2 comments about Rosalyn Yalow: Nobel Laureate: Her Life and Work in Medicine (Helix Books).

1. Rosalyn Yalow, from a poor uneducated family in the Bronx, and educated in the New York City public school system, became the first American educated woman to make it to the top in science or medicine. A nuclear physicist who never took a course in biology, she developed a method to identify and measure vanishingly small amounts of almost any substance in body fluids and tissues. As a result her work revolutionized virtually every aspect of medicine and biomedical science. What did it take to succeed in universities, hospitals, and scientific establishments that were completely dominated by men and male culture? What price did she pay? What barriers still stand in the way of women in these fields? This book speaks to these questions and more. It provides a searching and sensitive portrait of an overpowering woman who stood alone, fought for her place, and guided other women to follow their dreams and abilities. Yet the book is about human relationships; motherhood, marriage, partnership, and especially Yalow's relationship with herself. It is also about the ongoing struggle to achieve equal opportunity for all people. It reads like a novel, with a poetic feel for words and structure. Even the science is seamless and available to readers with little or no scientific background. Here is a great book about a great woman who is not an actress, not a heiress, not a figure in a political scandal, but a towering intellectual figure who changed the world. I couldn't put it down. Read it, then give it to your kids. Especially the young adult boys and girls.



2. As someone who is concerned with how gender influences our movement within society and our personal development, I found this book fascinating. To say nothing of the fact that this is one of very few books about a woman of intellect and emotional control of daunting proportions. As a woman physician, this book provided insight into my own development and future path. But as a woman, I hope men read this book. The insights go far beyond medicine, or careers, to the center of the gender issues that face us all.

2 comments about Watson And Dna: Making A Scientific Revolution.

1. Victor K. McElheny, the author of WATSON AND DNA, worked under Watson at Cold Spring Harbor on the north shore of Long Island, New York, as director of Banbury Center from 1978 to 1982, organizing conferences on environmental sources of cancer. This did not attract much money. Support from the National Cancer Institute "took the form of book purchases." (p. 175). Industry had to provide funding when deficits became severe, but Watson was willing to provide credit for others when money came in. "Watson said that a conference on patenting life forms that I staged in 1981 had opened the way to the $7.5 million research cooperation between CSHL and Exxon." (p. 176). There is a site map of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on page 173, and I needed to page through the book to find it, since there is no list of illustrations. Page 58 showing DNA DOUBLE HELIX and FOUR BASES AS BASE PAIRS OF DNA is a schematic from MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE CELL by Bruce Alberts et al. An X-ray image of DNA made by Rosalind Franklin in May 1952 is shown on the third page of photographs following page 178.

   The twentieth century produced some individual thinkers, and in scientific research those who were determined to be the first to provide an answer were seen by experts who had patiently acquired their knowledge as aspiring upstarts. Anyone who could help them was likely to be like Erwin Chargaff, when Francis Crick "forgot which base was which. He did not know which bases had NH[subscript]2, amino groups. You could always look these up in a book! Chargaff drew the formulas for the two smart alecks. They were so ignorant. He recalled, `I never met two men who knew so little and aspired to so much.' They talked a lot about the `pitch' of the bases with respect to the long axis of DNA. After the humiliating interview, Chargaff jotted a note: `two pitchmen in search of a helix.' He was not in a hurry to find the DNA structure. Watson and Crick's ambition, and their worry about Pauling's beating them to the structure, left Chargaff cold." (p. 48).

   One of the keys to the structure was that "It possessed a type of symmetry called `monoclinic C2,' which specified that the two helical chains ran in opposite directions. . . . In ten turns, then, the rung-like pairs of bases would be repeated, implying a rotation of 36 degrees from one base pair to the next." (p. 55). It took a long time to get the proper form of molecules for the basic structure, with NH[subscript]2 instead of NH groups. Watson was working with "enol" forms instead of "keto" until the fourth week of February, 1953, when Jerry Donahue convinced Watson which shapes were basic. "The particular tautomeric form governed which hydrogen bonds could form between bases. With enol, it wouldn't work. With keto it would. Donohue's intervention was vital." (p. 56).

   The number of people working in molecular biology has increased so much since the basic elements of the field were figured out in this fashion that readers of this book are unlikely to achieve the fame acquired by many of the people this book describes. Few will have the opportunity to go "to Fort Detrick, Maryland, the heavily guarded enclave where the military tried to make biological weapons out of deadly pathogens, and soon found that, as Watson said, `there was nothing good to tell the President.' The pathogens were useless in a superpower conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, each with thousands of nuclear warheads." (p. 216). Ultimately, "Said Watson, `You can't imagine them banning anything they thought would work.' " (p. 217). This book does not reach the point of trying to find WMD so we can ban them all over again, in places we sold them to after "Watson's Harvard colleague Matthew Meselson helped convince President Nixon to stop the work and destroy supplies." (p. 217).

   Consider this book an investment in our future that will cost you much less than Exxon was willing to pay to learn how to patent life forms.




2. For anyone else, a career that includes a stint at Harvard as a professor and mentor to numerous successful scientists, several decades spent rebuilding Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory into a world-renowned scientific center, and the opportunity to steer the Human Genome Project, would be considered a tremendous success. For James Watson, that was all just an epilogue to his Nobel Prize-winning deduction of the structure of DNA. Double Helix, Watson's million-selling account of this breakthrough, is one of the most compelling books ever written about science. Genes, Girls and Gamow, his recent book about his subsequent career, does not have the same power.
   
   Victor McElheny largely covers the same periods that Watson describes in his autobiographical works, but he adds more description of Watson's education and concentrates more on his professional career. The book is well-researched and informative; McElheny interviewed scores of Watson's associates and pored over previous reminiscences by Watson and Crick, among others. A previous employee and a longtime admirer of Watson's, McElheny occasionally veers toward hagiography, but he is generally balanced in his portrayal of the eccentric scientist. Unfortunately, the biography suffers from several flaws that are no fault of the author. Watson was working on his own book, so declined to be interviewed for this work. The absence of his account is telling, especially in regard to his private life and his resignation from the Human Genome Project. The chapters on the discovery of DNA structure are thoroughly engaging, but Watson has already told that story. The rest of the book reads like a long anticlimax; it is interesting but lacks the motivating story of Watson's years at Cambridge.
   
   This is a good book about one of the most intriguing figures of 20th-century science, but my biggest praise for it is that it inspired me to reread the Double Helix. As McElheny shows, Watson never rested on his laurels, but his later career was not as remarkable as his early breakthrough. There are few things that are.

4 comments about T Farnsworth.

1. 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.



2. 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.



3. 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.



4. 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.

5 comments about Fulcanelli and the Alchemical Revival: The Man Behind the Mystery of the Cathedrals.

1. If we use the word "misconception", it is quite on purpose, for that word refers to "getting it wrong", which on the whole is not dishonourable. Nevertheless, within this particular misconception is also the deep and scarcely veiled contempt in which the author holds Fulcanellian alchemy. The authors listed above had undoubtedly shown respect for Fulcanelli and had considered him an Adept of hermetic philosophy, which he masterfully discussed in both of his published books. However, Genevi?ve Dubois not only appears to hold contempt for Fulcanellian alchemy, but for Fulcanelli himself, who is also disparaged, run down and betrayed in such a manner that her book would have been more appropriately entitled, "Fulcanelli d?voy? " rather than "Fulcanelli d?voil? "!
   
   "L'Affaire Fulcanelli" , another work by said author, is a fallacious and partial book full of glaring errors of logic, transcription and date. It is, as far as I know, a book that few noticed (with the exception of Jean Laplace), and one which ridicules and describes a hoax cunningly orchestrated by the duplicity of two document looters - Pierre Dujols and Ren? Schwaller - and the ingenious ideas of Eug?ne Canseliet and his mentor Julien Champagne, in the manner of a novel by Flaubert: the "Bouvard and P?cuchet " of the Belle Epoque. However, under the pretence of making amends, Genevi?ve Dubois wished to make it clear at the end of the perfidious book that she thinks that young Canseliet had been the sport of Champagne, who thoroughly manipulated him.
   
   Jean Laplace, therefore, justly expressed his indignation in the diatribe he published in La Tourbe des Philosophes , N?s 36-37:
   [...] I was still very na?ve to think that those "questers" had only in mind to put a name on a pseudonym; I realized after some time that some of them were only trying, under the cover of that so-called "quest", to destroy the hated image of Eug?ne Canseliet, whom they so detested. [...].
   
   The malevolence and intentional prejudice warned against by Eug?ne Canseliet, again produced a heap of nauseous nonsense entitled Fulcanelli d?voil?. Still, in his Alchimie expliqu?e, and on that same page 12, the philosopher foresaw that four centuries would not elapse, as in the case of Flamel, before his own life would be meticulously sifted through without any benevolence by yet another Villain.
   
   [...] The new accusatory document that appeared in November 1992 (Fulcanelli d?voil?) goes even farther, insinuating that there never was an Adept Fulcanelli, since all of that had been a hoax of which Eug?ne Canseliet was the victim, unless he was a stakeholder in it. The hatred for Eug?ne Canseliet that emanates from that distasteful book is all the more easily released as the only one able to give answers has been dead for about ten years now. Still, when one realizes that the author is not even able to correctly read the original copy of the philosopher's published letter - so enormous are the mistakes - one is allowed to seriously doubt her insight.
   
   Not content with all that, Genevi?ve Dubois, who was at that time directing a line of alchemical writings for publisher Dervy, decided in 1995 to publish an odd book under the name of "Jean-Fran?ois Gibert" entitled Propos sur la Chrysop?e, avec en annexe le Manuscrit de Pierre Dujols-Fulcanelli traitant de la pratique alchimique , in which the author expresses, without beating around the bush, her negative intentions (p. 21):
   
   Newton's case study now being almost completed, we will now talk about the case of Fulcanelli, one which is close to a hoax and represents the final form of pseudo-alchemical materialism, a blind alley in the hermetic labyrinth. To prove our statements we are going to present a still unheard of manuscript from Dujols-Fulcanelli on the Chrysopea. This will enable students of the philosophical art to get their own ideas on the Great Work considered in the manner of Le Myst?re des Cath?drales, written from the notes left by Dujols and Champagne, by the scholarly blower, the late Eug?ne Canseliet.
   
   What an edifying document, indeed, is this text which, while correctly reflecting Pierre Dujols' style, is at the perfect opposite of the alchemical path followed and recommended by Fulcanelli.
   
   The alchemist Fulcanelli was the most famous adept of the 20th century, the man who achieved the Great Work less than 100 years ago, but his true identity has always been shrouded in myth and uninformed speculation...until now.
   
   Patrick Rivi?re reveals with profuse documentary evidence the true identity of the enigmatic and prestigious author of The Mystery of the Cathedrals and The Dwellings of the Philosophers. Beginning with an overview of French alchemical life at the turn of the 20th century, Rivi?re carefully builds his case step-by-step with facts, documents, and photographs, introducing us to the well-known physicist who was known as Fulcanelli. Rivi?re also demolishes the scurrilous hypotheses that suggest Fulcanelli never existed. Rivi?re is uniquely suited to solving this mystery as his teacher was Fulcanelli's sole student, Eug?ne Canseliet. (ISBN 1-897244-21-5 Red Pill Press)



2. Who was this enigmatic being, Fulcanelli, a twentieth century alchemist who allegedly discovered the secrets of immortality, or at very least a special elixir that extended his life long beyond life expectancy? His true identity is the subject of this book.
   
   Fulcanelli is accredited with authoring two books, Le Mystère des Cathédreles (1926) and The Dwellings of the Philosophers in 1930. The former title by far is considered a masterpiece in modern alchemy, examining the sculptures in French gothic cathedrals, primarily Notre Dame of Paris, and linking them to the processes of alchemy, suggesting that these churches were used as but intended as learning centers for the ancient sciences. A curious "lost" chapter, The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye, is added to the 1957 edition of this book, a chapter which redirects Fulcanelli's work in an entirely different corner of the universe, a ten page examination of a stone cross near a parrish church in the center of a small town in the Basque country. The examination of the symbols on this cross, according to the author of this chapter, point to a prediction of the end of the world. This chapter has spawned an entire impulse based on Fulcanelli's book, that is very different than the rest of the book, and this topic (that chapter) is not the focus of this book, though the author does have some interesting remarks about it in a later chapter in her book. And being that it was added over thirty years after the original edition of this book, it is questionable whether it was even penned by the same hand that wrote the rest of the book. Le Mystère des Cathédreles is definitely about alchemy, not the end of the world.
   
   This book will introduce the reader to the thriving Parisian occult activity between the periods of about 1910 and 1930. Major personalities are named and relationships established. Interest in the occult was acute during this period, and Paris was the center of a bustling community of artists, writers, poets, and others with an intense interest in this subject matter.
   
   Dubois book presents quite a bit of compelling information suggesting exactly who was behind the Fulcanelli phenomena. She introduces the key players and presents how certain individuals were quite capable of producing this ground-breaking revival of the alchemical tradition. The clues Dubois are strong (and abundant) and the conclusion logical. The book is lavishly illustrated with portraits, fragments of handwriting samples, notes, obituaries, and even the natal charts of two of the key players (with brief analysis for both) in this drama.
   
   Geneviève Dubois has written other text on themes Alchemical and has extensively studied this period of occult history. This book is a welcomed addition to the mystery of who Fulcanelli might (probably) was plus an excellent historical survey of the thriving occult community in Paris up to around 1930.



3. Anticipating this book & finally reading it was a bit anticlimactic in that the promise did not quite meet my expectations. What I found in this book is a good overview of French alchemical occultism since the end of the 19th century through the mid-20th. A sound companion to Christopher McIntosh's "Eliphas Levi & the French Occult Revival". But as to throwing additional light onto identifying who was Fulcanelli- the usual suspects remain unchallenged. The translation appears a bit forced and choppy, and required me to go back and reread certain sections to see if I had missed something. Like Herman Hesse novels, the allure and promise of mystical insight is promised but never quite delivers.



4. After having read both 'Le mystere des cathedrales' and 'The dwellings of philosophers' (which, by the way, do NOT seem to be written by the same person), I simply cannot understand why so many people are interested in the 'true' identity of their supposed author. On the other hand, this is one of the instances when I understand perfectly the Traditionalist (like in Rene Guenon) contempt for biography. The only thing that truly matters here is whether Fulcanelli's ideas work or not. So far I have not read a reasonable discussion of this; instead, we get more and more books dealing with the utterly insignificant minutiae of the life in the occult circles in France around WW1.
   I feel like paraphrasing the old Zen adage - if you meet Fulcanelli on the road, kill him!
   
   Coming back to Mlle Dubois' book: it certainly brings to light many previously unpublished documents and obscure facts. However, their arrangement is rather haphazard, the commentary minimal and the translation of all this into English simply not very good; at times it reads almost like one of those jobs done by an online free translation engine. But it still deserves three stars, if only for a stubborn research.



5. I came across Genevieve Dubois's book after searching for more information on the great alchemist of 20th century by the name of Fulcanelli. After reading this book, I found myself in a state of confusion and disgust. What Dubois has brought forth is the notion that Fulcanelli is nothing but a simple myth, as being "spread" by a number of individuals as stated in this book (p. 77):
   
   "[Jean-Julien] Champagne devoted years to maintaining the fiction of Fulcanelli's vocation as an adept. He had launched this fiction, and it was maintained by the whole group around him, all of whom must have promoted the myth: Gaston Sauvage, the Chacornacs, Pierre Dujols, Canselist, Jules Boucher."
   
   And, Dubois branded Eugene Canseliet, a real disciple of Fulcanelli, as "the pivot in manipulations of which he remained quite unaware - a kind of hoax that would take a turn its perpetrators did not perhaps foresee" and as a "key to the tenacious spreading of the legend" (p. 60-1).
   
   Throughout the book, the author made a strong and an unchanged argument that Fulcanelli has never existed and remained only as a hoax. In sum, she attempted to hinder the reader from searching for the real truth about Fulcanelli and being indirectly encouraged to "look no further."
   
   This book was written by a mind of misconceptions and a poor logic, and it would lead the reader on the road to a distorted knowledge.
   
   For any sincere reader of the Fulcanelli subject, Dubois's book is to be avoided.

No comments about William Shockley - The Father of Silicon Valley (Biography).

1 comments about Discoveries: Darwin and the Science of Evolution (Discoveries (Abrams)).

1. The book summarizes the earliest proponents and opponents of evolution, the voyage of the Beagle, and the closest members of Darwin's family.
   All of it is easy to read except a chapter entitled "Evidence for evolution" (pp. 116-128).
   
   The book could be improved with an FAQ chapter, answering questions such as "Why are there still monkeys?" and "What good is half an eye?"
   The book is small, profusely illustrated, and can be read in a short time. If there were more of it, I would give it a 5.

No comments about Melanie Klein (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism).

2 comments about I, Cyborg.

1. I would have liked to hear more of this experiment. From the writer experience, it appears that a body can be directly linked to a computer to do simple tasks like driving a wheel chair.

   The possibiliy of directly linking a computer to a brain as quite an exciting possiblity. I also agreed with the writer that it could be quite a blessing to many people that are incapicitated in some way.




2. Don't bother. This guy is a systems and process engineer, a robotics genius - and a megalomaniac who thinks he does real science. Surprise! He went to do his experiment and discovered that there are rules to real science, like Human Subjects Protection laws. This is a guy who thinks that if you feed each group of 10 schoolkids a different breakfast for a month and find a 3 point difference in IQ in the group that ate bacon sandwches, that proves that bacon raises IQ. He mixes up his psychological, biological and philosophical concepts, mostly because he really doesn't seem to have much grounding beyond the logic of systems - and his own desire to become the first cyborg. That huge book, and 95% is "me, I, me, I" about his papers, his trips, his projects, his jobs, his TV appearances, his publicity.
   
   The experiment isn't much. Big deal, he implanted a small array of electrodes in his lower arm with some wires attached, wore it around for 3 months, connected it to a computer once in a while, and then he ran some simple tests on it, the most important of which, in my estimation, was making the virtual hand work at a distance by moving his own hand - a nice future worth developing for robotics working in dangerous environments, something that didn't seem to have occured to him. The part about sending electrical currents from his hand to his wife's hand was interesting, but he imbued it with semi-mythical power. My question is, does it count as brain-to-brain electrical communication if the nerve stimulation doesn't pass through the brain but only works in the arm and spinal column, or just the arm to the implant? Issues he didn't consider because of his limited knowledge in anatomy, neuroanatomy (he had to open a textbook at every step of his experiment), etc.
   
   I think cyborgs are coming, and I think neural control of objects is a good thing. I want to be able to write and make art from my brain directly, when that is possible, and would even be willing to volunteer to help along the way. But I don't think Warwick counts as the first real cyborg. He wasn't even the first implant - the first and second implants were done in 1996 by a group in Atlanta, headed up by Philip Kennedy (Science News, 1/29/05, p. 73). I think Warwick's effort was an engineer-being-a-science-dilettante publicity-hound's quick-and-dirty effort to grab a lot of ink and a Nobel Prize, which he thought to deny in the book - why bother to mention it if you're not thinking about it?
   
   Read the news stories about his experiments, they get to the point faster. Read his books about robotics, which is where his expertise lies, if you're interested in his real work and significant ideas. Read other people's work on cyborgs. Check out the good work being done with blind people and paraplegics by different groups, work that goes into serious scientific looks at what Warwick just played with. They just don't write self-aggrandizing books about things, they go through peer review first!

5 comments about Time Lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.

1. Although Time Lord weighs in at fewer than 250 pages, this book took me a great deal of time to read in part because it constantly put me to sleep. Usually the combination of history/biography/science is favorite of mine, and finding out where our notion of time originated sounded like a fascinating topic to me. In the end, however, the story just isn't that exciting and it felt like the author was padding the book with unrelated filler material.
   
   To be fair, Sir Sanford Fleming is an interesting and admirable character. Intelligent and hard working, he was a self-made man who emigrated from Scotland to North America to seek his fortunes. In addition to the creation of standard time, he was also largely responsible for the trans-Pacific cable and the trans-Canadian railway.
   
   While Fleming's accomplishments are all duly noted by the author, much of the book felt like filler material. Entire chapters are spent waxing philosophical about the "nature of time" and how various notions of time affected everything from art to literature. If you happen to have done postgraduate study in art or literature, you may genuinely enjoy these distractions, but I found them to be a bit too much. Blaise spends as much time (one chapter) discussing Sherlock Holmes as he does discussing the actual Prime Meridian Conference.
   
   Time Lord is not without its pleasures. It is truly fascinating to read how the world worked (or attempted to work) with an infinite number of local times, and how the advent of rail travel in particular created the need for time standardization. It was also interesting and, at times, amusing to study the role politics and national pride (particularly between the British and the French) played in the entire affair. Unfortunately such topics do not constitute the majority of the book, as they are what I was most looking for.
   
   If you or the person you are shopping for enjoy this genre, you might first want to consider The Measure of All Things (which chronicles the creation of the meter) or Pendulum (on the life of Leon Foucault), both of which I found to be more enjoyable reading than Time Lord.



2. Most of Time Lord should have been about Sir Sandford Fleming, about how he grew up, about why he left home (Scotland) and crossed the ocean to a new land (Canada), his trials and tribulations, the events of his life, great and small, that shaped this great but mostly forgotten man. Then after three or four hundred pages of this, an author can permit himself to give his personal views in a few pages.
   
   Instead of doing this, Clark Blaise reverses the precepts and gives us 200 pages of his Views on Time and how Deep the Concept is. He gives us a mishmash of poetry and literature and badly thought out espresso philosophy. Nothing about Fleming. I would have loved a day-by-day account of the Prime Meridian conference, or of Fleming's days as chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. No such luck.
   
   After finishing the book, I went to the shortish wikipedia entry on Fleming and found more facts there than in Blaise's book. Until someone writes a better book, that might be the best thing to do.
   
   Vincent Poirier, Tokyo



3. After he set out the initial scene and made narrative inroads, the author proceeded to regale us with his views on time and why they're important. These pseudo-science views could have all made a great short story but had no place interspersing with an actual narrative. It really screamed for a good editor to sit the poor man down and say "No."



4. How could i possibly pass by such a title? As an avid fan of Doctor WHO, the original time lord, captured the eye firmly enough. But this is hardly a book of science fiction, although few novelists could adequately depict the subject. This book is the rendering of one of the 19th Century's most notable autodidacts. An almost penniless emigrant from rural Scotland, Sandford Fleming revolutionised the world's concept of time. In this fascinating, but rather disorganised, account, Blaise weaves numerous themes around Fleming's aim to make the world's time measurement coherent - and universal.
   
   The prompt for Fleming's quest was a missed train in Ireland well into the era of the Industrial Revolution. Driven by steam, that age first used that power to raise water from coal mines. Applied to transportation of goods and people, one of steam's legacies was changing the nature of time. Factory workers now laboured to the clock, and travel speed increased dramatically. Rail travel quickly overtook animal prowess, but also revolutionised our lives. In North America, the spread of the land led to rail companies becoming the index of industry, and a force in politics and society. Each rail company kept time according to its head office. Its schedules granted it dominion over time, leading to such anomalies as the city of St Louis, which observed six different railroad times. This, in addition to the common practice of each town marking its own time by the sun's overhead passage.
   
   Without question, Blaise' most eloquent chapter is "The Aesthetics of Time" in which he renders the influence of changing concepts on time on the arts, notably impressionism and literature. While the world was moving toward more uniform means of dealing with time, the arts recognised that the established "natural time" with its easy, regular flow - "time's arrow" - had been demolished. Readers and viewers came to accept disjointed time in stories and paintings. Blaise uses Cailllebotte's "Paris Street, Rainy Day", which was composed from a string of photographs, as the prime example. Nothing is still and the figures appear detached from "normal" concepts of time. In a similar manner, novelists could break up stories into disconnected parts, skipping about in the chronology to build new forms of narrative. Blaise' own narrative follows their pattern, forcing the reader to accept his irregular presentation. Given the quality of Blaise' insights and ability to discuss them, this book is half the size it might be.
   
   Fleming's missed train kept him apart from most of this social upheaval. A tightly focussed engineer, his aim was standard time around the planet. He understood the desire for a "prime meridian", but wanted a mechanism that would transcend national or commercial interests. He devised a complex scheme with a time centred within the Earth. It would have obsoleted every clock and pocket watch in existence, but had the advantage of universality. Ocean shippers also favoured a standard scheme, with nearly all ships using Greenwich, England as their temporal starting point. Resistance from nations who'd already established their own primes obstructed Fleming's project, which came to a head in Washington, D.C., in 1884. A prolonged, three-week negotiation ultimately led to the standard time zones we live within today. In Blaise's view, Fleming is justifiably renowned for his contribution to this achievement. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]



5. The book spends a lot more time talking about Fleming and things going on around the time of his life and less on the specific topic of the creation and adoption of standard time - definitely not what I expected given the title.

No comments about The Dilemmas of An Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science.