Quirky, humorous, frequently gross anecdotes about science, scientists, inventions, and discoveries fill this book, subtitled ``5,000 Years of Mishaps and Misunderstandings'' and profusely illustrated with busy, weird cartoons in a magazine-like layout. Readers who relished The Robot Zoo and Everyday Machines will enjoy this effort even if they are not familiar with the great names of science: Pliny, Ptolemy, Alhazen, Galen, Newton, Mendel, and Volta (women are all but invisible—Marie Curie gets a mention as do the sirens of Greek myth, but that's about it). The topics include theories about the age and origin of the world, information on plagues of pesky animals, the search for life on other planets, early medicine, a history of flight, experiments with electricity, accidental discoveries, failed constructions, etc. This is a browsing book: There are no sources given, no chronologies, and no biographical information on any of the people, whose ideas are not presented in the context of their times. Although both a table of contents and an index are provided, they are not always useful: Many of the pages do not include folios, making some flipping back and forth for information inevitable. (Nonfiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57036-269-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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