Rating: 5/5
Review:
A beautiful introduction
I like Scientifica Historica very much. I studied History and
Philosophy of science as an undergraduate many years ago and have
maintained an interest in it, so this is an area I’m familiar with
in an amateur sort of way – and am pleased (and slightly smug) at
the number of books discussed by Brian Clegg that I have actually
read.
The first thing to
say is that the book is beautiful. The illustrations are lavish and
inspiring much of the time – especially for me, seeing original
scripts from millennia ago and handwritten notes by some deeply
revered scientists but also pages and covers from great books. This
makes it more of an introduction and a coffee table book than an
in-depth work on the historiography of science, but that’s just
fine because it fits that role very well. All the great works of
pre- and 20th-Century science you’d expect are here, from Aristotle
and Hippocrates through the great Arab works of the 9th to
the 12th centuries, then Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler,
Newton, Galileo, Harvey, Malthus, Dalton, Faraday, Darwin, Einstein…
plus a lot more, all of which is a delight to see. Each is discussed
readably and with enough depth to inform the casual reader and to
encourage those interested to seek out more.
Things become quite
interesting with 20th-Century selections as science broadens out and
I think it’s here that people may find some editorial choices
controversial, especially in the final section on popular science
books. Clegg doesn’t give us any Freud or Jung, for example, but
does include Oliver Sacks and two (two!) of Desmond Morris’s books.
To me Sacks is unarguable, as are many others he chooses, but two
Desmond Morris books but nothing whatsoever by Peter Medawar or
Stephen Jay Gould? My judgement would have been different – but
then, that’s always going to be the case in such a selection.
So, as an enticing
introduction to some of the great (and in my view some not so great!)
books of science, this works very well and I can recommend it.
Thanks for your kind (and very rapid!) review. You're quite right about omissions - I was limited in the number of authors I could cover so had to select some as representative. Freud and Jung were consciously omitted as I don't regard what they did as science. But Morris was to illustrate an influence that originated from TV, and that, I'd suggest, did more to shape popular science books than many. I should have included Gould, certainly - I'd say that was slip-up. Incidentally, the list at the back originally included a much wider range of authors, but the publishers decided they only wanted authors mentioned in the main text.
ReplyDeleteThanks again for the review.
My pleasure, Brian – I meant it. The rapidity is because the ARC I was sent is in a format which often seems to be time limited and deletes itself, so I thought I’d better get on with it! It was no hardship; I spent some happy hours with the book, including a good many rather pathetic moments of pleasure thinking “That’s the exact edition I have!” of things like Eddington, Carson and others. I found the section on the mediaeval Arab texts particularly interesting; I know about them only in a very general way so I find that section pretty new to me.
DeleteI wholeheartedly agree about Freud and Jung (I love Medawar’s essay Further Comments on Psychoanalysis) although many wouldn’t, I suspect. I can also see what you mean about Morris, even though I’ve found what I’ve read of him (admittedly not much) to be even less scientific than Freud – but he was very influential in popular science, I agree. In any case, no two people will agree completely on a list of “great” popular science books and I think most of your choices are spot on; I certainly didn’t mean to criticise! I’d be fascinated to see your expanded list.