Twin Tracks
The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Twin Tracks is a landmark book of real-world stories that investigates the nature of change and divines as never before the unlikely origins of many aspects of contemporary life. In each of the work's twenty-five narratives, we discover how the different outcomes of an important historical event in the past often come together again in the future.
Each chapter starts with an event -- such as the U.S. attack on Tripoli in 1804 -- that generates two divergent series of consequences. After tracking each pathway as it ranges far and wide through time and space, Burke shows how the paths finally and unexpectedly converge in the modern world.
Twin Tracks pinpoints the myriad ways the future is shaped, whether by love, war, accident, genius, or discovery. For instance, in "The Marriage of Figaro to Stealth Fighter," Burke's twin tracks start with the composer of the opera and the French spy from whose play he stole the plot. The tracks then encompass, among other things, freemasonry, the War of Independence, Captain Cook, jellyfish, Jane Austen, and audio tape. Ultimately, the convergence of the two Figaro tracks sets the stage for the development of Gulf War Stealth aircraft.
Wonderfully accessible and lucidly written, Twin Tracks offers an amusing and instructive new view of the past and the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burke is back with another volume of the surprising and frequently serendipitous connections among the seemingly unconnected people, events and discoveries that have shaped our modern world. His work, which by this point comprises a genre in itself (including such titles as The Knowledge Weband The Pinball Effect), meanders through the history of science, medicine and technology, playing an intellectual history version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. His motto: "Everything is connected." As in earlier books, Burke tweaks the form a bit, this time offering 25 pairs of parallel narratives; each pair starts with one "trigger event," then they diverge and reconverge at the end (hence the book's title). Want to know how the Boston Tea Party led to the development of contact lenses, or The Marriage of Figaro to the F-117A stealth fighter? Burke can tell you, following two simultaneous threads that careen off in wildly different directions from the "trigger event," then create the conditions for the end result. One could complain that his connections are sometimes tenuous at best, more synchronicity than cause-and-effect, but that would miss the point the real fun is in Burke's dry wit and his sheer exuberance as he takes us through centuries of history in mere pages, only to pick a new starting point and do it all over again. B&w illus.
