Reviews for American Women In Science

The average rating for American Women In Science based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-05-09 00:00:00 Stephanie Peete I would have liked this to have been a much better book. There were parts of it where it showed promise - but those parts were swamped in what was mostly 'junk polymathism'. That is a new phrase I've made up - I think it might even prove handy. I am going to use it as a way to describe someone who has decided to refer to multiple disciplines, but not really use them in a way that shines new light on either the topic at hand or on the discipline referred to. Worst of all was the fact that when he referred to some subjects (Kuhn and Hegel in particular) his knowledge of the topics was so superficial that it was hard not to wonder why he bothered explaining them, when he might have seemed more intelligent if he had just kept to the topic at hand. I mean, why bother to give a description of Hegelian Dialectics if all you are going to say is 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis'? There were bits of this book that I quite liked, despite them being hidden under a mountain of junk. And those were the bits where he discusses how Priestley came to find out (if not actually 'discover') oxygen. This book really could have done with a good editor. I think that unless you are a particularly good story teller - and this guy just isn't - I think the best policy is to tell the story in chronological order. In fact, this is good advice even if you are a great writer. Life has a way of ordering things sequentially that makes sense. If you are going to mess around with that, it is probably best that you have a very good reason. Not that he played around with time too much, but I would bet this guy can't tell a good joke. I would bet he gives the punchline away before he is half way through. The point is that there were bits of this I really liked. Here is a guy who leaves England because he is too radical to remain there and is welcomed to the newly formed United States as the friend of two early Presidents and also Benjamin Franklin. This is an Age of Enlightenment hero - the guy who discovered Oxygen, no less - and yet. And yet… Bad writing really does get in the way of even the best of stories and I felt some of his 'asides' to discuss paradigm shifts, ecosystems and such stuff were so cursory as to take away from the book, rather than add to it. He discusses the 'great man of history' idea and comes to something like the same conclusion as Gladwell in Outliers, if not as extreme a version as Gladwell (and extremely right, I think). But this is uninspired and uninspiring. Yes, I can see why it was put into the book, one would need to explain why Priestley made quite so many momentous discoveries - but what we are left with here is so bland and so opinionated that it adds nothing to the book. Right, the good bits. The best of this was the discussion of how he worked out how 'bad air' became 'good air' again. I have often wondered how they worked out that plants had something to do with putting oxygen back into air. It is a bit like how they worked out that plants feed on sun-light - you do have to wonder how anyone would think to test such an idea. Priestley was exactly the sort of guy who would come up with an experiment to test that sort of thing. If you were to make up a story as a just so story called How Some Guy in a Powdered Wig Discovered the Secret of Breathing - you might think he had already guessed that plants somehow made oxygen and so tried to think up experiments to prove just that. That is not what happened. If PETA had been around in the 18th century there is little doubt that they would have been picketing Priestley's house. Just before he left England his house was burnt to the ground - the standard version is that this was due to conservatives in England who objected to his rationalist, republican views. I wouldn't be surprised if one day a letter turns up proving it was an organisation called 'people for the ethical treatment of mice' that did the deed. But a man can only torture so many mice to death before his attention turns to killing other of God's creatures. I ought to do this in order. Priestly worked out that if you put a mouse in a glass container and put this container upside down in some water so that air could not get in, the glass of the glass container made a wonderful means to let you watch the mouse slowly expire. You may not think this is very entertaining, but you do have to remember they didn't have television at the time. Anyway, he had lots of data on how long it took your average mouse to die when left in the chamber with very little air. So, he started killing off other creatures and measuring how long they would take to die. Then he had a brilliant idea. Since there was no challenge in killing animals anymore - now he wanted to see how long it would take to kill plants. So, he rushed out to the garden and got himself some mint. He popped this into the machine and much to his disappointment the mint seemed to go on living, even in the worst of air, air already breathed up by an ex-mouse. After a week or so he decided to pop a mouse back into the glass and was surprised to find that it didn't die straight away (as it ought to have given there should have been no oxygen left in there). Somehow the plant had replaced all of the oxygen in the container. Not that it was called oxygen at the time, of course. Later when he was able to do experiments that produced oxygen he found that 'god's air', the stuff that is all around us, could actually be improved on - something that must have challenged his religious sensibilities. Not only could oxygen enriched air keep the mouse alive for longer, but it made candles burn for longer too. This was actually the source of his error about oxygen, which he confused with the mythical fluid substance that allowed things to burn - phlogiston. He was nearly right, but others around him were more so. Like I said, this could and should have been a much better book and would have been if he was more interested in telling the story of the life of Priestley, rather than the author showing himself off as a bit of a polymath.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-17 00:00:00 Losson Leonard Steven Johnson, author of the excellent "The Ghost Map", here takes on the life of Joseph Priestley. The best parts of this book are where he confines himself to the task at hand, and gives us details of that life. Priestley was a fascinating character, a brilliant chemist and one of the most influential scientists of his age. He was also a practicing clergyman, whose nonconformist views ultimately provoked such a storm in England that he had to flee to America with his family. He was friends with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; as a consequence of these friendships, he was to have substantial influence on the development of political thought in the fledgling democracy. Priestley wasn't brilliant all the time, of course - there was his notorious attachment to the phlogiston theory, as well as an unhealthy obsession with the Book of Revelation in the final years of his life. So the details of Priestley's life certainly provide more than adequate material for an interesting account. Indeed, the book is at its most interesting when Johnson confines himself to filling in the biographical record. In particular, his account of the early work (discovery of what would later be termed Coulomb's Law, publication of the 'History of Electricity', invention of soda water) and the two experiments which established Priestley's reputation (the work showing that plants synthesize oxygen, his later 'discovery' of oxygen) is excellent. Unfortunately, Johnson then seems to lose his moorings a bit. Understandably, he wants to put Priestley's scientific contributions in historical perspective. But this leads him to include what can only be called bloviation - ponderous, pseudo-profound musings about paradigm shifts, regrettable metaphors about the nature of scientific progress down the ages, and sentences like these: In the next decade, the three paths would combine to form a mighty highway, one that would ultimately drive Priestley all the way to the New World. Seeing human history as a series of intensifying energy flows is one way around the classic opposition between the Great Men and Collectivist visions of history. What is the internal chemistry of a mob? Tellingly, mob behavior inevitably gravitates toward displays of intense energy transfer: the collective strength of a hundred enraged men pulling a building apart and unleashing the destructive, oxidizing force of combustion. Where are the editors when you need them? Seriously, dude, ease off on the goddamned chemistry metaphors, wouldja? They make you seem like a moron, which you're not. For a prolonged stretch in its middle third, the book ceases to be mainly about Priestley, degenerating instead into a kind of "look at me, I'm Steven Johnson, see how clever I am" morass. This is unfortunate, because even the most pedestrian of Priestley's biographical details would be more interesting than Johnson's views on the nature of scientific progress, which seemed to me to be short on content, long on pomposity. (This actually surprised me, because I've heard him interviewed on the radio and he seemed quite sensible and unpretentious). Fortunately, things get back on track (more or less) for the remaining third of the book, describing the rising tide of violence that forced the Priestleys to flee to America and the scientist's final years in Pennsylvania. Despite the misgivings expressed above, I really enjoyed this book, and have no hesitation in recommending it. But I do hope that Steven Johnson gets himself a better editor on his next project. (I've put this on my "terrific" shelf for now, despite reservations about Johnson's style, because Priestley's life was genuinely fascinating)