The best history books refocus our gaze on previously invisible threads of causality and consequence. Virginia Postrel’s fascinating The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (Basic Books) recasts fibres and looms as the driving forces of human progress, exposing the impact of weaving – women’s work – across multiple cultures. Even scratches on Linear A tablets from Knossos turn out to refer to looms, not towers.
In contrast to this rosier view of human inventiveness, Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (Pushkin Press) offers a wrenching reflection, part fact, part fiction, on the entanglement of scientific discovery and destruction over the two world wars. A chapter on Prussian blue and Zyklon B dwells on the chilling effects of cyanide on the body, while the ‘pure’ field of mathematics emerges as a bridge to total self-destruction.
