Book Review: Hendrik Hertzberg understands One Million

That's right, folks—Hendrik Hertzberg's new book has one million dots in it.

Few of us have ever taken the time to sit down and seriously ruminate over a word that has become a part of our daily lexicon—one million.

Okay, so that’s two words, but still, think for a second. Have you ever seen one million of anything? Is “one-million” the sort of word(s) that leads you to drop your jaw in awestruck wonder, or do you tend to shrug it off? If you had to describe the concept of a million to someone who had never heard of the term before, could you do it?

Thankfully, our friend Hendrik Hertzberg understands 1,000,000. And thanks to his new-ish and aptly titled book One Million, we all might be able to grasp the concept a little better ourselves.

Hertzberg, who usually writes about politics for The New Yorker (and spoke at Covenant last year), has put his creative side on full display in an updated re-issue of the book (first published in 1970), which hit store shelves this fall. The book is 200 pages of madness, save for the 12-page intro that would kill as a stand-alone essay. By madness, I mean the 5,000 dots per page representing numerical digits, counting up all the way to—you guessed it—1,000,000. It’s simple, fresh, and mind-blowing.

Interspersed throughout each page, Hertzberg has placed certain numbers to correspond with the dots. For instance, at dot 359,160, you’ll learn that it had been exactly 359,160 hours since Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, as of the forty-first anniversary of the shooting on April 4, 2009. Trivial information—but it’s information nonetheless, and it provides us with a useful perspective. So it’s not all that useless, is it?

Hertzberg understands the useless/useful idea better. In his introduction, he reminds the reader (or in the case of this book, the browser) that “This book is NOT a reference work. Unlike the plastic bags your dry cleaning comes back in, this book is a toy. But it is a toy with a didactic purpose, like a chemistry set or an anatomically correct doll.”

In my opinion, this would be a great toy to get acquainted with during the holidays, by a crackling fire with your dog at your feet and a piping hot mug of your mother’s finest cocoa, which is probably made up of at least one million molecules. To get your neurons firing, here are a few wonderful, completely insignificant facts from Hertzberg’s book:

483: Americans killed during the Revolutionary War
22,000: Newspaper jobs lost in 2008
153,424: Pounds of coffee Starbucks uses in a day
349,296: Inches, the height of Mount Everest
584,164: Sunday circulation of the Houston Chronicle
728,382: Gallons of blood pumped by the average adult human heart in one year
879,440: Dollars lost every fifteen minutes by GM in 2008

Holy smokes, GM! $879,440 every fifteen minutes? That’s $58,629.33 a minute! Which, according to my calculations, is $977.16 a second! Which is exactly the same price as—well, you get the idea. As you might see, this could be the sort of book that gets your neurons going gaga. A winner for sure. If you get your hands on a copy, I guarantee that you’ll find out interesting facts about cigarettes, copper, codfish, and crows, as they fly. All valuable and worthwhile information, thanks to Mr. H.