An entertaining account of the development of scientific collaboration.
A short, lucid history of efforts by scientists to work together.
Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, writes that modern science began about 400 years ago. Before then, scholars believed that everything worth knowing was already known; their goal was to discover it—in writing by such esteemed thinkers as Ptolemy, Pliny, Aristotle, and Confucius—and pass it on. Beginning with the British Royal Society in 1660, individuals organized to investigate the natural world and exchange information. Members corresponded widely and hosted scientists from other countries, but these were largely national groups, patronized by their rulers. Scholars call this collective the Republic of Letters, the first of three periods Daston identifies. She maintains that it was the first scientific community to attempt to balance competition and cooperation in a quest for knowledge. In the end, “the Republic of Letters was more like a state of nature than a state”—peaceful when little was at stake, quarrelsome and disorganized when faced with complex projects. Daston delivers an amusing account of the 1761 and 1769 expeditions to observe the transit of Venus. Astronomers traveled the world, but these efforts lacked coordination, and the results were worthless. Thanks to the telegraph and steamships, matters improved in the 19th century, when innumerable international scientific congresses convened, leading to extensive collaboration and standardization but less material progress because these were mostly independent of governments and short of money. For better or worse, a genuine international scientific community emerged after World War II, when governments took an interest. With maddening unpredictability, they “helped and hindered scientific collaborations ….happy to bankroll them in the name of national glory, but just as happy to wreck them in the name of national security or frugality or simple indifference.”
An entertaining account of the development of scientific collaboration.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798987053560
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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