I read these books in tandem. Each is about 250 pages, and each describes a particular aspect of its author’s experience.
I was pretty certain I would like In Ruins. It name checked books and places and things that I already knew and liked—the peculiar buildings and history of the tidelands of east England, as described in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the ruins of Rome through the centuries, the fate of the monasteries and abbeys of England after Henry VIII seized them for the crown, Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln Inn Fields, London (which I had visited last year), and the life and work of Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa and author of The Leopard. Plus, it had lots of pictures! The author even manages to work in former world middleweight champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who, after losing a title bout, came to Rome and put his life in perspective: “I was angry as hell when they took away my title. But when you stand in the Pincio Gardens at sunset looking down at the whole of Rome, across centuries, it sorta puts things in perspective.” Hagler still lives in Italy, where he appears in television and films.
The book is about (spoiler alert!) ruins—how people have seen them through the centuries, what ruins tell us about ourselves and the past, etc. About half the ruins the author discusses are in Italy, and half are in England. You would think that once a building was ruined, that would be more or less the end of the story. But modern, excavated, groomed and managed ruins of the kind available to 21st century tourists are much less interesting than the haphazard, untended, overgrown ruins of the 18th century. In 18th century Rome, the colliseum had small forests growing in its grandstands, and Christian shrines—and even a small building, a hermitage—on its floor. In those days you could ride a horse into the colliseum under the moonlight. A 19th century botanist collected seeds from plants growing in the colliseum and determined that many of them were exotics from Africa and the Middle East. His only guess as to how those plants could have gotten there is that they grew from seeds that had been excreted by lions and other exotic fauna brought to the colliseum in its heyday to munch on Christians and other dainties.
Crazy U is a brisk and perfunctory piece of extended journalism by one Andrew Ferguson, “a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.” Ferguson has a 17-year-old son who was getting ready to apply to college. Since I have a 15-year-old son who might be getting ready to apply to college in about two years, I thought the book might provide some useful insights. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but after about 50 pages I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be getting it. I can’t say that I didn’t pick up a few useful tidbits—for example, I told my son he should start thinking about which teachers might be good for a reference now rather than two years from now when his freshman teachers will be just a dim memory—but my overall impression was that this was a stale piece of hackwork.
I think years of reading New Yorker articles has spoiled me for mainstream journalism. Ferguson does a very professional job of interweaving his son’s story with sections on things like the SAT and the U.S. News college rankings. These expository sections are a bit dry, so the author spices them up a bit with witty asides: “That something so dull [as the SAT] could have an effect so pyrotechnical is hard to credit. It’s as if the Trojan War had been fought over Bette Midler.” This is humor intended to provide respite for the reader who might be beginning to fidget after all the “heavy” information. Jay Leno humor.
Ferguson pretends to be appalled at how excruciatingly careful the people who create the SAT have to be to avoid the faintest hint of political incorrectness, but his book is similarly scrubbed of anything that might align it with one faction or another in the culture wars.
The author’s son is a good student but not exceptional. It could hardly be otherwise, though, since if he were too bright his experience would not generalize well, and if he were not bright enough, it would be cruel to expose him.
Overall, Crazy U felt less like a book and more like a seminar presentation minus the PowerPoint. Written with the discipline of the professional who wants to get the maximum financial return on his time and effort. No wasted speculation, no risky digressions, no stepping off the path for even a second. Crazy like a fox.
