Here's Looking at Books...

BEGINNER'S LUCK

Walter Clemons

I have an appealing handbook called Just Juggle by Steve Cohen (McGraw-Hill) that I mean to master one of these days. Teach Yourself Modem Greek stares from my shelves, though Lancelot Hogben’s Mathematics for the Million (Norton), which I once worked halfway through, has gone into a box in my basement. I’ve always wanted to tap-dance but tossed out a book that promised to teach me in the privacy of my own home: the diagrams were inscrutable, and I guess there are some things you just can’t learn from a book.

But I never give up hope. I even made funny faces in my bathroom mirror for a while under the influence of a book that said this would retard aging. Didn’t seem to work, but who knows, if I had stuck with it?

This week I’ve had a very enjoyable crash course in Marx, Lenin, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Mao, capitalism, the French Revolution, Irish history, nuclear power, world hunger and—toughest of all—DNA. DNA for Beginners by Israel Rosenfield, Edward Ziff and Borin van Loon (Norton, hardcover and paperback) is the eighteenth in the series of Documentary Comic Books initiated by the Mexican political cartoonist Rius (Eduardo del Rio) in Marx for Beginners (Pantheon).

These are self-help books for highbrows, with bold, amusing graphics (cartoons mingled with engravings and photographs) and pep talks for the faint of heart. “Don’t have a nervous breakdown,” Einstein for Beginners advises when the relativity theory turns threatening; “a. go slowly, b. use pencil and paper, c. get a friend to come along!” Before long, you can puzzle out equations without flinching, though I wouldn’t like to try reproducing them from memory.

The books work most effectively when a single scientist or political thinker provides a biographical focus. Darwin for Beginners, with a witty text by Jonathan Miller and inventive graphics by Borin van Loon, is the best of the lot, though Oscar Zarate’s scandalous drawings make Freud a close second. French Revolution for Beginners is one of the relative failures, both because it’s a routine chronological ramble and because the subject doesn’t arouse in the authors the political feistiness that makes some of the other titles irritating and provocative. Ireland for Beginners builds up polemical steam when it arrives at the recent past. “The Irish are pigs!”—a remark of Princess Margaret’s—issues from the mouth of a prancing pig twirling a long string of pearls.

The Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, a British group that developed the series on a shoestring budget, is unabashedly leftist and activist in purpose. “Are you upset?” Food for Beginners pointedly asks, after outlining the practices of multinational agribusiness and scornfully rejecting overpopulation, climate and inefficient farming as first-world excuses for third-world hunger. “We hope so. If you don’t feel like going out and taking a swing at someone or something, then this book is, frankly, a failure.” Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose gets the back of Robert Lekachman’s hand in a bibliographical note in Capitalism for Beginners: “Adam Smith said it all better, earlier and funnier, but Friedman is a force in the world, more’s the pity.” Most of the books have useful, opinionated guides to further reading.

Six years ago the disastrous Random House Encyclopedia, a useless, unusable behemoth aimed at students whose attention spans had been rotted away by television, attempted a visual presentation that the Beginners series achieves with far more sophistication and ingenuity. You may smile at Van Loon’s drawings, in the newest book, of RNA polymerase as a tractorlike mobile scanner tooling its way along the template strand of the DNA double helix, but you won’t feel your intelligence has been insulted. By the time you reach the end of the little book, it has become possible to read, with a glimmering of comprehension, the terse 1953 paper in the scientific journal Nature in which J. D. Watson and F.H.C. Crick proposed the helical structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid. A stirring experience for a self-improver who aspired no higher last week than getting three tennis balls into the air.