The Wall Street Journal - 07.09.2019 - 08.09.2019

C12| Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**

Hardcover Nonfiction TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge 1 New Jeanine Pirro/Center Street Educated: A Memoir 2 2 Tara Westover/Random House StrengthsFinder 2.0 3 3 Tom Rath/Gallup Becoming 4 6 Michelle Obama/Crown Girl, Wash Your Face 5 8 Rachel Hollis/Thomas Nelson

TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck 6 5 Mark Manson/Harper It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way 7 7 Lysa TerKeurst/Thomas Nelson Girl, Stop Apologizing 8 10 Rachel Hollis/HarperCollins Leadership The Disney Princess Cookbook 9 — Disney Book Group/Disney Thank You for My Service 10 1 Mat Best, Ross Patterson & Nils Parker/Bantam

Hardcover Fiction TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls 1 1 Dav Pilkey/Graphix A Better Man 2 New Louise Penny/Minotaur Where the Crawdads Sing 3 2 Delia Owens/Putnam The Girl Who Lived Twice 4 New David Lagercrantz/Knopf The Dark Side 5 New Danielle Steel/Delacorte

TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK We Don’t Eat Our Classmates 6 3 Ryan T. Higgins/Disney-Hyperion The Inn 7 4 James Patterson & Candice Fox/Little, Brown The Pigeon Has to Go to School! 8 8 Mo Willems/Hyperion One Good Deed 9 5 David Baldacci/Grand Central Dog Man: Brawl of the Wild 10 7 Dav Pilkey/Graphix

Methodology

NPDBookScangatherspoint-of-salebookdata frommorethan16,000locationsacrosstheU.S., representingabout85%ofthenation’sbooksales. Print-bookdataprovidersincludeallmajorbooksellers, webretailersandfoodstores.E-bookdataproviders includeallmajore-bookretailers.Freee-booksand thosesellingforlessthan99centsareexcluded. Thefictionandnonfictioncombinedlistsinclude aggregatedsalesforallbookformats(exceptaudio books,bundles,boxedsetsandforeign languageeditions)andfeaturea combinationofadult,youngadultand juveniletitles.Thehardcoverfictionand nonfictionlistsalsoencompassamixof adult,youngadultandjuveniletitleswhilethebusiness listfeaturesonlyadulthardcovertitles.Refer [email protected].

Nonfiction E-Books TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Educated: A Memoir 1 1 Tara Westover/Random House Grant 2 — Ron Chernow/Penguin Press How Not to Die 3 — Michael Greger & Gene Stone/Flatiron The Complete Poetry 4 — Maya Angelou/Random House Boy Erased: A Memoir 5 — Garrard Conley/Riverhead Becoming 6 — Michelle Obama/Crown Three Women 7 — Lisa Taddeo/Avid Reader Maybe You Should Talk to Someone 8 — Lori Gottlieb/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck 9 — Mark Manson/Harper The Boy They Tried to Hide 10 — Shane Dunphy/Hachette Ireland

Nonfiction Combined TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Educated: A Memoir 1 2 Tara Westover/Random House Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge 2 New Jeanine Pirro/Center Street Everything...Ace American History 3 3 Workman Publishing/Workman Becoming 4 8 Michelle Obama/Crown Best Friends 5 New Shannon Hale & LeUyen Pham/First Second Big Preschool 6 4 School Zone Publishing/School Zone StrengthsFinder 2.0 7 6 Tom Rath/Gallup It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way 8 7 Lysa TerKeurst/Thomas Nelson The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck 9 10 Mark Manson/Harper Everything...Ace English Language 10 9 Workman Publishing/Workman

Fiction E-Books TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK A Better Man 1 New Louise Penny/Minotaur Sapphire Flames 2 New Ilona Andrews/Avon The Girl Who Lived Twice 3 New David Lagercrantz/Knopf Where the Crawdads Sing 4 3 Delia Owens/Putnam The Dark Side 5 New Danielle Steel/Delacorte The Wallflower Wager 6 New Tessa Dare/Avon Nantucket Neighbors 7 New Pamela M. Kelley/Piping Plover Butterfly in Frost 8 New Sylvia Day/Montlake Romance Bad Luck and Trouble 9 — Lee Child/Delacorte Hot Shot 10 New Fern Michaels/Zebra

Fiction Combined TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK A Better Man 1 New Louise Penny/Minotaur Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls 2 1 Dav Pilkey/Graphix Where the Crawdads Sing 3 2 Delia Owens/Putnam The Girl Who Lived Twice 4 New David Lagercrantz/Knopf The Dark Side 5 New Danielle Steel/Delacorte Sapphire Flames 6 New Ilona Andrews/Avon The Goldfinch 7 8 Donna Tartt/Back Bay The Wallflower Wager 8 New Tessa Dare/Avon Hot Shot 9 New Fern Michaels/Zebra The Inn 10 5 James Patterson & Candice Fox/Little, Brown

Hardcover Business TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK StrengthsFinder 2.0 1 1 Tom Rath/Gallup Dare to Lead 2 2 Brené Brown/Random House Emotional Intelligence 2.0 3 4 Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves/TalentSmart The Total Money Makeover 4 6 Dave Ramsey/Thomas Nelson Atomic Habits 5 5 James Clear/Avery The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: 6 3 Patrick M. Lencioni/Jossey-Bass Extreme Ownership 7 7 Jocko Willink & Leif Babin/St. Martin’s The Energy Bus 8 — Jon Gordon/Wiley Good to Great 9 — Jim Collins/Harper Business Bad Blood 10 — John Carreyrou/Knopf

Best-Selling Books |Week Ended August 30 With data from NPD BookScan

I

T IS OFTEN said that the
most influential book in the
history of Western thought is
Euclid’s mathematical treatise
“Elements.” The work of a
Greek mathematician living in Alexan-
dria around the year 300 B.C., it re-
defined the way people thought about
space and, eventually, everything else.
The earlier civilizations of the ancient
Near East had conceived of mathe-
matics in terms of measurement, the
conceptual starting point of their
science being units of magnitude, like
the hour or the foot. In the logical
system of the “Elements,” however,
the basic ideas, what philosophers call
the “primitive notions,” weren’t units
of magnitude but intuitive concepts
like point or line, posited in an
abstract mental space. If one also
granted the truth of a small number of
apparently obvious postulates, which
Euclid called “axioms” and “common
notions,” one could demonstrate the
truth of a vast range of propositions.
So Euclid’s geometry, for the first
time, established a model of absolute
proof through step-by-step inference,
and as Amir Alexander notes in
“Proof! How the World Became Geo-
metrical,” it was intellectually elegant
besides. Given the mental agility of
its most brilliant practitioners, it
acquired enormous prestige and even
a sort of glamour during the Renais-
sance.
Mr. Alexander begins his chronicle
with Leon Battista Alberti’s codi-
fication of linear perspective in the
15th century. Alberti was an architect,
and his use of perspective drawing,
a form of applied optics, revealed that
however irregular nature might be,
perceptual space could be mapped.
This mapping of space, as the author
points out, intrinsically favored the
deployment of regular polygons, not
only in two but also in three dimen-
sions, since for Alberti “the role of
architecture was to bring out the
deep geometrical order that governs
everything.”
A historian at UCLA, Mr. Alexander
is especially fascinated by the way
powerful people took hold of this geo-
metrical way of thinking and used
it for their own ends. The next major
stop in his account is the moment in
1495 when Charles VIII of France, on
a military foray into Italy, discovered
a geometrically laid-out garden at
Poggio Reale, in Campania. Resolving
to re-create this “microcosm of har-
mony” back in France, he engaged the
gifted Pacello da Mercogliano to de-
sign a formal garden beside his châ-
teau at Amboise. It became the first in
a beguiling array of château gardens,
mostly in the Loire Valley, commis-
sioned by dominant members of the
Valois dynasty.

(though such evidence, if it exists, would be interesting). After all, ancient Persian gardens were devised on geometrical plans long before Euclid, and this type of garden later became standard all over the Islamic world, from India to Andalusia. It is hard to see how a designer’s adroit use of basic drafting tools, like a T-square and triangle, demanded any genuine mathematical skill, or even a passing acquaintance with Euclid’s inferential method. And in what sense was the Euclidean demand for proof, a word that provides the title of Mr. Alexander’s book, neces- sary at all for garden design? What, logically speaking, was to be proved? Weren’t the pretty roses a sort of Q.E.D. in themselves? Mr. Alexander’s primary interest may be in formal gardens—fair enough—but the most complex use of geometrical forms in the Italian Re- naissance and in early-modern France is manifest not in gardens but in church architecture. One thinks of Bramante’s Tempietto, on the Janicu- lum Hill, in Rome, which reinvented the cylindrical classical temple; other geometrical buildings in Italy include dozens of churches on the Greek-cross plan, which is symmetrical through both axes like the logo of the Red Cross, and oval-plan churches, like those of Bernini and Borromini in Rome, not to mention Borromini’s in- credible Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, whose lobed dome rises upon a floor-plan de- rived from two intersecting triangles. Geometrical forms do have a sort of inevitability about them, especially when repeated visually, which leads

Mr. Alexander to argue that they make a good emblem for political power, especially of the absolutist variety. This is convincing. But just as he conflates the clean visual syntax of geometrical design with the mathematical authority of Euclid, so he confuses design as an emblem of political power with the notion of design as a positive legiti- mating factor. He argues that in the 16th century “magnificent display” was “a means of preserving the belea- guered [French] monarchy.” Later we are told that for a visitor to Versailles “the truth, hierarchy, and order of [Louis XIV’s] rule could not be denied, undermined, or overturned.” Here the reader’s hand may go up: Does powerful design really confer political authority, or does it merely tend to confirm it? Mr. Alexander appears to waver between these two positions, but we may suspect that neither is ultimately true. Nothing like public opinion existed during Louis’s reign, but public sentiment surely did, and as research since the 1960s has tended to reveal, much of the French business class—despite all of Louis’s parterres and fountains and mirrors—nursed a smoldering grievance against him. The “world” that the author is talk- ing about here, the world that “became geometrical,” is not the real world—not New Jersey, for instance— but rather the far-flung archipelago of walled gardens and palaces realized by potentates and their artists. He ad- mits, with slightly rueful realism, that by at least the mid-1800s the Italian- ate formal garden had given way to the sprawling English-style park, free- form and non-geometrical, like the

Bois de Boulogne or Central Park. He connects this development in part to a critical revision of Euclid’s “Elements” undertaken by 19th-century mathe- maticians, but doesn’t a simpler expla- nation lie in the expanding democratic population of the modern metropolis, with its need for recreation? Mr. Alexander’s account acquires thematic sinew as he traces the histor- ical quest for some sort of rational city, a living diagram of justice with orthogonal or otherwise geometrically related avenues. Soon we are on na- tive ground, in our own democracy, with its graph-paper-like facades, and our protagonist is Pierre-Charles L’Enfant. Portrayed with ardent sym- pathy and humor, the designer of Washington, D.C., appears inspired, cranky, insolent, perseverant—and thoroughly three-dimensional. Fusing a very French sensibility with the zeal- otry of a convert to the new American experiment, L’Enfant—despite the ob- jections of Jefferson and others— champions a National Mall like a “republican incarnation of Versailles’s Allée Royale” while, at the same time, in its placement of government buildings, a city center like “the Constitu- tion set in stone.” The riveting story ends happily and unhappily. Having realized a by-now ancient dream and designed the ultimate geometrical capital city, L’Enfant, we are sad to learn, is dismissed from service, fades out of view, and dies in poverty.

Mr. Hofstadter’s books include “The Earth Moves: Galileo and the Roman Inquisition” and “Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples.”

Proof!

By Amir Alexander

Scientific American/FSG,

304 pages, $28

BYDANHOFSTADTER

Rulers and Compasses

ROYAL RAMBLE A section of the gardens at the Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, planted in the 17th century under Louis XIV.

LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

BOOKS

‘Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.’—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

In always clear and lively prose, Mr. Alexander devotes particular en- thusiasm to the jewel of the succeed- ing (Bourbon) dynasty—the Versailles of Louis XIV. Versailles is his center- piece, not only because it illustrates such overwhelming political and military power but also because, with its

interminable acreage and polygonal regularity, it seems to want to ingest, to refashion the world. Its seemingly endless walkways could exhaust dig- nitaries and petitioners even before they arrived at the palace, itself a geometrical extravaganza. Though all this is rather winning, one can’t help wondering what Euclid- ean geometry, the discipline of it, really had to do with laying out a garden. Mr. Alexander has a notable facility for drawing together three disparate realms of experience: the personal circumstances of his main characters; the political tensions of their times; and the designs they com- missioned, especially garden layouts and urban street plans. Yet readers may find his principal argument en- veloped in a haze of perplexities. He offers no support for the contention that Euclidean reasoning was enlisted in garden design or city planning

Clean lines and geometric shapes have been used as emblems of power from Versailles to Washington, D.C.

The Wall Street Journal - 07.09.2019 - 08.09.2019

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