Rob Hardy, of Columbus, graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and attended medical school in Jackson, doing his residency in psychiatry. He practices at Community Counseling Services. Reviewing books has been his hobby for many years. He is always grateful to his wife, Helen, for making sure he has time to read. They live with many dogs and cats, and many books. The ones reviewed in The Commercial Dispatch, however, are donated to the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library.
Recent Stories & Articles A hedgehog obsession11/10/2009 11:41:00 AM You may spout any praise of America, but you cannot conceal the fact: America has no hedgehogs. Not native ones, anyway. Oh, we have hedgehog hobbyists who enjoy having imported hedgehogs as pets, and even have them compete in the International Hedgehog Olympic Games (the Olympic Committee who runs the human version wants you to be sure they do not themselves sponsor or endorse the hedgehog version). Darwin and earthworms11/10/2009 11:32:00 AM Charles Darwin’s name is so firmly linked with evolution that it is often forgotten that he was interested in specifics of biology. For instance, while he was fretting for 17 years over whether to publish about evolution, he was busy investigating barnacles. He was to publish an authoritative work on them. He also wrote about the geology he had seen on his travels in the “Beagle,” and did experiments on whether eggs or seeds could travel the oceans to get to new lands. He was constantly busy on other projects, constantly enquiring and doing his own research simply because he had an exemplary curiosity. Pat Tillman’s true story told10/23/2009 2:28:00 PM Everyone who has followed current events even slightly over the past five years knows that football hero and soldier Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, and that the military had trouble telling the truth about his death from rifle fire by his own platoon. Tillman had a remarkable life for one who died at age 27, and in “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman” (Doubleday), Jon Krakauer has provided the biography that Tillman deserves, vivid and compelling. Inside the mind of a dog10/23/2009 2:13:00 PM Scientifically, we might know a lot more about rats than we do about dogs. There are some experimental labs that have dogs as subjects, but lab rats get a lot of scientific attention. Dogs get a lot of domestic attention, but scientific study of dogs, and the ways they get along with humans and with other dogs, has not been a high concern. Comics and mathematics10/6/2009 4:47:00 PM Stand back, Spiderman. Back off, Batman. Comic books have a new hero with unexpected powers, and he isn’t even imaginary. He’s Bertrand Arthur William, the Third Earl Russell. To most Americans, Bertrand Russell is notorious for being an outspoken atheist long before the current crop of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and others. Poseidon’s Steed9/29/2009 12:56:00 PM Probably you have never seen a seahorse in the wild. Even Dr. Helen Scales, who is a scuba diver and marine biologist, has only seen them a few times. The first one she saw, after many dives of looking, was “like glimpsing a unicorn trotting through my garden.” But everyone knows what a seahorse looks like, a fantastic looking creature that sparks curiosity, and it is a hit at aquariums or in oceanic picture books. Scales has satisfied many facets of the curiosity about seahorses in her book “Poseidon’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality” (Gotham Books). The art of Harvey Kurtzman9/23/2009 7:16:00 AM If you have never heard of Harvey Kurtzman, you have seen his work; for instance, his cover logo for MAD Magazine is one of the most easily recognized of trademarks. Kurtzman was with MAD from the beginning, and it is perhaps what he is most famous for, but he did plenty else, and it isn’t exaggeration to say that if Kurtzman hadn’t put out such prodigious and respected (and funny) work, we might not have had R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, or Monty Python or the Simpsons. A cold look at climate change and adventure9/9/2009 1:04:00 PM You can bet that Bill Streever likes cold better than you do. After all, standing in his swimming shorts in wind, rain and a chill of 51 degrees, he plunges into the 35-degree water of Prudhoe Bay, 300 miles above the Arctic Circle, for five minutes. Translations and mistranslations of Chinese food history in the U.S.9/2/2009 8:07:00 AM In 1784, the Empress of China, an American ship bearing American ginseng, sailed to China for trade. It was the first time the new nation had tried such trade, and the Americans did not know what to expect, for instance, in what they might be served at dinners. It was all well if they ate with the British or Portuguese who were already trading there, but dining with the Chinese would have been a problem. Great inventions of evolution8/26/2009 11:59:00 AM It is one of the shibboleths of evolution that the blind forces which change genes and change creatures have no aim or direction. Our hands and the wings of bats may be wonderfully engineered biological machines, and may arise from the same basic limb design, but it is wrong to think that evolutionary forces set out to build up progressively so that hands and wings could emerge with their current efficient designs. An epidemic proved deadly for Napoleon’s army8/26/2009 11:48:00 AM Competent military commanders have known for centuries that disease will take away more of their soldiers than cannonballs or bullets will. There was no truer case of this than that of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, a multinational force of more than half a million men issuing from various nations in Europe with the mission of conquering Russia in 1812. Sure, most people know that the vicious Russian cold froze away any chance Napoleon had for victory, but his losses to typhus had cut his forces drastically long before the winter set in, and typhus kept killing. The last member of Hitler assasination plot tells story in memoir8/18/2009 2:28:00 PM Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager died in May 2008. He was the longest surviving member of the most famous assassination plot against Hitler. Before he died he sat down for long conversations with Florence and Jérôme Fehrenbach, and together they have produced the memoir “Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member” (Knopf). Khrushchev and his strange U.S. tour8/4/2009 3:31:00 PM The Cold War is over; we won it and we have forgotten about it, because we have hotter things to worry about. Young people now, and those in the future, will watch, say, “Doctor Strangelove,” and be astonished that the world could have organized itself in such a way. If you really want to get in touch with how weird the Cold War years were, a wonderful introduction is “K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist” (PublicAffairs) by Peter Carlson. Outnumbered by insects: ‘Bugs and the Victorians’7/29/2009 7:12:00 AM Insects, even the greatest of couch potatoes knows, are everywhere. If you weighed all the insects and weighed all the people on the planet, insects would win. Author gives a look at magic books, their origin and their influence7/14/2009 If you thought you were outside the realm of magic, think again.
There has been “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on television, for instance, with magic books central to some of the plots. When the program was popular, Owen Davies used to get e-mails from teenage girls asking about specifics of casting spells. “They had seen my personal website,” writes Davies, “presenting my historical studies on witchcraft and magic and assumed I was a practitioner.” The power of puzzles7/7/2009 If you are old enough, you remember the sensation that the Rubik’s Cube caused all the world over in 1980. No one is still alive that remembers the 1880 fad for the analogous two-dimensional “Fifteen Puzzle,” which had 15 numbered blocks within a four by four container and you were supposed to arrange them numerically. Mechanical puzzles can make storms like these, maybe because you can solve them over and over again, but it isn’t often that word puzzles produce such fads. Ensuring interest by condemnation7/7/2009 Nowadays you can get just about any sort of pornography you want with a few clicks of the mouse, and much of it is free. Before that, New York City, especially Times Square, was known as the headquarters for porn movies, and when porn was available only in print media, New York’s Nassau Street in lower Manhattan (close to City Hall) was its hub. Human wonders and specimens7/7/2009 On the cover of the new book by historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks is the portrait of a young girl dressed in Renaissance finery, an elaborate and lacy dress. She smiles slightly and looks directly at the viewer with big brown eyes. She has flowers in her hair. But she has hair not only at the top of her head, but all over her forehead, cheeks and chin. Origins of the obelisk6/16/2009 The ancient Egyptians hardly knew how influential they would be when they put up obelisks. Pyramids are, of course, more impressive, but if you build a pyramid, it is going to stay where you put it no matter what. Obelisks may weigh hundreds of tons, but they are still to some extent portable, and they have been exported, to various world capitals for various reasons. The wonder of the exotic, inexplicably lovable elephant6/16/2009 Elephants are among the first exotic animals of which kids have some knowledge. Every Noah’s Ark set has a pair, and children are able to draw elephants almost as soon as they can draw any recognizable animal. We love Babar and we love Horton. But most westerners see real elephants only in zoos and circuses, where they are among the favorite attractions. Rob Hardy:‘But Wait ... There’s More’: The history of informercials6/2/2009 A fad for deregulation hit our country in the mid-1980s, and whether you think this was a good thing or a bad thing, it inarguably brought us late-night advertisements for the miracle Food Dehydrator, the Ronco Automatic Pasta Maker, spray-on-hair for balding persons, the Snuggie and colon cleanse based on Biblical principles. When sports and war collide5/26/2009 Sports and nationalism often clash, and did so memorably when Adolf Hitler was in power. The story of how the four gold medals won by non-Aryan Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics embarrassed the Fuhrer has often been told. Of somewhat lesser renown is the 1936 heavyweight fight between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis, of which a German radio announcer said, “It is every German’s obligation to stay up tonight. Max will fight overseas with a Negro for the hegemony of the white race!” History’s millenial worries5/20/2009 It wasn’t so long ago that we were all fascinated with the change of millennium, jumping into the two thousands of years. There were worries: Everyone with a computer remembers that shortcuts by 20th-century programmers were supposed to mean computers would crash when they unexpectedly came across years with a first digit of two rather than of one. It’s interesting that our worries with the big date change were technological. They didn’t come to pass. Compelling historical narrative of Spartacus exciting, satisfying5/12/2009 You know the name Spartacus, probably from the many fictional descriptions of his life, especially Kirk Douglas playing the title role in the 1960 film by Stanley Kubrick. There are novels about him, too, and a ballet by Khachaturian. Ronald Reagan was no scholar of Roman history, but in an address in Britain, he referred to the rebellious slave Spartacus as a symbol of the fight against totalitarianism. Spartacus’s name seems as if it will resound forever, and so a case could be made that we ought to know more about him than the “facts” presented in a Hollywood biopic. Search our archives for older stories by Rob Hardy
