Steven Johnson just keeps getting better as a writer and as a thinker. He takes big ideas and makes them compelling by finding their connections to unexpected ideas, and then uses them to pry up the floorboards of our assumptions. Just at the level of putting words together, Steve is a master. Best of all, he’s young, so we have many more years of his writing to look forward to, if the wily universe permits.

Although the topic of The Ghost Map is the cholera epidemic in London that led to the discovery that the disease is spread through contaminated water, it operates on several levels. In fact, it’s about the need to operate on several levels. So, at one level it a terrific procedural mystery with compelling real-life characters, at another it’s about the biology of bacteria, and at a third level it’s about the structure of cities. We would still be at the mercy of cholera if the hero of the tale had not been able to go up a level of abstraction to see the statistical pattern of deaths. And Johnson’s own meta-explanation requires going up to another meta-level to show how all the levels are required to tell the tale and understand the truth. It opens up a means of explanation that is rich and sometimes so surprising that it makes me laugh with delight. This fluidity with levels of abstraction also informs Steve’s books Emergence and Mind Wide Open. And with its multilayered points of view, The Ghost Map serves as further evidence for Steve’s point in Everything Bad Is Good for You that our culture is becoming more comfortable with complexity.

Steve is an intellectually sympathetic writer, which is a rare virtue. Rather than dismissing the then-prevalent theory that a “miasma” caused cholera, he is able to explain the good reasons why the miasmists held on to their theory so long. A lesser writer would have dismissed them as stupid, hide-bound, or buffoons. Steve is also able to explain why the doctor who figured it out was able to do so, tracing it to his previous work with ether, rather than claiming it was a bolt of genius lightning.

And to top it all of, The Ghost Map is a compelling, fun page-turner…a terrific read, as we say nowadays.

Steve makes my writerly cheeks burn with envy.

(Disclosure: I’m delighted to know Steve a bit. ADDED April 20 ’07: I should also have noted that Steve blurbed my book. Nevertheless, The Ghost Map is a really good book.) [Tags: ghost_map steve_johnson books reviews ]

Categories: Uncategorized dw