Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday April 8, 2011
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL BREAKFAST CLUB: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World
Laura J. Snyder
Broadway
ISBN 978-0767930482
439 pages
$27
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who can be reached at mdirda(at)gmail.com
This fine book -- essentially a history of British science during the first two-thirds of the 19th century -- examines the interwoven lives of Charles Babbage (1791-1871), John Herschel (1792-1871), William Whewell (1794-1866) and Richard Jones (1790-1855). In their time, all were famous, but today only the first is still a name to conjure with. The cranky, irascible Babbage imagined, then built a small model of what he called a "Difference Engine," and worked out plans for the even more sophisticated "Analytical Engine." In short, as every reader of Victorian steampunk fiction knows, Babbage invented the computer.
His friends, moreover, were no slouches. Whewell coined the word "scientist," suggested that geologist Charles Lyell name historical epochs "Eocene," "Miocene" and "Pliocene" and gave Michael Faraday the terms "ion," "cathode" and "anode." Whewell became a professor of mineralogy, produced a book on scientific method that inspired a young man named Darwin, translated Homer's "Iliad" into hexameters and spent the second half of his adult life as the master of Trinity College, Oxford, the most influential academic post in Britain. Richard Jones, the least notable of the four, made his mark as a critic of David Ricardo's hardhearted economics and influenced the more socially aware thought of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. The only child of William Herschel, the emigrant German astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus, John Herschel eclipsed his father in the wide range of his scientific interests. First notable as a chemist and a mathematician, he later charted the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, produced a massive catalogue of nebulae and was instrumental in the development of photography, showing William Henry Fox Talbot how to fix an image so that it wouldn't fade.
These lifelong friends first met at Oxford, where Herschel hosted, in 1812 and 1813, what we would now call Sunday brunches during which the conversation touched on every aspect of science, religion and society. From the beginning, the quartet shared two convictions: Science must be grounded in careful observation and exact measurement, and it should benefit humanity. Drawing on astonishing energy and learning, even by Victorian standards, they helped bring about the transformation of science from a hobby into a profession. In the course of their careers, as Laura Snyder writes:
"They had publicly called for public funding for scientific innovation. ... They had brought to the public's attention the issue of scientific method, writing popular books and articles on the subject. They had advanced the idea that the methods of one science (geology) could be brought to bear on another (economics). They had argued for professorships in the sciences at the universities, and for adequate lecture rooms, laboratories, and salaries for those professions. ... They had been instrumental in the formation of scientific societies," including the Astronomical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Notably, too, their personal influence extended far and wide. To choose just one example: Whewell teamed up with Francis Beaufort of the Hydographic Office to study tides. Beaufort, as every sailor knows, gave his name to the scale still used to gauge the wind's force. But as Snyder casually reminds us, Beaufort was also "the government official who approved Charles Darwin for the position of naturalist on the voyage of HMS Beagle."
Snyder is a historian of science, and whenever her fab four start on a new project she regales the reader with its past history. Thus, in the course of her book, she explains Francis Bacon's inductive method, the early development of automata (including Jacques de Vaucanson's notorious "Defecating Duck" with its 400 moving parts), the history of economics and the care of the poor, the discovery of photography in Europe and England, the stormy life of Byron's daughter Ada (who, as the mathematically gifted Countess Lovelace, assisted Babbage in his work), the New York Sun hoax claiming that Herschel had discovered "bat-men" on the moon, the controversies surrounding the rival mathematicians who calculated the existence of Neptune, the search for the magnetic poles, the development of an English form of telegraphy quite different from that of Samuel Morse and the methods of cryptanalysis used by Babbage in his solution to the famous "Vigenere" code, the supposedly "indecipherable cipher."
In short, "The Philosophical Breakfast Club" is as wide-ranging and anecdotal, as excited and exciting, as those long-ago Sunday morning conversations at Oxford. Snyder just can't resist a good story or an odd factoid. For example, prior to outlining in detail the workings of Babbage's Difference Engine, she informs us that "the first mechanical calculating device known to have been constructed was designed by Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) of Wurttemberg, later part of Germany. Schickard was, impressively, Professor of Hebrew, Oriental Languages, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Geography at the University of Tubingen. Schickard was well acquainted with the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, discoverer of the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, who had come to Tubingen to help defend his mother when she was accused of being a witch." That a great scientist's mother might have been a witch -- to learn such a fact is half the charm of reading history. Elsewhere, Snyder notes that Babbage invented the "penny post" in which the sender paid for a single stamp, good nationwide, rather than having a letter's recipient charged according to the distance the letter had traveled. "Babbage calculated that the cost of sorting the mail and determining the appropriate postage cost more than what the postal service earned by the extra postage."
Some readers may find Snyder almost too generous with her anecdotes and back-stories, but to me her book is an example of popular intellectual history at its near best. What's more, "The Philosophical Breakfast Club" forms a natural successor to Jenny Uglow's "The Lunar Men" (which focuses on 18th-century chemist Joseph Priestley, inventors James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood, and polymath Erasmus Darwin), and Richard Holmes' "The Age of Wonder" (in which William Herschel and his sister Caroline are prominent figures, along with chemist Humphry Davy and botanist and head of the Royal Society Joseph Banks). As it happens, the final chapter in "The Philosophical Breakfast Club" looks briefly ahead to the careers of James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin, so perhaps there's yet another volume needed to bring the history of British science into the 21st century. In the meantime, allow Laura Snyder to introduce you to the obsessive Charles Babbage and his busy, hardworking friends.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE REVENGE OF THE RADIOACTIVE LADY
Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385510646
334 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Adam Langer
Critics of the work of Jonathan Franzen -- and I don't entirely dismiss them -- have claimed that the pungent misanthropy in his fiction undermines its quest for relevance and moral authority. What if, I've heard friends and critics muse, a writer approached a novel with Franzen's scope, ambition and outrage yet with a sunnier, more empathetic worldview? What might such a novel look like?
Well, Elizabeth Stuckey-French's "The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady" provides an answer, if not the definitive one. Though her novel is not quite the intellectual or linguistic tour de force that "The Corrections" or "Freedom" is, here nonetheless is an ambitious, dark, contemporary American comedy told from the perspectives of a multitude of idiosyncratic characters. Here is a portrait of a dysfunctional family painted against a broad backdrop of vital social issues. Here is a husband contemplating an affair, a wife considering leaving her family, a once-revered patriarch descending into dementia. Here are insightful riffs on pop culture and rants against American hypocrisy and superficiality.
And yet Stuckey-French writes with such effervescence and treats her characters with such generosity that, at times, it's easy to forget that the author has far greater ambitions than merely entertaining readers.
The author takes as her inspiration an ignominious episode during the 1940s when researchers at Vanderbilt University fed radioactive drinks to unsuspecting pregnant women as part of a nutrition study. Fifty years later, survivors and their children filed a class-action lawsuit against the university, claiming the experiments resulted in myriad health problems, including some deaths from cancer. The suit was settled in 1998 for $10 million.
Stuckey-French's titular radioactive lady is the sprightly 77-year-old retired high school English teacher Marylou Ahearn, who was subjected to a similar experiment in the 1950s, one that she blames for the bone cancer that killed her 8-year-old daughter. Unsatisfied with the settlement she received, Marylou seeks to mete out her own form of justice. She moves to Tallahassee, Fla., changes her name to Nancy Archer, heroine of the classic 1950s B-movie "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman," and hatches a plot to kill Wilson Spriggs, the doctor who experimented on her.
It is a sign of this novel's quirky, indie-movie sensibility that, even when Marylou is contemplating murder, she sounds less like a potential killer than a player in a game of Clue. Poison? Too detectable. Garroting? Too brutal. Smothering? Risky. Locking Dr. Spriggs in a shed with dangerous chemicals? She tries; it doesn't work.
Unable to settle on a satisfactory murder method and dismayed to discover that Dr. Spriggs suffers from Alzheimer's and is now more pathetic than hateful, our heroine trades in her "Arsenic and Old Lace" schemes for a subtler yet more malicious form of revenge: She will insinuate herself into Spriggs' family and destroy it. "It was easy enough figuring out the best way to mess with each member of that family," the author writes. "She hadn't spent twenty-five years as a high school English teacher for nothing."
Like her heroine, who maintains a "false cheeriness that made (people) feel comfortable with her," Stuckey-French bops merrily along, even as her plot turns darker and more disturbing. Her consistency and capacity for forgiveness are admirable. And yet these very qualities force the author to perform some difficult gymnastics to prevent the novel from completely abandoning comedy and descending into the realm of the horrific, particularly after one character is revealed to be a sexual predator. Although her writing can be detailed and precise, upon occasion the author quickly cuts away from potentially key dramatic scenes, describes them after the fact or leaves them to the reader's imagination.
Ultimately, the novel's tone undercuts the seriousness of its aims and the intensity of its drama. The most convincing aspects of "The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady" are not its grand aspirations but its more intimate moments: astute observations of the neuroses of married couples and their children, wittily rendered critiques of contemporary suburban life. Yet these are hardly damning criticisms. In fact, the same might be said of many excellent contemporary American novels.
Adam Langer's most recent novel is "The Thieves of Manhattan." He divides his time between New York and Bloomington, Ind., where he's at work on a new novel.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE CIVILIZED WORLD
Susi Wyss
Holt
ISBN 978-0805093629
226 pages
$15
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books monthly for The Washington Post
In this first novel made up of several short stories, Silver Spring author Susi Wyss examines the lives of three Americans and as many Africans. She's interested in the question of where "civilization" is actually located, or if, in fact, civilization is only a consoling fantasy in a fearsome world.
While traveling with her insufferable British fiance in Africa, where she lives and works, an American-born woman named Janice rebelliously thinks, "What did it mean to be civilized anyway? It couldn't just mean skyscrapers and cellphones and cars. From what she understood, Africa held the oldest civilizations on earth."
She eventually dumps the fiance, but she still longs to have a child. In order to do that, she must be able to depend on an atmosphere of safety, but despite 20 years of work for various nongovernmental organizations in Africa, she has only measured trust in blacks. (Or is it just men?)
These feelings stem from a traumatic experience when Janice was robbed in the night by thieves who took several valuables, including a pair of African statues -- twins, representing something or someone unknown to her. During the robbery she was locked in a closet for hours, not knowing if she'd ever be discovered. She's fairly sure one of the thieves was her building's security guard, but who was the other?
The other was a young roughneck named Kojo, twin brother to Adjoa, a hardworking woman who happens to be Janice's masseuse. Adjoa and Kojo have emigrated from Ghana to Ivory Coast to earn enough to start a hair salon -- a place of cleanliness and beauty, a place of, yes, safety, where tired, troubled women can take their worries and find some solace.
Janice and Adjoa are the two main characters, white and black, but there are others, including the aptly named Ophelia, a cranky foreign service wife who sleepwalks through her life in Africa. She doesn't "get" the place and doesn't want to. She can't have children, but she begins to fixate on the idea that a child would give her life meaning. Perhaps a little unbelievably, since she seems out of tune with all things African, she settles on a toddler from Ethiopia.
On the trip to Ethiopia to adopt her child (where she meets Janice, intent on the same adoption project), Ophelia gets much the same jolt that Janice absorbed during those long, dark hours in her locked closet: the realization that Africa isn't "safe."
Or is the entire world charged with danger? We meet another middle-aged black woman, Comfort, who should probably have the word "cold" inserted before her name. One of Comfort's sons works in America, and she visits her daughter-in-law, Linda, to help with her new baby -- help which, of course, turns out to be a unique form of torture. Comfort cares for the baby in the African way, which afflicts poor Linda with an extreme case of the heebie-jeebies. All of her fuzzy, liberal thoughts of equality, tolerance and diversity are shot to hell by the overbearing Comfort, who's just as insufferable about the superiority of her own civilization as Janice's fiance was about his.
But safety is hard to find, hard to pin down, and after Comfort has gone home and their little boy has grown into a (vulnerable) child, Linda is harried and taunted by a group of teenage boys, one of whom is mentally retarded and -- yes -- black. When she complains about the toughs to her usually easygoing African husband, his reaction isn't exactly what she might have wished for.
Wyss' credentials for writing this kind of book are impeccable: Like Janice, she worked in Africa for years. And yet "The Civilized World" is strangely uneven. The book's strength and its weakness depend on its character studies.
Adjoa, in her hard work, loneliness and striving, is perfectly believable and subtly realized. Janice, on the other hand, is just about as dry and uninteresting as Ophelia, the white, disaffected wife who ... well, you'd have to poke her with a stick to be sure she's alive or not.
Without meaning to, perhaps, Wyss has perpetrated a stereotype that goes back at least to Sherwood Anderson's "Dark Laughter." Blacks are vibrant, complex and full of life; whites are pale, lifeless and dull as planks. That can't really be true, but that's what it looks like here.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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A HOLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher
Joel Achenbach
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1451625349
276 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Henry Petroski
A quick search on Amazon for "BP oil spill" reveals a flood of books whose intended audiences range from children and young adults to academics and policy wonks. Some of the titles, such as "Drowning in Oil" and "In Too Deep" -- and even more so their subtitles, "BP and the Reckless Pursuit of Profit" and "BP and the Drilling Race that Took It Down" -- presage their point of view. Some of these books were published even before we had assurance that the Gulf of Mexico oil leak had been stopped and the well had finally been sealed.
Into this ongoing torrent of publishing activity comes "A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea," by Joel Achenbach, a Washington Post reporter who covered the gulf oil spill last spring and summer. His book's virtually monosyllabic title is refreshingly neutral and its subtitle -- "The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher" -- welcomingly noncommittal. Achenbach does not give away the path to the denouement of his gripping narrative.
In previous books, Achenbach has written on subjects ranging from the 2000 presidential campaign to the mysteries of life in his "Why Things Are" series. His eclectic interests serve him well as he tells the story of the BP accident and aftermath as one with many facets and far-reaching implications. Achenbach appears equally well-informed and comfortable discussing encounters between managers, engineers and roustabouts, and the effect of White House politics in Washington on oil-spill containment operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
The story here is familiar: An explosion occurred aboard the drill rig Deepwater Horizon. It sank two days later and the mile-long string of piping that had connected the rig on the surface to the so-called blowout preventer was severed. The massive tower of machinery sat on the bottom of the sea but simply did not work. In Achenbach's masterful hands, the story takes on fresh drama and meaning. His style fittingly changes over the course of the book, evolving from a staccato, clipped-sentence narration of the confusion and urgency following the explosion to a more measured and formal recounting of some early outcomes of investigations into the accident and then philosophical reflections on the meaning of it all.
One of the many engaging subplots that run through Achenbach's tale is the interplay among Washington politics, Gulf of Mexico realities and BP's response and responsibilities. The White House recognized that, whether it liked it or not, it was inextricably implicated in what President Obama described as the nation's greatest environmental disaster. That sounded like hyperbole to those mindful of such historic events as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but the White House knew that it was fighting a war of perception. Its representatives, such as Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, played central roles in asserting that the government was keeping its boot on the neck of the oil company and that the country's best minds were working on the problem of stopping the flow of oil.
Achenbach rightly ridicules the White House's seeming inability to utter Chu's name without mentioning that he had won a Nobel prize in physics. That alone was evidently considered enough to qualify him to be put in charge of efforts to stop the leak.
But the scientist proved to be more than just a Washington strongman driving the engineers to fix the problem. He tried to understand the workings of the recalcitrant blowout preventer himself, though in the end it was the engineers who made the right moves to kill the well, circumventing Chu when he moved too slowly.
In his preface, Achenbach says the story of the oil spill is "as fascinating as it was horrible," and his book is proof that it is. He reflects often throughout on the role of the reporter in the midst of such a story, and he admits that he had no formula or template for its telling, but he promises to rise to the challenge "to translate Engineer into English." He achieved his goal, and he has done so admirably.
Henry Petroski, a professor of engineering and of history at Duke University, is the author of "The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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