Review: Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps Fergus Fleming

 When I was in high school many years ago, we lived for a couple of years in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in a 13-story building.  On a very (very) clear day, we could see Mont Blanc far in the distance. Even at that distance, it was a majestic site. I like looking at mountains, but the idea of climbing would never enter my mind. The thousands who have now climbed Everest, with the help of guides to carry their bags and technology, have trivialized what once was an extraordinary accomplishment.

So it was for the Alps in the 18th and 19th centuries.  They were considered unclimbable, harsh, and forbidding monuments to death and destruction.  Avalanches regularly killed many, and the physics of glaciers were not understood. Fleming has written a detailed examination of how and why that all changed.

It was a combination of thirst for scientific knowledge about the Alps coupled with myth that was layered with romantic views of Byron and others. Killing the Dragons refers to the legends that the Alps were populated by Dragons. Crossing the Alps was a very hazardous undertaking because of swift changes in the weather, glacial crevasses, and falling rocks.  (One avalanche sent boulders into a lake creating a tsunami of epic proportions inundating a town.

After Mt. Blanc was climbed successfully, the story continued, moving from dragons to a virtual advertising campaign. Much lie Everest today, climbing Mt. Blanc became the thing to do. The Alps were transformed into a thing of beauty and respite, attracting hoards of visitors, rather than something to be feared. 

Before you know it, the Alps and Switzerland benefited from another kind of myth, that of the health giving clean air and wonderful resorts. Towns and villages that had been considered mere provinces of swine, were now sought after resorts and the Swiss, clever people they are, soon had a train (!) running up though the Matterhorn close to its summit for people like me who would rather ride than climb.*

It’s a fun read (I listened to the well-read audio version)

 

 

*The train continues up inside the Eiger and Mönch mountains, with another 5 minute stop at the Eismeer (Ice Sea) viewing point until it reaches Jungfraujoch, 3,454m or 11,333 feet above sea level, the highest railway station in Europe and billed as The Top of Euro.

 

Review: Night Bird by Brian Freeman

 

I read the second in the Frost series first.  Had I read it in order after this one, I would have noticed the psychological connection. In Voice Inside, Freeman’s killer was obsessed with a memory and acted on it. Memory is also a prime mover in Night Bird.

Memory is a very tricky thing as we have learned in the past few decades.  It’s malleable, easily fooled, and extremely fallible. Ask an eyewitness to an accident how fast a car was going as he went through the stop sign, the witness will implant the image of a stop sign in his memory even though there may not have been one there.

Here a memory expert (Francesca Stein — get it? Frankenstein) uses images to change a client’s remembrance of a traumatic experience in order to eliminate a phobia.  She maintains that every time you haul up a memory from the repository in your brain you alter it in some way.

If you are interested in how memory works and its experience in the judicial process I recommend The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences Mark Howe and Laure Knott. *

A salient paragraph:

When memory serves as evidence, as it does in many civil and criminal  legal proceedings, there are a number of important limitations to the  veracity of that evidence. This is because memory does not provide a  veridical representation of events as experienced. Rather, what gets encoded  into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they  already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional  state. This information is subsequently integrated (consolidated) with other information that has already been stored in a person's long-term, autobiographical memory. What gets retrieved  later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors  that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of  the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on  whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that  particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a  therapist, telling the police about an event). Moreover, what gets  remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally  stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains  in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences  that may have occurred across the interval between storing and  retrieving a particular experience. Because the contents of our memories  for experiences involve the active manipulation (during encoding),  integration with pre-existing information (during consolidation), and  reconstruction (during retrieval) of that information, memory is, by  definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst.

 

Lots of plot summaries. No point in me adding another.  I suggest reading them in order and I will certainly now move on to the 3rd.

*Memory. 2015 Jul 4; 23(5): 633–656. Published online 2015 Feb 23. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1010709 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4409058/

Elizabeth Loftus gained considerable fame (and fortune) for her research into the fallibility and manipulatability (if that’s a word) of memory.

https://www.amazon.com/Eyewitness-Testimony-With-preface-author/dp/0674287770/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520271440&linkCode=as2&tag=teco06-20

https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory?language=en

An interesting article on Loftus’ research and the Weinstein trial. Physical evidence should always be required in any case involving memory. When you have prosecutors and victim’s rights advocates, all of whom have their own agendas, juries need to be very careful in evaluating eyewitness and memory testimony.

https://www.scribd.com/article/446066265/Expert-Testifies-About-false-Memories-In-Harvey-Weinstein-s-Trial