1 comments about Out of the Crater.

1. Mr. Fisher, besides being a world-renowned volcanologist, is also an amazing storyteller. I enjoyed every page of his book. What is wonderful about this professional journal is its appeal to all types of audiences. A young adult reader to a professional in earth sciences can enjoy this type of non-fiction literature. Not only did I learn general information about volcanology & pyroclastic eruptions, but I also laughed out loud when reading about Mr. Fisher's travelling mishaps -specially about Napoleon, the cantankerous mule he met in Mexico. The career path he chose was a result of significant events in his life, including being witness to two atom bomb explosions at Bikini atoll. The passion he holds for his career is felt as a reader and it truly is "geologically and culturally stimulating" as he describes the culture and geology of his research sites around the world.

1 comments about Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life.

1. This amazing biography of crystallographer is even more interesting because it is the author's first book. Despite being a non-scientist, Ferry does a superb job of exploring the life of her subject. It is a joy to read, treating with equal respect Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin's personal and scientific life. The central role of crystallography (with excursions into biology, chemistry, and physics) is not minimized, but it would be easily understandable to the non-scientific reader. Besides being a woman scientist in Great Britain at a time when women were not even eligible for college-level degrees at some schools, Dorothy was a successful wife and mother, raising several children almost alone while her husband worked in faraway places. But rather than concentrate on the difficulties, Dorothy put all her efforts into pursuing science, and thus she became fantastically successful, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for her work on the structures of Vitamin B12 and penicillin. Everyone in her field respected her, no one suggested her proper place was anywhere else, and so she avoided many of the pitfalls women in science often face. As long as she lived, Dorothy worked for what she believed in, whether it was solving the structures of complicated bio-active molecules, peace, or international communication. She built friendships all over the world, and used her fame and personality to help people. This book will make you a Dorothy Hodgkin fan, which is a tribute to both the subject's worthiness and the author's skill.

1 comments about Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist.

1. This book reprints the text of Wilfred Blunt's 1971 biography, "The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus," adding lavish illustrations, a brief bibliography by Gavin Bridson, an explanation of Linnaeus's system of taxonomy by William T. Stearn, and a comment on modern biological systematics by C. J. Humphries. Carl Linnaeus was an egotistical, vain, and sometimes difficult man, but he was also a beloved teacher, and his impact on natural history is undeniable. Blunt is a charming writer, and he skilfully tells the story of Linnaeus's rise from obscure provincial to famous professor, drawing on Linnaeus's own writings and those of his contemporaries. The illustrations bring to life the places Linnaeus lived and traveled and the plants that he observed, described, and named. Blunt has less to say about Linnaeus's science; readers who want to know how Linnaeus's contemporaries reacted to his ideas and what effect they had on biology will have to turn to works by Lisbet Koerner and others. But if you've ever wondered who was responsible for modern scientific nomenclature, and what it was like traveling in Sweden and Europe in the eighteenth century, this book is a fine place to start.

4 comments about Remarkable Mathematicians: From Euler to von Neumann (The Spectrum Series).

1. This book is a collection of short biographies of notable mathematicians from Euler to von Neumann. It does a good job of explaining both a mathematicians background and the significance of their contributions to mathematics. Great to read through or as a reference to have on the shelf.



2. The only reason that this book doesn't get 5 stars is because of the fact that not enough emphasis is placed on the achievements of the mathematicians in terms of their mathematics.

   However, this does not take away from the fact that is is exteremely well researched, laid out and presented. We get a meaningful insight into how these geniuses (genii?) lived and that fact that they were quite ordinary people with the same levels of hardship (and in some cases even more) as the rest of us. Perhaps an improvement could be made on further mathematicians, both past and present.

   Still recommended reading.




3. When reading about the great ones of mathematics, I always enjoy short biographies rather than long ones. If the biographer is required to fill a large section of a book, then they tend to cover more detail than I really care for. While I do enjoy some details about the personal life of a mathematician, anything more than just a few morsels tends to detract from their accomplishments in mathematics.
   James strikes the perfect balance in describing the lives of these great historical figures. Each biographical sketch is less than ten pages and he covers their life from birth to death. One valuable thing that he does is give their complete names, which is often omitted from biographies. In fact, despite all of my reading about the people of mathematics, there were some whose full names I had not known until I read this book.
   The emphasis is on the lives of the people, and the general concepts of the mathematics that they created, rather than the specifics. No formulas are used in the explanations. Personal and professional interactions are a large part of the life of nearly all mathematicians, and from these biographies, we learn many of the specifics of how contemporaries reacted to each other. As is always the case, the full range of human foibles are displayed as the lives of the mathematicians unfold.
   The lives of these sixty mathematicians are described in chronological order according to their birth years. Given that they all began their mathematically productive lives at different ages, this leads to some degree of overlap in both directions. Nevertheless, it is possible to easily trace the development of the major mathematical ideas as they are nurtured from early germs to towering oaks.
   Mathematicians are people who find themselves in a social and political environment that they must cope with and sometimes just survive in. In this book, you will learn about sixty of them who made a major contribution, sometimes starting from a point of privilege, and other times only after great struggle. It is well worth reading for pleasure and can also be used as a resource for a course in mathematical history.

   Published in the recreational mathematics e-mail newsletter, reprinted with permission.




4. Don't miss these captivating tales of the life and the times of mathematicians starting from the period of Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, and right up to recent times, at least up to and including the Cold War. Even if you aren't in math, I think you are likely to be caught up in the drama of the various lives, times, and events. The writing is fast paced and engaging, much like that of Constance Reid's books: "Hilbert", or "Courant"... Over the tumultous historical periods, it has been said that mathematicians have been more likely than others to have been uprooted in the upheavals of history, perhaps because they are concerned with theories and ideas that are more universal. But their lives are still much affected by the times and the events of history: The French Revolution(Galois, Poisson, Fourier...), the Napolionic Wars(Cauchy, Abel...), the period of Bismarck and Nationalism in Europe(Weierstrass, Cantor, Lie...), the Russian Revolution(Alexander, Kolmogorov...), the two World Wars, and the crisis period between WWI and WWII(Banach, Hadamard, Courant, Hilbert...), and the Cold War(von Neumann, Wiener...). The pictures on the cover give you a sample of the profiles in the book: G. Polya, K. Weierstrass, A. N. Kolmogorov, N. Wiener, S. Kovalevskaya, and S.-D. Poisson. Even if you won't get to meet them in person (I was a guest at George Polya's ninetieth birthday!), this book is the next best thing.

3 comments about Storms, Floods, and Sunshine: Isaac Monroe Cline : An Autobiography With a Summary of Tropical Hurricanes.

1. After reading several books about the Sept. 8th, 1900 hurricane that decimated Galveston, Texas (The Windows of Heaven, Weekend In September, The Great Galveston Disaster, Death From The Sea, Isaac's Storm and Through a Night of Horror) I found this book, an autobiography of Isaac Cline. It is an interesting look at a man who was at the forefront of understanding the need to accurately predict weather phenomenon in order to protect people whose lives could otherwise be lost and whose homes and businesses were imperiled.
   Isaac Cline was born in a log cabin on a small farm in Tennessee. His favorite book to read was the Bible, followed soon after by the writings of Jules Verne. Isaac wanted to one day write a great book on a matter of science, although in what area he was not then certain. He attended college through a combination of hard work and generosity, and was encouraged to become a preacher but realized that this was not truly in his heart.
   He flourished in the science and math classes. In 1871 the U.S. Weather Service was formed and this gave rise to the opportunity to chose a scientific career where he could indulge his passion for science and research. Isaac Cline would eventually be known as the Weather Service man on Galveston who realized what was happening and put himself in danger to warn residents to flee. His personal losses were high.
   He was also sent for a time to New Orleans where he realized that the potential for disaster from a hurricane in that region was all but inevitable.
   His research into tide tables, wind velocities, the storm surge, and figuring out the spiraling pattern of hurricanes are just a few of the advancements that can be credited to this fascinating man.
   Isaac Cline was also a collector of art in several forms, having some personal collections that were at times unrivaled for their quality and quantity.
   Some of the chapters in this book have a provincial feel to them, due to the fact that they were written in a different era, but the wide variety and experiences that Isaac Cline relates show his unique personality and depth of character.



2. Isaac Monroe Cline, writing of a storm he weathered off the coast of Veracruz, Mexico, made the prescient comment that "This was my first experience in a tropical cyclone, but it was not to be my last." Prescient, that is, for native Galvestonians who have listened to stories of the fateful, terrible Great Storm of 1900 from their forebears. I myself am a descendant of a survivor of an event that binds people together like Pearl Harbor survivors. Every B.O.I. (Born On the Island), it seems, had someone in the family or knew someone who made it through the night on September 8 one century ago.

   Storms, Floods and Sunshine is one book that will be indispensable to storm descendants and Texas history aficionados. It is the autobiography of Isaac Cline, the weatherman who followed the storm as it crossed the Gulf of Mexico after its birth under the sweltering West African sun, traveling thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, cutting a swath of destruction across Cuba before turning its fury directly on the industrious city of Galveston, the Wall Street west of the Mississippi and number one cotton port in the nation.

   The chapters are short and the sentences are spare of the sentimental, flowery rhetoric one might expect of a Victorian-age Southerner born at the cusp of the Civil War in 1861. His life was one of Masonic diligence, Franklin-like in his pursuit of science and the betterment of mankind, shunning distractions like strong drink, gambling, even the company of women, until he could convince himself that perhaps the soft touch of a woman's hand could help him in social advancement.

   Predictably, the longest chapters concern the development of weather technology, from its infancy under the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army., the political undercurrents, the infighting, and the agricultural aggrandizement. There are some snippets of humor, such as one forecaster who typed up the forecast for the week, submitted it to the newspaper, and took off fishing.

   "History does not record a greater disaster in the United States, than that which occurred at Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900."

   The one chapter that stands out, of course, is the one which changed the lives of thousands of residents and the course of a city. It materially changed Cline's life as well--he lost his wife in the disaster. Curiously, he is very silent about her other than a short description of how they met. Perhaps the memory of her death was too painful to relate in the wake of a hurricane that took at least 6,000 lives.

   Some of the asides and anecdotes may strike the modern reader as a little bizarre. To put it in perspective, the writer is, after all, a devout Methodist who put aside a promising career as a preacher to study medicine and the weather. For example, a whole chapter is devoted to the novel idea that the ark was actually built in America--near the swamps of Florida and North Carolina, to be exact. Yet even here he marshals evidence he considers scientific, such as wood type and ocean currents. Plausible, maybe. Unusual, certainly.

   It is a firsthand account of someone who helped a neglected branch of science become an essential part of our understanding of the natural world today. As Cline writes, "The slow progress made in the study of weather is surprising. The barometer was not invented until 1643, and the special study of weather and its changes did not receive much attention until two hundred years later."




3. In a field of science where writing can be used more as a weapon than as a tool for understanding, Isaac Cline still shines as a meteorologist who knew how to write in a way most anyone can understand, without "dumbing up" the prose. The only thing missing are pictures, charts, and diagrams, if for no other reason than as a necessary break from all the text. His short chapters work to the book's advantage.

   Even after 49 years, the spirit of the author comes alive in his writings. He was in a unique situation - witnessing the birth of the National Weather Service, and leading to its eventual acceptance from a public unable to believe anyone could make a one hour forecast, let alone one for two days!

   He expanded the role of the NWS in his 55-year career, and now has an award named after him, long after his demise. He lived to a ripe old age, doing what he loved most. His personality is in full effect - he comes across arrogant at times, and uses shameless self-promotion in order to get everyone to know all the contributions he has made to meteorology and Early American Art. It was, and still is, well deserved, however.

   He goes over his role in the Galveston Hurricane, the 1915 New Orleans Hurricane, and numerous Mississippi River Floods, including the great crevasse of 1927. He put most of the pieces of the hurricane puzzle together, and advanced the science significantly. He raised a family, and still found time to restore old paintings and make great contributions to his community in Galveston and New Orleans throughout his life.

   The lessons he learned in life were hard, but it helped make him the man he was. His story is still fresh, even after all these years. This book is well worth owning, and is valuable in its historical information. Meteorologists and local historians could do worse than do read/own this work.

1 comments about In the Thick of It: My Life in the Sierra Club.

1. Michael McCloskey has had a huge influence on conservation and environmentalism in America, and he's truly eligible to be the subject of an informative biography. Unfortunately, he should have had someone else write it. I am a volunteer officer with Sierra Club, active at both the local and state levels, with an interest in the organization's history. For that reason I was attracted to this autobiography of the man who served faithfully with Sierra Club and other important groups for some 40 years, and was one of the Club's most influential Executive Directors. However, even I had trouble keeping up my interest as this book dragged along, and I can't imagine any general reader (who may very well crave knowledge about conservationist history) being able to hold more than a polite semi-interest. This is because McCloskey's story, as told by himself, becomes an interminable list of brief reports, presented strictly in chronological order. Milestones and achievements are presented monotonously with an unchanging focus toward their importance and influence, or lack thereof, and there are very few deeper insights or analyses of historically important trends in conservation.
   
   Granted, there are a few useful tidbits here and there, especially in Chapter 13 in which McCloskey discusses how environmentalists can build alliances with labor, minorities, the poor, and business interests; while in a few other places he has some good advice on the specific financial and tax challenges face by non-profit advocacy groups. But on the other hand, most of the book dwells on minutiae of dubious usefulness, most notably the tedious coverage of several decades of internal power struggles within the Sierra Club leadership - passing strife that now means little to current Sierra Club members and even less to the interested layperson. McCloskey is also regularly prone to an underlying, yet subtle, self-righteousness. Once again, McCloskey is immensely influential in American conservationism, he was a strong leader of an important organization, and his lifetime of accomplishments is ripe material for a biography. But in the form of a self-aggrandizing autobiography, his story does not receive the insight and analysis that could be delivered by a professional biographer or historian. [~doomsdayer520~]

No comments about Charles Darwin in Australia.

5 comments about The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.

1. In the 100 years after Robert Fulton's death in 1815, biographers produced several accounts of his life. All were largely admiring of his far-reaching achievements, mechanical and intellectual, one to the point of obsequiousness (Thurston, 1878). ( See www.history.rochester.edu/steam for two of them, Thurston and Dickinson, 1913.) Then, after a gap of 60 years, Cynthia Philip provided a different picture of Fulton in "Robert Fulton: A Biography" (1985), which dealt in far greater depth and detail with his personal and business life -- and that paints a picture of a promoter who engages in double-dealing, industrial blackmail and even treason. For the thoroughness of its biographical research, Philip's is the essential Fulton biography now extant. It was followed 15 or so years later by Kirkpatrick Sale's shorter and less formal account ("The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream," 2001), which sought to put Fulton's accomplishments in a broader perspective and so shifted the balance back somewhat toward the positive. But not a lot, since the narrative essentially reflects Philip's account.
   The evolution of the view of Fulton is understandable: To the 19th Century, his achievements were real and palpable; the use of steam power to move people and goods revolutionized transportation and opened the American West (then comprising the land over the Alleghenies), as Kirkpatrick notes; its impact was as great, if less obviously, in a myriad other applications as well. But to the late 20th Century, all those developments are taken for granted or are long forgotten: Steam locomotives no longer move Americans; airplanes do. So today, there's far more room to examine Fulton's life critically.
   But there's a cost to lost context. The weakness of both Philip's and Sale's accounts is that they are biography, not history: They offer too little perspective to evaluate Fulton personal peccadilloes or intellectual contributions. Was his towering drive to enrich himself and benefit mankind an individual trait, or was it a motivation shared by ambitious men of the age? Were his erratic business relationships a personal fault, or did they reflect the conduct of entrepreneurship of the times? Were his calculations of the benefits of canal construction (an early Fulton passion) a sign of his genius or a common device of canal promoters? Without that kind of background, it's hard for the reader to sort out whether Robert Fulton was really the scoundrel he sometimes seems in the modern biographies or the unequivocal benefactor to mankind of an earlier era that 19th Century biographers depict.



2. It does seem odd that the Secretary of the socialistic and luddite E. F. Schumaker Society would produce the best work to date on one of America's pioneering industrialists, but Kirkpatrick Sale is, first and foremost, and excellent historian. His first work of note, "SDS", was a brilliantly detailed work, and although Sale's sympathies were clearly with the founding members of SDS, he never let that prevent him from telling all the truth as he saw it.

   And so it is with "The Fire of His Genius". Sale goes back to original documents to present the real Fulton, a rich and complex character, and to clear up a number of errors that have crept into the popular histories, such as the claim that Fulton's boat was named the "Claremount". (It was in fact called the North River Boat, after the popular name for the stretch of the Hudson it operated on).

   Sale goes into some detail on Fulton's finacing, his relationships with friends and backers (some real surprises here) and his various dealings with governments. The picture that emerges is of an egocentric, but talented entrepeneur, less engineer than salesman, who nonetheless was instrumental in creating the technology of riverboat navigation that was instrumental in opening up commerce and trade throughout the expanding United States in the Nineteenth Century. All in all, excellent history and entertaining reading.




3. This slim volume (only 250-odd pages) is perhaps more informative than most biographies of Robert Fulton. Author Kirkpatrick Sale has done a marvelous job, in "The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream", of capturing the brilliance and the importance of Fulton's vision. Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat but he did know how to perfect and sell it. This young man led an incredibly full and active life, considering how young he was when he died.

   But "The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream" also differs from other works on Fulton because of the second half of the subtitle: Fulton's influence on America. Much has been made of the New York City that Fulton lived in, and how his work would be part of that city's transformation from a major city in America to an international cosmopolis. (The creation of the Erie Canal in 1820 would really propel that metamorphosis.) But Sale's book also looks beyond the borders of the East and North (or Hudson) Rivers. It takes a long hard look at the westward spreading nation that needed new forms of transportation and a new navy. How Fulton was inextricably wrapped in both concerns is a major component of this very readable book. It helps complete the picture of an era of American History--and of a great American like Robert Fulton--that sorely needed investigation. We are all indebted to Kirkpatrick Sale for this scholarly examination.




4. Today with jet passenger aircraft crisscrossing the country, with nuclear powdered naval craft sailing for months without refueling, and with cruise ships carrying more passengers than the populations of some American Colonial villages, Robert Fulton and the first practical steamboat is largely forgotten. However, the author, Kirkpatrick Sale, states "....the steamboat would be the single most important instrument in the transformation of America in the first half of the nineteenth century: it promoted the penetration and settlement of the American interior...." The text narrates Fulton's life placing him in proper historical context.

   Chapter 1 is an account of the very successful August 1807 maiden voyage of the Fulton's steamboat, North River (erroneously called the Claremont in textbooks), from New York to Albany and return. Following this successful trip, Fulton initiated regular steamboat service on the Hudson from New York to Albany which ceased only when the Hudson River froze. While not the inventor of the steamboat, Fulton was successful because he built the North River "on sound engineering principles and scientific techniques."

   The text states that little is known about Fulton's early life, He was born on a farm in 1765 in Pennsylvania to Irish immigrant parents. He developed a strong drive to avoid his father's poverty, and in his mid-teens he moved alone to Philadelphia and was apprenticed to a jeweler. In 1787 he arrived in London (source of funds unknown) for further art study under Benjamin West. It was a difficult time for would-be artists and in 1793 he began devolving into engineering concentrating first on canals. He conceived many inventions such as a marble-cutting saw, a canal-digging engine, prefabricated iron bridges, etc. In 1797 he went to France. Sale gives an intriguing account of Fulton's attempt to sell a submarine and mines (Fulton called them torpedoes) first to Napoleon in France; then later to England when he was rejected by France. Amazingly Fulton tried unsuccessfully to blackmail both countries by threatening to reveal his work to their enemies.

   In Paris in 1802 Fulton met Robert Livingston who wanted to build and operate a steamboat on the Hudson River. A partnership was formed and Fulton was obligated to build a steamboat to ply the Hudson; however, the author notes "Fulton knew from the outset that it would be on the Mississippi and its major tributaries that the steamboat would have its most consequential impact...." In 1803 he conducted a successful trial run of a prototype steamboat on the Seine, and in December 1806 Fulton returned to America where in 1807 Fulton's commercially successful North River began operations. The book gives a good account of how Fulton and Livingston with state granted monopolies developed steamboat traffic on the Hudson and Mississippi Rivers plus steam ferries to New Jersey. Incredibly, in 1808-09, he lobbied for his torpedoes in Washington.

   For the 1808 season, Fulton refurbished the North River "offering accommodations of some taste and luxuriousness" rather than the somewhat spartan 1807 conditions. Later steamboats would continue this luxurious accommodation pattern. By early 1813, he had six steamboats at work and six more ready to launch.
   The author notes "Steamboating was too obviously lucrative an enterprise-everyone of Fulton's boats was making money, some robustly so-not to attract any craftsman or entrepreneur who could find a source of modest capital and a machine shop with a few experience hands. By 1814 at least a dozen other men had launched vessels of their own...." Fulton and Livingston would spend the last years of their lives defending their monopolies with Fulton carrying on alone after Livingston's death in 1813. When Fulton died in 1815 his monopolies were essentially ended. Strangely, until the end of his life, his passion was his weapons of war, none of which were successful, rather than the steamboat.

   The book's last chapter, titled Legacies, is most interesting as it outlines the history of the steamboat after Fulton's death noting that the steamboat was central to drawing people to middle America. Mark Twain wrote "The 19th Century began the most prolific age of invention, bringing into our daily life the convenience of machines which were recently unknown but in our dreams. At the beginning of that period of material progress stands the name of Robert Fulton." The author notes sadly on page 176 "No lasting monuments, not even a gravestone, were erected [to Robert Fulton] until 1901 when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers put up a bronze plaque on a squat column along the south wall of Trinity churchyard."

   The book's closing sentence states "And none who ever rode its throbbing decks, or watched its majestic motility on the water, ever failed to realize that it was this the symbol, as it was for many years the agency, of the American dream."




5. What stands out to me in this biography are his early years as a portrait painter in England; the attempts to sell his inventions, the submarine and his mines, to Napoleon and later to the British, for profit; the erotic tryst he had with his friends the Barlows in Paris; his later attempts to maintain his patents on his steamboats on the Hudson and in New Jersey ,which he operated for his own profit, against competition; and the surrounding American history, which included the Lousiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark expedition. Fulton was a true American entrepreneur who died at a premature age, burned out by his efforts. The final chapter on his legacy to the commerce of the American heartland, the effects of which took place largely after his death, is also very impressive.

1 comments about Engines and Enterprises: The Life and Work of Sir Harry Ricardo.

1. At first glance this might seem a technical treatise - and in fact those who study internal combustion engines will find sufficient detail to fascinate them. It is, however, a biography which covers the technical, business and personal life of a man whose contributions to transportation technology are far more widespread than his fame. The descendant of families accomplished in architecture and the arts, Ricardo was Cambridge educated at a time when most engineers in Britain learned from apprenticeship. His career spanned nearly seven decades, and his technological innovations found their way into motorcars, trucks, railroad engines and aircraft. John Reynolds pens a good read, and it will appeal to all with an interest in transportation history.

No comments about The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies.