A Well-Ordered Thing by Michael D. Gordin

Before I begin, I would like to confess publicly that though A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table by Michael D. Gordin occupies a special spot on my bookcase and in my heart, I have not read it. Nor is it likely that I ever will. I do apologize—it’s just not a subject that calls out to me, and you will admit, it’s not exactly light reading.

Why, then, do I even own this book? Because it was written by one of my best friends from college, Mike Gordin. Mike was one of my “blockmates” at Harvard, which meant that we, along with four other friends, signed up as a group to enter the upperclass housing lottery. While freshmen all live in dorms inside Harvard Yard, with roommates assigned prior to arrival, the remaining three years are spent within one of the upperclass “Houses,” a system based largely on the Oxford College model.

At the end of freshman year, everyone enters the housing lottery to determine which House will be your home and social center for the next three years. This House selection is assigned randomly now, but at the time, we were still allowed to at least choose our top four preferences, without ranking them as was done even before our time. To ensure that we could live in the same House as our friends, we were allowed to form blocking groups of up to ten people and enter the lottery as a single entity. (Many of these rules have since changed; we are so glad it happened after we graduated.)

Our blocking group consisted of me, my best friend and roommate M, and four of our male friends. The six of us were like family for three years; we ate our meals together, we gathered in the guy’s “quad” room to watch TV and movies, we patronized each other’s artistic performances, and we went to parties together.

Even then, we could all tell that Mike was a little different, and destined for greatness. For one thing, he was obviously smarter than all of us combined. He not only excelled in every one of his classes and extracurricular activities, but somehow, he was so knowledgeable that he knew everything about our classes and activities, too. And no matter which board game we played, Mike’s team always won. Not just Trivial Pursuit—even that game called “Encore,” where the task is to sing songs with a given word in the lyrics. We almost got to the point where he had to be his own team, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of us.

Of course, Mike stayed at Harvard to get his Masters and Ph.D., was hired by Princeton immediately afterward as an assistant professor of history, then spent two years as a Fellow back at Harvard, and published a book about Russian history and science (after learning Russian and traveling to Russia several times to do research) all before he was even thirty years old. But what impresses me most about my friend is that he’s a completely well-adjusted, socially dynamic, and just plain fun guy. He makes people laugh and can hold a conversation on any subject. He’s perfect at parties.

I don’t get to see Mike that often now that we are living on opposite sides of the country. But I am keeping an eye on his literary output, and you can be sure that I will own every one of the books he writes. I may even read his next one due out in December.

A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table by Michael D. Gordin

tags: business books history of science Russian scientists Harvard houses Michael Gordin