An informal, often entertaining excursion in the history of science.
An iconoclastic, decidedly revisionist look at the hit-or-miss business of science.
Forget everything you know about snakes swallowing their own tails and the burning of blue, gemlike flames. All too often, writes Waller (History of Medicine/University College, London; The Discovery of the Germ, not reviewed), science evolves despite the institution of science, in which the race goes not to the most elegant solution but to the fellow with the biggest research grant and the most political power. Waller merrily revisits several famous moments in science, among them Pasteur’s elucidation of germ theory, Robert Millikan’s divination of the electron, and Einstein’s development of relativity theory. In this account, none happened quite the way the textbooks tell us they did. Pasteur, for instance, fudged results, stole his assistants’ ideas and passed them off as his own, refused to replicate results, and “suppressed a considerable amount of negative data” along the way to pasteurization; moreover, he could never quite reconcile his reactionary political and religious beliefs to what his experiments told him about the invisible world. Millikan essentially blundered his way to finding the electron, beset by the ever-shifting value of e and glad to overlook inconsistencies in the data; “had he not been judged correct in the long run,” Waller harrumphs, “it’s likely that modern commentators would invoke his story as a homiletic warning against reasoning from weakly attested theories.” As for Einstein: suffice it to say that Arthur Eddington’s astrophysical proofs of general relativity were a lucky hit for all concerned. Waller’s interest lies more in the telling anecdote than the overarching moral, but he does a good job overall of showing the role of accident—and referees willing to look the other way—in the everyday work of scientists, whether conducted in Dr. Lister’s filthy operating theater or in the most gleaming of labs.
An informal, often entertaining excursion in the history of science.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-860719-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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