No comments about Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment.

5 comments about Alfred C. Kinsey : A Public/Private Life.

1. Jones certainly did his homework, but the work comes across as mean, even vindictive. He shows Kinsey is the harshest light and he comes across as excessively judgmental. A more recent book, Sex - the Measure of All Things by Jonathan Gathorne Hardy is a kindler and more balanced look at Kinsey and his work. I recommend starting with that. Kinsey was a great pioneer -- not perfect -- but a true giant in opening up to the doors to our sexuality. The Christian right has spent the last thirty years trying to discredit Kinsey's work and take us back to the 19th Century.



2. "Awkward" and "provincial" wrote the NY Times reviewer, and I can't disagree. To get an idea of the biographer's perspective on Kinsey, consider that he refers to an interest in S/M as "peculiar," and closes by predicting that had the atheistic Kinsey lived to see the age of AIDS, he would have seen AIDS as the work of a "wrathful God."



3. James Jones's biography of Alfred c Kinsey is a valuable antidote to the hagiographies and demonologies published so far. Jones presents the nastier sides of his subject's personality and exposes his strategically concealed sexual practices. However, Jones presents Kinsey as a pervert and charlatan, failing to understand the moral and scientific rationales for Kinsey's approach to sex research and thus totally misrepresents both the man and his achievement. Jones's last-page sop to Kinsey's greatness seems to be a cowardly after-thought to a bilious, splenetic and angry book.



4. I would recomend reading Judith Reismman's new book: Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences.

   The Kinsey Institute revealed that Kinsey used pedophiles to document orgasms in hundreds of boys and girls as young a 5 months old. One of his favorites reported abusing at least 800 children. These

   Kinsey reclassified prostitutes as married woman when he could not find enough woman willing to submit to his questionnaire. He used child molesters, rapists, homosexuals, prostitutes,sadists, masochists, etc. to represent the average American.

   Kinsey would not allow anyone, even a janitor to work for him unless they submitted to a sexual history questionnaire. When applicants did not agree that adultery, pre-marital sex, and sex with animals was normal, he told them they would not fit in with his staff.

   The Rockafeller Foundation's records reveal that Kinsey's associates were unqualified. Not only were the histories unscientifically administered but the statistics were proven unreliable and inacurate.

   If you want to know the full truth of the Kinsey deception -- buy Reisman's well documented book.




5. i had not known too much about kinsey until i read this book . . . now i know perhaps even more than i watnted to know (the book is nearly 1,000 pages). . . however, it was never dull . . . and would be of interest to readers interested in books about higher education, the mdeia, public rleations, statistics, politics, and yes, sex also! . . . i recommend the book!

4 comments about On Becoming a Biologist.

1. Not bad, but a bit dry and outdated (obviously not the author's fault - just a comment on the book's usefulness today). I was expecting more of a story about his personal journey towards becoming a biologist, but the book is more for people considering biology as a career option - what it takes. Perhaps an updated edition is in order?



2. John Janovy has written a book in "On Becoming a Biologist" that I could have used profitably when I was doing just that- becoming a biologist. I depended on my own enthusiasm, that of my instructors and two major professors, and my fellow graduate students. Indeed, this was sufficient, but having Janovy's book would have also offered a significant boost in times of doubt and uncertainty.
   
   Certainly no one goes into biology (or art, or literature, or any other academic activity) if one wants to get rich. Few biologists are wealthy. However we do have one thing (of several) in our favor- we generally like what we do (at least in teaching and research- now faculty meetings and committees are another thing entirely.!) We can, in fact, always find something of interest in any vacant lot, pond, river, woods or desert. We are very seldom bored. Janovy catches this excitement well in his book and he has done all potential biologists, professional or amateur (and I think a lot of nuts and bolts biology- taxonomy, life history, ecology, ethology, etc. will be done by amateurs in the future) a great service. He also brings out an issue that is often overlooked- a true field biologist should be an observer and in doing so, should not overlook art courses to sharpen that ability. Art is not in antipathy to natural science despite some modern notions otherwise. The famous ornithologist and artist George Sutton is a fine example of a scientist who mixed the two disciplines with profit.
   
   Janovy introduces the reader to the naturalists, the practice of biology, teaching and learning, making a living, and responsibilities, in five gem-like chapters. I recommend this book highly to anyone who contemplates biology as a career or avocation. If you were enthusiastic before, you will be all the more so after you read Janovy's prose!



3. I am stuck in what can only be called (generously) a mid-career crisis and changing to a career in biology is one of the possible directions I've been considering. Reading this book not only helped me to understand what life would be like if I chose to pursue a career in biology but it also talked about the details of a life that are hard to learn from the outside: the world-view, the ethical code, the experience of the daily life of a biologist. One of the best things I learned from this book is that for a person interested in biology there are many options, including being a devoted amateur. I still don't know what the future holds for me. This book was only one piece of the puzzle but it is an important piece and the lessons I learned go beyond biology.



4. Janovy presents an enjoyable, readable overview of how one becomes a biologist. He also provides suggestions about what and how to do things once you become a biologist. Janovy's comments are practical and insightful. This book should be required reading for all first-year college biology majors -- it is for mine! The going is smooth, the examples are clear, and the overall message is that it's no only OK, but fun and exciting to become a biologist. This is a great little book.

4 comments about Philo T Farnsworth.

1. but it doesn't change the truth. Unless you believe the teacher lied (and I have never heard that suggested or demonstrated) you have no basis for an assumption that Farnsworth did not invent the essential element of electronic tv. And Sarnoff, as well as Zworykin, are known to have (to be polite) exaggerated their deeds and discoveries.



2. The book is a lie. Farnsworth did not invent television. Television was around before Farnsworth was born. Other inventors' patents were used by RCA, notably Kalman Tihanyi, who patented the iconoscope in 1928.



3. While Godfrey has compiled, and reasonably well organized a great deal of information, his written presentation lacks style and readibility. The quality of writing is what one might expect from a newly-minted PhD attempting to gain recognition by publishing his/her dissertaion. I could not recommend this book to anyone looking for a general Farnsworth biography. For the occasional advanced undergraduate or graduate student studying the history of technology, I would recommend it for its reference value.



4. When Philo T. Farnsworth was fifteen, and plowing a field, he thougth up the concept that became electronic television. After one year of college, Farnsworth started repairing radio and then got support in the 1920s to develop electronic television. The only competition he faced was RCA and RCA tried to stop him. What followed were years of intense work and bitter frustrations. But in the end, Fransworth was proven to be the creator of television. Although forgotten today, this biography brings back to the public the importance of Philo T. Farnsworth and how the technology he developed back in the 1920s is till used today. An excellent read.

No comments about Siebold and Japan. His Life and Work..

5 comments about Einstein A to Z.

1. This is a good introduction to the life of Albert Einstein, beloved physicist and Time magazine Man of the 20th Century.
   
   Biographies about Albert Einstein can be divided into two categories: those written before 1987 when his papers and voluminous correspondence were made public, and after when the peccadillos of his life became more widely known. Authors Karen C. Fox and Aries Keck treat us to more than a few of those peccadillos, including his offer to marry either his cousin Elsa Lowenthal or her daughter Ilse, remarking that he was in love with both women, but wanted to have a child with Ilse!
   
   Einstein biographies can also be categorized according to what the biographer chooses to emphasize, Einstein's private life or his scientific accomplishments, or both. In this book you can choose by letter which part of Einstein's life you want to read about. The alphabetical entries begin with "Absentmindedness" and end with "Zionism." In between are such entries as "Cosmological Constant," "Einstein, Mileva Maric" (Einstein's first wife), "Jokes about Einstein," the "Michelson-Morley Experiment," "Princeton," "Twin Paradox," etc.. In all there are 114 entries, a Timeline, an Introduction, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index. The entries are like little self-contained essays. They are well-written, informative and without any kind of bias while revealing that Einstein is definitely a man worth writing about.
   
   Here's an Einstein joke. Einstein's driver used to sit in the back of the lecture hall while Einstein lectured. He sat there so many times that he said he could probably give the lecture himself. One day Einstein took him up on the idea, and the driver gave a flawless lecture with Einstein watching from the back of the room. At the end there was a question, and the lecturer said that "...the answer to that question is so simple, I bet that even my driver, sitting up at the back could answer it." (p. 148)
   
   Sometimes I like to compare Einstein to other great scientists much as some people compare baseball players. What are the greatest baseball players of all time? I won't hazard an opinion, but my three greatest scientists are Einstein, Newton and Darwin in no particular order. Certainly Einstein is the most celebrated. Reading this "biography" makes that clear.
   
   I was struck with just how human the authors make Einstein appear with his very human failings as a father and a husband along with his nearly superhuman accomplishments as a physicist. I was especially struck with Einstein's stubborn streak. Even at the time of his death in 1955 he still did not fully accept quantum mechanics, being especially disenchanted with the notion of "entanglement," which he called "spooky action at a distance." This is somewhat ironic since Einstein, along with his good friend Niels Bohr (with whom he had many spirited, even heated, discussions), Max Born, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and others were the architects of QM.
   
   What makes this book so agreeable is how handy it is for dipping into and finding something out about Einstein and his work, and how gracefully and informatively it is written.
   
   One last point. Fox and Keck do mention Einstein's famous disdain for socks. They speculate that he didn't like to wear them not merely because he didn't care about his appearance, "but possibly because they were physically uncomfortable." (p. 59) Maybe, but since I gotten older and have had time to think long and hard on this most interesting subject, I can report that the real reason that Einstein didn't like to wear socks is he didn't like to bend over and pull them on or push them off. If you've ever tried to put on a tight pair of socks, you know what I mean.
   
   Bottom line: fun to read, nontechnical with just enough science for the layperson to appreciate.



2. At first glance, could there be a worse way to present the life and work of a deep and complex figure like Einstein than chopping him up into 300 pages of encyclopedia entries? Much to my surprise, this fresh approach to Einstein by science writers Karen Fox and Aries Keck really works. It helps that every entry is well researched and sparkingly written, but even the inevitable repetitions turn out to be helpful, often reinforcing an important idea or presenting it from a different angle. I read the book from beginning to end on a long airplane trip, and found it as enjoyable and engrossing as any book I've read recently.
   
   Even though I've read many books about Einstein, and written a chapter about him in my book _Science Firsts_, I found quite a lot in _Einstein A to Z_ that was new to me. For example, I did not know that the German army was aware of the possibility of an atomic bomb as early as 1924, or how intensely Einstein was monitored by the FBI from 1932 on, or that Life magazine once labelled Einstein a Communist dupe or fellow traveller. I also thought the authors did a great job of tracing the evolution of Einstein's philosophical thoughts about science, from a very hard-nosed version of Mach's positivism (physics should deal only with observables) that guided his earliest work to a view that embraced the necessity of hypothesizing intangibles such as the gravitational field.
   
   My only quibble with the authors was what I felt was their somewhat apologetic depiction of Einstein's lifelong battle against political repression wherever her encountered it. This was as central to Einstein as his science. He was outspoken in his battles against fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany, McCarthyism in the U.S., the nuclear arms race, and excessive nationalism wherever he saw it, including, as the authors point out, in Israel. His political views may or may not play well in America today, but they certainly don't need to be apologized for.
   
   I don't think Einstein A to Z should be the only book about Einstein a person reads, but it certainly can hold its own with the more traditionally organized biographies. It's well worth reading.
   
   Robert Adler, author of _Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation_; and _Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome_.



3. I picked this up and was amazed when it was 3 hours later and I'd let everything else I was supposed to do in the afternoon slip by me. I'm NOT a scientist, so perhaps it's not aimed at people who already know a lot about Einstein, but it was just the perfect level for me. I liked the stories about his life interwoven with information about his theories. The format of the book -- it's made of lots of entries on subjects from his relationships with women to his work on the atom bomb -- really worked for me, and I'd love to see other biographies organized like this!



4. I guess I'm not the intended customer on this one. It read like a stack of high school book reports and the writing style felt somewhat clichéd. The information is there though. Could easily be given a yellow "Einstein for Dummies" cover.



5. This book is a great first-stop for students researching Einstein's life and works as well as those who want to gain some insight on Einstein but don't want to read a textbook. The book's easy-to-read sections teach you enough on that particular topic to feel satisfied by what you've learned or confident enough to take your research further with a more in-depth source. I really like books that can draw me into science by showing the human side of a scientist; for me, it makes complicated theories that much more accessible. I would even recommend this book to a book club. Whether you read it in its entirety or read just the sections of particular interest to you, the book could really open up a great discussion about one of the world's biggest science icons.

No comments about Women in Chemistry and Physics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook.

1 comments about Discovering Dorothea: The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate.

1. Chances are you never heard of Dorothea Bate; she was one of those last Victorian Britons who made her way into science by the amateur study of natural history. The practice of observing, collecting, classifying, and displaying natural specimens was an acceptable hobby for gentlemen and ladies, but Bate pursued it with astonishing passion and effectiveness. As much of her life as can be reconstructed is happily related in _Discovering Dorothea: The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate_ (HarperCollins) by Karolyn Shindler. There were more than the usual difficulties of writing the biography of this important woman, and Shindler has made them part of the narrative, as the title implies. Bate's private effects, personal letters and diaries, and other mementos of her intimate life passed to her sister at Dorothea's death in 1951. The sister's home burned three years later, along with the remnants of Dorothea's life, leaving only her scientific journals and papers. It is enough, as she never married and her life consisted of her work. Shindler has fashioned an admiring narrative of a woman with many traditional feminine characteristics gamely pursuing life in the field and also in the male-dominated scientific world of the time.
   
   In 1898 when she was nineteen, Bate marched beyond the public areas of the magnificent Natural History Museum in South Kensington, announced herself, and stated that she wanted to see the Curator of Birds, in charge of the Bird Room. The room was a male preserve, and "that she had aspirations to join them must have been one of the most astonishing ideas that any of the scientists had ever confronted." She somehow got stationed at a table of bird skins, showing her expertise at sorting them into species. She was eventually to work for the museum, both for it in the field and within it, for her entire life. She impressed the geology department the same way two years later with finds from a cave near her home, and her career of collecting took off. She traveled on her own to Cyprus, Crete, and the Balearic Islands, where her most strenuous efforts were in getting to the remote limestone caves around the islands. She found Pleistocene remains of pygmy elephants and hippos, as well as much more, and crated them up to the museum. She became a valuable in-house member of the geology department, working for the museum until her death.
   
   Bate's scientific journals were semi-official documents that were ready to be read by others, so Shindler produces fewer actual personal quotations from them than might be expected in a biography such as this. Nevertheless, in her letters and in the memoirs of those around her, Bate does show as a woman who is "witty, acerbic, clever, and courageous." A woman who knew her at Crete said she was "one of the jolliest, most capable, and fearless girls I ever knew." She was a nurturing guide and consultant, invaluable because of her huge store of knowledge, and one later curator who tried to tally all the papers and books thanking her for her help could not keep up with the huge number. Sadly, her family never did understand her; after reading Bate's obituary, her sister admitted, "I personally never heard about many of these things she did." Shindler admits that Bate "of necessity, is defined by what she did rather than who she was," but what she did makes for a portrait of a woman happily and constructively engaged in intellectual endeavors she exuberantly assigned to herself.

No comments about Darwin on Love.

1 comments about The Journals of Hippolito Ruiz: Spanish Botanist in Peru and Chile, 1777-1788.

1. If you like plants and the ethnobotanical uses of them (like I do), along with exploration and adventure, then this book is for you. Hipolito Ruiz was a Spanish botanist in Peru and Chile from 1777-1788. Along with all the many hardships which he encountered back in those days, he observed and recorded the many different kinds of medicinal and non-medicinal plants which the natives used. It truly is a fascinating account of his travels and what it was actually like in the 1700's. Along with being an adventure in ethnobotanical exploration , it is also a cultural portrayal of the peoples who lived there. I also enjoyed the appendix at the end of the book which lists the medicinal plants in alphabetical order which are mentioned in the text. Maybe this book should be required reading for medical students (?). Could be a cure for cancer, aides, etc. down there (!)