A
library for the price of a book.
About twenty-five years ago, two very different authors tackled the
whole history of science in human affairs and wrote books for the non-specialist
on the sum total of what we know and how we know it. The two science
popularizers could hardly have been more different. One was Carl
Sagan, an avowed atheist whose specialty was astronomy, but whose avocation
was
contextualizing the history of science and placing it in a broad historical
and cultural context. Cosmos would go on to become the best-selling
science book in publishing history, and its tie-in to the PBS series of
the same name and its lush illustrations and figures welcomed novices into
a seemingly impenetrable series of disciplines and made them comprehensible.
The other writer was less well known, a man named Guy Murchie, who was a practicing member of the Bahai faith (an offshoot of Islam). Murchie's The Seven Mysteries of Life organized all knowledge around seven philosophical principles - ideas like transcendence and vitality. Murchie illustrated his own book with etchings and woodcuts of his own making, and invited those who saw themselves as spiritual or religious to appreciate the wondrous complexities of nature with the same sensibility that they used to celebrate their deities. Both tomes are still good reads today, but science has marched on and each of these books contains out-of-date material and formulations whose accuracy has been superceded.
Bill Bryson takes the same brief as Sagan and Murchie and updates those works with A Short History of Nearly Everything. He covers much of the same ground but advances these fundamental stories of man's discovery of nature to the Twenty-First Century, covering complicated, often contradictory, subjects with a flair and good humor rare among sober academics. Bryson's greatest gift is his ability to capture the essence of a complex subject or problem and express it in simplified terms without distorting it. If you have ever read a refereed journal article from Science or Nature, you will appreciate how rare this quality is. Scientists deal in facts and experimental results and distrust the literary use of metaphors and similes.
Scientists adore the phenomenon of repeatability (anybody performing the same procedures should obtain the same result) and minimize the importance of biography and cultural context. Scientists write for others in their field and only a few have mastered the art of explaining their work's significance to their mother or a neighbor. A scientist like Carl Sagan, who spent a lot of his time popularizing, was resented by his colleagues for filling the vacuum that they themselves had created.
Bryson is not a scientist, but is a nature and travel writer.
He possesses good gut instincts and a flair for the telling detail.
He seems to have read just about every book and article that present and
explain new theories, and has produced a one-volume synthesis that could
well serve as an introductory text to the history of science for humanities
majors. When I was in college, a course called Physics for
Poets was offered, which presented the vagaries of the mechanical universe
without the abstract
vexatiousness of higher mathematics. Bryson has produced a modern
version of this, on a grander scale. Call it Science for Sensualists
if you desire.
But whatever you call it, you will not find a better one-volume introduction to the opaque disciplines that have transformed our world into one dominated by technology, a world that has become increasingly interdependent despite geographical separation. Science has enabled humans to dominate the planet, and has raised many red flags of warning in the process. Voters now make decisions that have global consequences, and an informed sense of what we collectively know is increasingly critical. If I could make this book mandatory reading and a prerequisite for voting, I would unhesitatingly do so.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard SeltzerA
library for the price of a book.
The
Middle East -- Context for Conflict: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon,
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States. Historical
background and context for understanding today's news. This CD contains
the full text of 10 "Country Studies" published by the Federal Research
Division of the Library of Congress. Each country study is presented as
a single document, in plain text form -- easy to read, to print, and to
search (rather than as a collection of over 100 separate documents for
each book). The tables in the appendix of each book are presented as html
documents. In addition, we include: The 2003 edition of the CIA
World Factbook, an interlinked set of hundreds of HTML documents, with
detailed up-to-date reference information on every country in the world,
with images of maps and flags; and some classic works of history, literature,
and religion, including The Koran and books on the traditions of Judaism,
all in plain text form. Complete
table of contents Free sample: Iraq,
a Country Study.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
The Readers' Corner and
Writers Showcase
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