Precise draftsmanship of numbered charts and steps make this book from Weitzman (Old Ironsides, 1997) a bull’s-eye for meeting the desires of both railroad buffs and the mechanically inclined. Shifting his focus from the waterways to the rails, the author places his detailed procedural information in historical perspective, opening with a brief discussion of the birth of the railroads in 1830, when Peter Cooper’s steam locomotive, Tom Thumb, lost a race to a horse; moving on through the ensuing four decades, when the manufacture of locomotives was an exuberant cottage industry; and continuing through the 1870s, when all that activity culminated in America’s becoming the worldwide leader in the industry, and steam engines replaced water wheels. Following that is a description of the orderly and precise assembly of the various parts of an eight-wheel locomotive, an explanation of the drafting and crafting of mechanical metallic parts, and coverage of the somehow humanizing process of building the little wooden cab in which the engineer and fireman lived during their long hauls over the rails. With the black-and-white renderings full of intricate detail, this is a fine addition to historical collections. (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-69687-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
Year to year, this science series has become something of a treasured literary institution, and Ridley gives us yet another...
Annual selection of some of the country’s most illuminating recent popular-science articles.
This volume, edited by science author Ridley (The Cooperative Gene, 2001, etc.), is an ideal roundup of wide-ranging, high-quality journalism: in this case, 21 examples of the best of the best, culled from the pages of the New York Times, Discover, the New Yorker, Wired, and elsewhere. While the entries are uniformly superb, there are a few stand-outs: Lauren Slater’s colorful profile of a most unusual New England plastic surgeon and his curious theories about the potential of the human body; Gary Taubes’s assault on common myths about dietary fat; Sally Satel’s caution about our eagerness to ignore race as a factor in understanding health differences between people; Natalie Angier’s compelling history, written in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, of the human “trait” of altruism. The subjects of global terrorism and the Internet converge eloquently in Julian Dibbell’s reflections on “steganography,” the ancient art of hiding messages that, today, has gone fully digital. Ridley, who clearly delights in speculative pieces that grope a bit in the dark, juxtaposes two of last year’s most provocative articles concerning climate change: Nicholas Wade’s account of Danish eco-optimist Bjorn Lomberg, who raised the hackles of environmentalists by offering well-researched conclusions showing that, in many areas, the state of the world’s ecology is not as gloomy as often believed; and Darcy Frey’s profile of scientist George Divoky, who has observed bird life at the top of the world for a quarter-century and sees plenty to be concerned about. Ridley, who cites in his prologue the importance to scientific inquiry of the expression “I don’t know,” ends with Divoky’s saga as a kind of tribute to the timeless ideal of the scientist’s resolve and human questing in general.
Year to year, this science series has become something of a treasured literary institution, and Ridley gives us yet another jewel.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621162-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
Absorbing and thought-provoking.
Seventeenth-century England forms the tumultuous backdrop for science journalist Zimmer’s account of the handful of thinkers who established that the brain, not the heart, was the seat of the soul.
The author singles out as his hero Thomas Willis, a name best known today among anatomy students for the “circle of Willis,” a ring of blood vessels at the base of the brain. A poor boy educated in medicine at Oxford, Willis eventually removed to London to become a rich and famous society physician. But it was his Oxford days, at the center of a circle of scholars that included Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle that marked the revolution that dethroned Aristotle and Galen. Meticulous autopsies of Willis’s patients and multiple experiments on animals dead and living (PETA would weep) established that it was the brain and the system of nerves carrying “spirits” to and fro that accounted for thoughts, emotions, and actions. Moreover, the dissections were also able to point to brain specialization, linking diseased parts to symptoms suffered by the deceased. Willis and his peers were not ready to surrender all to a mechanistic view. They posited a dual soul: a sensitive, material soul subject to disease and a “rational” soul deep in the brain that was immaterial and immortal. And for all Willis’s acute observations of patients’ signs and symptoms, his treatments stuck to the potions, purges, emetics, and bloodletting that were standard care at the time. Zimmer details all of these developments, along with brief bios of the principals, against the chaos and calamities of the English civil war, the beheading of Charles I, the rise of Cromwell, the Restoration, the Irish rebellion, the devastating plague of 1664–5, the great London fire of 1666, and enough bloody religious battles to satisfy the Taliban. Indeed, the many parallels that can be drawn between politics, religion, science, and human behavior then and now add unexpected dividends to this engaging narrative.
Absorbing and thought-provoking.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3038-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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