by Richard Fortey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2008
Visitors to the venerable building in South Kensington will probably get more from Fortey’s lively, learned portrait than...
An insider’s tour of one of the world’s great museums.
Hired as the “trilobite man” at London’s Natural History Museum in 1970, Fortey (Earth, 2004, etc.) intimately knows its collections and many of the scientists who worked on them during his tenure. This thoroughly entertaining, beautifully written book displays his broad curiosity about scientific history and storyteller’s eye for the telling anecdote. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the museum’s work: nomenclature, paleontology, zoology, botany, entomology and so forth. Each gives fascinating details about various aspects of its subject. For example, the Archaeopteryx fossil, one of the museum’s treasures, has given successive generations of researchers better and better insight into its relation to both birds and dinosaurs, thanks to increasingly sophisticated tools of analysis. The author also provides a wealth of detail about the scientists themselves, often as entertaining as the objects they study. We learn that Linnaeus named a particularly useless weed after one of his rivals and that the museum’s technicians used to cook sausages over Bunsen burners in the back. Fortey conscientiously limns the history of the museum and its many departments. He relates how various collections got started, often by colonial administrators or military officers who took up a hobby in distant postings. The famous controversies and hoaxes are here as well, notably the faked “Piltdown Man” fossil, which fooled two generations of anthropologists before it was exposed. The author offers a good explanation of why the establishment fell for the Piltdown hoax and falls in line with today’s generally accepted identification of the perpetrator. We also learn how the museum has evolved with changing ideas about its function, especially since the last Conservative government decided that it needed to be self-supporting.
Visitors to the venerable building in South Kensington will probably get more from Fortey’s lively, learned portrait than from any official guidebook.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26362-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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BOOK REVIEW
by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Lulu Miller illustrated by Kate Samworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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