight-word foundation, essayist/provocateur William T. Vollmann has erected a 208-chapter, 4-pound fortress of verbiage in honor of Imperial County, California’s desert-turned- garden-turned-desert where farmers squabble over water rights, migrant workers sneak by ever-vigilant border patrol agents and prostitutes beckon to customers (Vollmann among them) in the dusky half-light of cantinas.
An aborted novel transformed into nonfiction that is simultaneously tedious, exhilarating, dry and heartbreaking, “Imperial” thrives on its smart design (historical documents and Vollmann’s own striking photographs break up the immense narrative) and its author’s awareness that he can’t quite understand his chosen subject.
Convinced that his manuscript, “like most human records. . . essentially recounts failure,” Vollmann trolls both sides of “the ditch” (his term for the All-American Canal that divides the twin cities of Calexico, U.S., and Mexicali, Mexico) sans driver’s license or Spanish-language skills in search of hidden tunnels built by 19th-century Chinese immigrants, or sweatshop conditions in maquiladoras, or navigable portions of the sewage-laden New River, hoping to find some ungettable story that, even if he were the crack investigative journalist he knows he isn’t, could never encapsulate Imperial’s broke-down majesty.
“Imperial does not need me to be itself,” Vollmann insists, but no one who reads this singular, significant book — half Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” half James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” — will contemplate NAFTA, illegal immigration or a trip to a “Southside” brothel without thinking of him.
