1 comments about Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth.

1. This book goes more in detail about Thomas Alva Edison than any other book can.It looks at the life of America's and the world's greatest inventor.

1 comments about Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution.

1. This a brief, entertaining biography of a great man whose work has saved millions of lives, including, perhaps, my own. It's the type of book one would hope every high school student would be expected to read.

No comments about Celebrating Women in Mathematics and Science.

No comments about Tom Edison Finds Out: Another Really Truly Story.

No comments about Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist.

4 comments about Egg and Ego: An Almost True Story of Life in The Biology Lab.

1. This is an excellent book for anyone who might have some idea that they might want to be a professional scientist, working in biomedical research or as a professor in a university. Slack writes very well and he can tell an amusing anecdote. There is a some good science in it too. He is slightly curmidgeonly, perhaps, but I think this is part of his appeal. He tells it like it is. Read this book to find out that being a research scientist, perhaps unfortunately, is like being in the corporate world, and scientists have egos just like anyone else. There is a wealth of guidance for a new 'starry eyed' student. Slack is a good scientist and he portrays with a light touch some of the characters he knows, journals, government regulations and career structures. In addition he explains how he got into science and why. Anyone who is already a biological scientist will find much to chuckle at and I think that all biology students should read it - particularly if contemplating going on to take a higher degree. This book is an antidote to the ridiculous idea that scientists are 'higher beings' concerned only with 'truth'.



2. Slack interweaves real science (Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology; frog and fly biology) with job descriptions of biologists and events in the laboratory to portray the fragile existence of academic scientists.

   As a career university biologist myself, I repeatedly found myself asking the question as I navigated through the book "Why did I get into this business in the first place?" Slack's work will certainly prompt the budding young scientist to confront their own destiny.

   To those interested in what professors do (since they are not in the classroom 8 hours per day), this is the book for you. Though clearly written, the science is still not for everyone; occasionally, Slack lapses into jargon without definition. However, the lighthearted and accurate picture of life in the laboratory will certainly provide enough entertainment for any reader, especially if you are undecided if you want to spend the rest of your life cohabitating with an academic.




3. Slack does a grand job of telling his story...life and living as a researcher working on problems of development. Slack has the ability to get you to grin as he talks about cow brains, growth factors, and other scientific adventures..."Where are the brains, Dad?" (You'll have to read the book to know what that means.) He also ably tells what it's like to be a scientist, as well as how one negotiates the politics and requirements of becoming successful as a research scientist.

   The format of the book is interesting. It includes several chapters that address what it's like ("Ego") to be a research scientist, i.e., chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10. He defines what he calls "good places," as well as who "good people" are in the scientific community. If you are a budding scientist, these chapters contain nugget after nugget of wisdom and insight. This book is worth the price for them alone.

   The remaining chapters, 3, 5, 8 contain the essence of the research that Slack and his group do, thus the "Egg" portion of the book's title. There is good information about the role of growth factors in development, and a broad brush review of the essentials of some of the processes of development and their molecular bases.

   If you are up for a good read about life as a biologist, then come on along. The only reason I didn't award this book 5-stars is that there would be a strong tendency for those not trained in the sciences to get lost in the technical aspects of the chapters on developmental processes. For most biologists, however, especially for upper division undergraduate and graduate students, this book is a gem!

   4 stars for the non-scientist, and 5 stars for the science crowd.

   Kudos to Slack for this great little book (though he seems to take a rather dim view of places other than research universities -- we part ways there). There is, I believe, too strong a sentiment among researchers (represented by some of Slack's opinions) that what non-researcher biologists do, i.e., teach, is not just different, it is "less than." It all comes down to what you choose to do for your own career, and how you define success for yourself.

   I hope this review was helpful!

   Alan Holyoak, Dept of Biology, Manchester College, IN




4. As an undergraduate studying biology and hoping to pursue a career in research I found this book both informative and shocking. J.M.W Slack openly reveals all the ins and outs of "Life in the Biology lab." I strongly recommend this book to anyone curious to what's truly in store for them if they choose to enter a field of science.

No comments about Investment Philosophers and Financial Economists (Secrets of the Great Investors).

3 comments about Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: A Voice in the American Wilderness.

1. This is the best book ever. Rafinesque is cool. He is cool and named plants. I love Rafinesque. (...).



2. This biography is of great interest to anyone interested in famous Kentuckians. Rafinesque was among the earliest scientists in the Commonwealth, and he was interested in nearly everything. Perhaps his major interest was botany, but he collected fossils, Indian artifacts, and shells. He wrote a huge number of books and articles, including a most interesting one on the fish of the Ohio River. He wrote on planting vineyards in America, and a Materia Medica of American plants. He was particularly interested in languages, and held theories linking the American tribes with other linguistic groups in Europe and Asia. He began the first botanical garden in Kentucky at Lexington, which was chartered by the state legislature. He left a memoirs of his travels and scientific work in Europe and North America.
   
   He was a professor at Transylvania University and was influential in the professional lives of a number of its alumni, though many of them considered him an odd fish, as did Audubon when he met him. The author of this book also considered him, for all his genius and originality, to be a psychologically unstable individual. His tomb is found today in the crypt at Transylvania, though he left a curse upon the university because the president fired him after an argument.



3. Botanists will be surprised to learn from this book that "almost none" of the roughly 6,700 Latin plant names devised and published by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840) "were listed in any botanical indices, including the comprehensive Index Kewensis" (p. 63). B. D. Jackson, the editor of that great compendium, did miss a few, but I occasionally take down the two folio volumes of my facsimile reprint of the 1895 Index and, as an exercise in bibliomancy, invite a skeptic to insert his finger at random between any two of its 1,299 pages. "I'll bet you money, marbles, or chalk," I challenge the doubter, "that somewhere among the six columns of tiny type on those two pages you will find a plant name attributed to Rafinesque." I have never lost the bet.
   
   Sadly, misinformation such as this about the Index Kewensis characterizes this long-awaited biography. Next to Audubon, Rafinesque has had more written about him than any other American naturalist of his time, but a competent book-length biography has not yet been published. Issued in parts, 1893-95, the two-volume Index Kewensis was completed in England the same year that the first life of Rafinesque was assembled by Richard Ellsworth Call in Kentucky. The product of Call's effort has been considered a book because its large type, wide line spacing, broad margins, and extra thick paper puffed it up to resemble a book. The author himself modestly called it a "brochure." In 1911, T. J. Fitzpatrick prefaced a 50-page "Sketch of his life" to the Rafinesque bibliography he had lovingly compiled, and the resulting book often was called a biography by reviewers who had little interest in bibliography. Finally, for Transylvania University's 1940 centennial commemoration of Rafinesque's death, Francis W. Pennell delivered a keynote address that, two years later, was published as a 60-page article, "The Life and Work of Rafinesque." Despite some inaccuracies corrected by the subsequent research of Pennell himself and by others, his article remains the most reliable single account of the remarkable career of America's most challenging naturalist.
   
   These three writers, as well as the author of the present book, all based their narratives on the slim autobiographical account published by their subject in 1836, A Life of Travels. Professional biographers assume all autobiography is self-serving to some extent and seek confirmation elsewhere for anything they take from it. But these biographers have been amateurs (in the non-pejorative sense of the term). Some of their resulting errors arise from a misunderstanding of the nature of Rafinesque's Life. Call considered it the equivalent of a private letter to let his family in France know what Constantine had been up to, a view that Warren unfortunately endorses (p. 183). Since 1987, however, it has been known that the little book was merely an outline prepared to whet interest at the Société de Géographie in Paris for the extensive narrative of his foreign adventures Rafinesque hoped to complete. The manuscript of that précis, sent to Bordeaux for his sister to transmit to Paris, never reached its destination. Three years later the author translated his file copy, and published it in Philadelphia at his own expense. Knowing this, and above all knowing there are 624 variants between the French and English texts, should give pause to biographers who use either version.
   
   Confirming what is stated in A Life of Travels requires, first, some wariness, and second, considerable investigation in primary sources. For instance, Rafinesque wrote there that when he and his brother returned to Europe in 1804 after 32 months in the United States, they "sailed in the Ship Two Sisters, Capt. Evans, going to Leghorn and thence to Calcut[t]a" (A Life of Travels, p. 25). All the biographers have remarked on the departure of the Two Sisters. The Lloyds Register lists more than 50 vessels named Two Sisters in 1804, but from records of the port of Philadelphia now at Philadelphia's Maritime Museum we can learn that departing on the date Rafinesque correctly stated, under command of Captain David Evans, was the good ship Sally & Hetty. After the passage of three decades, Rafinesque's usually reliable memory had failed him. Knowing this, a biographer ought to question other recollections. Rafinesque tells us also that in 1815 he returned to the United States from Sicily on "the Union of Malta." Only by consulting the Connecticut Gazette (8 Nov. 1815) will we discover that the ship wrecked outside the harbor of New London, Connecticut, carrying most of Rafinesque's worldly possessions to the bottom of the ocean, was an English vessel out of Malta named Union--not the Union of Malta, as Warren was led to believe.
   
   These are trivial errors, but representative of the hundreds of mistakes that mar this book. Consider the naturalist's mother, whose native language surely would have important biographical consequences for her children. Her son declared that she was "Grecian born, but of a German family from Saxony" (A Life of Travels, p. 5). Hence, we may reasonably ask, did the infant Constantine prattle at his mother's knee in demotic Greek or in Plattdeutsch? Warren is right that the woman actually "was born in Constantinople" but dead wrong about her having been "reared in Greece." From this error he infers that the naturalist "could probably speak his mother's Greek tongue" (p. 7). Actually, the woman never set foot in Greece. Since her merchant family had resided in Constantinople for several generations, it is likely that they had become Francophone, for French was the language of commerce in the Levant. Rafinesque had been disingenuous in his autobiography. He knew very well that Constantinople, his own birthplace and that of his mother, had not been a Greek city since the Ottomans made it their capital in 1453, but, as a Protestant Christian, he was determined to distance himself from all things Islamic. When he addressed the citizens of Lexington, Kentucky, to raise money for the Greek war of independence, he called himself "Constantine, of Byzantium." As an example of the ethnic prejudice he wanted to avoid, at the start of one of his many lawsuits, the opposing Philadelphia lawyer tried to rattle him by declaring that "This infidel" from a Muslim land "cannot swear on our Holy Bible. Let him swear on his own Koran!" (unpaginated, unsigned MS notes, Rafinesque's lawsuit against the estate of Zaccheus Collins, 1831; American Philosophical Society).
   
   Other writers, observing several titles in the Rafinesque bibliography in the German language, have concluded that at least he wrote the ancestral language of his mother's family, and Warren, who gullibly accepts the errors of his predecessors, also includes German among her son's linguistic accomplishments. Yet, careful inspection shows that all these articles were translated by others from their original French. Rafinesque had a talent for languages, but German was not one of them. Replying in French to a letter he had received from the paleontologist G. A. Goldfuss, he remarked (my translation): "Your letter of 3 November 1821 has reached me, but being unfortunately written in German, I could not read it" (Lexington, Mar. 1822; Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin).
   
   Rafinesque's Protestantism has caused additional confusion, partly because he never mentioned in print his brand of Christianity. In his so-called autobiography he never alluded to his domestic life in Sicily either, nor to the two children he fathered there. Only in his last will and testament did he remark that he "deemed" himself "lawfully married" to his children's mother, probably hoping that his honorable intention would enable his illegitimate daughter to inherit from his estate. He felt obliged, however, to explain that such a marriage was still prohibited in Sicily by the decrees of the 16th-century Council of Trent. One needs to know that those decrees forbade the marriage of Roman Catholics with Protestants. Nevertheless, Warren refers throughout to Josephine Vaccaro as the naturalist's wife, and adds that she later married a man named "Pizzalour." The naturalist's only surviving child, his daughter Emilia, was in the best position to know. She called her stepfather "Mr. Pinzarroni"; and Rafinesque thought the man's name was spelled "Pizzarrone." The puzzling "Pizzalour" is a signal to be on guard for other bungled names, which abound in Warren's book: Richard Harlan, a well-known Philadelphia zoologist, is here called "George Harlan"; Rafinesque's friend Dr. James Mease is sometimes called "John Mease"; James A. Spencer, who tried to exhume the bones of Rafinesque in 1924, is confused with his son Robert Spencer. Elsewhere, thorny proper nouns such as Heckewelder, Brongniart, and Chillicothe are misspelled. When not misspelled, Chillicothe is located in the wrong state (p. 139).
   
   Some of these errors may be typos (which also abound, and include among them the eponymous genus of Compositae plants that honors Rafinesque); in the biography of a botanist, such errors as "cryptogram" for "cryptogam" seriously erode a reader's confidence in the book's reliability. Rafinesque's own incomplete mastery of English also has caused misconceptions. Warren took the naturalist's word for it that in Palermo he "lived in a palace," but Rafinesque was unaware that "apartment house" would be a more apt translation for palazzo than its English cognate. A more serious blunder concerns Rafinesque's much criticized Florula Ludoviciana (1817), a book based on the travel account of the amateur botanist C. C. Robin describing plants from coastal Louisiana. During the last year of his life (1840), in answer to critics who had roundly condemned him for naming plants he himself had not examined, Rafinesque wrote (The Good Book, p. 42) that "I have seen some plants of Robin," presumably subsequent to the publication of his book. Warren inflates this simple declaration into "he claimed that while in France he had seen Robin's collection of Louisiana plants" (p. 61). Impossible! After he left Marseilles in 1800, at age 17, Rafinesque never again visited France; and Robin only began his tour of Louisiana in 1802, the same year Rafinesque arrived in Philadelphia. Warren concludes from his own misconception that "Rafinesque was caught in a lie" (p. 61). Since Rafinesque's veracity has been questioned elsewhere, this gratuitous and erroneous accusation is all the more regrettable.
   
   The index of this book is incredibly shoddy. The title of a magazine Rafinesque published in Sicily is first listed as "Mirror of Science," then again as "Specchia [sic] delle Scienze," followed immediately by "Specchio delle Science" [sic]. The naturalist's father is entered twice, once with the cedilla on his name François and once without it, as though these were two different persons. Constantine Rafinesque, who published under the name Rafinesque-Schmaltz in Sicily, gets listed also as "Schmaltz, Rafinesque." And there is no explaining why this wholly imaginary branch of the Rafinesque family tree appears at all: "Lanthois, Emily Louisa."
   
   Nor are the book's endnotes any more reliable. They seldom reveal whether the author is quoting from a document printed by somebody else or from the manuscript itself, and when the latter they sometimes locate it in the wrong repository. In the notes there are citations to authors by last name only who are never identified in the bibliography. The abbreviation of ibidem is used with such abandon that it loses entirely the meaning of "in the same place." Additional gaffes are introduced when Warren misapprehends secondary sources. An example appears in the treatment of Rafinesque's compensation at Transylvania University. Instead of being paid a salary to teach there, he had the privilege, like the medical faculty, of selling tickets to his lectures. In the 1820s, professors were compensated that way at other American medical schools as well, since it was expected that, unlike the other teachers, they also would enjoy a lucrative medical practice. I was surprised to read here, however, that the Transylvania medical professors "were . . . on a real salary" (p. 83), and chagrined to see that the related endnote attributes this revelation to one of my own publications. Well, no! In 1824, when Kentucky's General Assembly published a Report, on the Transylvania University, and Lunatic Asylum (separate enterprises but, to the legislative mind, both custodial institutions), the university's budget showed no salary costs for any of the six medical professors, who, moreover, complained that they had to pay the rent for their own lecture hall.
   
   I hasten to conclude this dreary recital by listing only the most egregious of the many remaining errors: on page 13, the epigraph attributed to Rafinesque is, rather, a sarcastic comment about him by an anonymous author, whose essay is further discussed (pp. 143-144), where its satiric thrust is naively overlooked; on page 60 the Annals of the New York Lyceum of Natural History is confused with Rafinesque's own Annals of Nature; an eyewitness description of Rafinesque's appearance (p. 85) seems to be attributed to W. D. Funkhouser, who was born 41 years after Rafinesque's death; Transylvania's president, Horace Holley, never "fought to permit Rafinesque to teach science" (p. 110), but instead Holley's attempt to discharge him was thwarted by the university's trustees; it was the Owenite community at Valley Forge that offered to pay the costs of Rafinesque's removal from Kentucky, not William Maclure at New Harmony, Indiana (p. 112); the portrait (facing p. 130) is not "of Rafinesque" nor is it "by Mat[t]hew Jouett"; though it is still an open question whether the Walam Olum, an alleged masterpiece of Amerindian poetry, was a hoax by Rafinesque or a hoax on him, he assuredly did not offer it "for a prize of twelve hundred francs" and he made only one attempt, not "several unsuccessful attempts to obtain a pension from King Louis Philippe" (p. 154). We are told (p. 174) that from Rafinesque's "pen came the works of poetry The Universe and the Stars," etc. However, one needs to go no farther than the title page of The Universe and the Stars (1837) to learn that this book--prosaic in both senses of the word--is a reprint of an 18th-century treatise on astronomy for which Rafinesque merely supplied explanatory notes. It does help to examine a book before pronouncing on its content.
   
   Though this book contains more thoughtful analysis of significant events in Rafinesque's life than do the studies of earlier biographers, when the analysis is based on inadequate or inaccurate factual matter it is bound to arrive at untenable conclusions. Warren believes that "one can only conclude that as his Kentucky days drew to a close and he could not find a [new academic] position anywhere, Rafinesque suffered serious mental derangement" (p. 108). I, for one, do not conclude that, because I have read the manuscript evidence of his many extensive farewell visits to a wide circle of friends on the eve of his departure, including the recorded sentiment of a teenage girl who wrote that "Dr. Rafinesque is packing his goods & chattels for Philadelphia.... He leaves us forever. Lamentable thought!" (Margaret Leavy in Lexington writing to her father in Philadelphia, 29 March 1826; University of Kentucky Library). Hardly documentation for a nut case.
   
   This book's chronology, patterned on A Life of Travels, is interrupted from time to time for these discussions. A really fine analysis of Rafinesque's views on classification, and the distinctions between the French-inspired "natural system" of botanical classification that he espoused in opposition to the Linnaean "sexual system" of most American botanists, occupies all but about six pages of chapter 2, a chapter treating the period 1802 to 1805. Warren identifies this dispute as one reason Rafinesque was ostracized by his colleagues. The problem is, however, that this conflict did not arise until more than a decade later, when Rafinesque made himself the principal reviewer of botanical books in America and castigated their authors for not sharing his views about classification. I suppose the subject was dragged into chapter 2 because the secondary sources Warren relied on so heavily have little to say about that earlier period. Yet, right in his own home town, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, there is an untouched cache of Rafinesque's 1803 letters to Henry Muhlenberg that reveal a very different person from the cocksure book reviewer of 1818. In these 1803 letters, Rafinesque was respectful and deferential to the correspondent 30 years his senior. Without any qualms about it, he discussed with Muhlenberg the identification and classification of plants purely in Linnaean terms.
   
   Surviving letters such as these are a valuable supplement to the scanty biographical information in A Life of Travels, which, among its many limitations, ends while its author had four more years to live. Sixty years ago, in his address at Transylvania's centennial symposium, Francis Pennell made good use of letters by Emilia Rafinesque to give some human dimensions to her father's story, as well as good use of the detailed letters Rafinesque wrote during his western travels to apprise Zaccheus Collins about his discoveries. Once back in Collins's Philadelphia in 1826, Rafinesque had no further need to write to him, so this source of biography dried up. Neither Pennell nor Warren took the next step beyond the Collins letters--that of fleshing out the last 14 years of the Rafinesque story through the major collection of Rafinesque-Torrey letters at the New York Botanical Garden Library. John Torrey outlived both Collins and Rafinesque. Warren does make some use of Rafinesque's letters to William Swainson (Linnean Society of London), of which there has been a microfilm at the American Philosophical Society since 1959, but he appears to be unaware of the equally large collection of Rafinesque-Candolle letters at the Conservatoire Botanique de Genève, which are not available in this country. Nor are the personal letters that remain with the Rafinesque family in France. Warren considers that an article published 60 years ago by E. M. Betts "contains all of the correspondence of Jefferson and Rafinesque" (p. 216). It does not, and moreover, errs in the identification of some of the people mentioned in those letters.
   
   Finally, though I cannot recommend this book to anyone seeking to know the factual details of Rafinesque's life, I do find of interest its author's explanation for why we continue to be fascinated by that life, even if I am not wholly persuaded by it. Warren surmises that Rafinesque "remains memorable, and perhaps unique, not so much for his scientific contributions, which tended not to have a lasting impact, but for the fantastical person that he was" (p. 210). The book may be worth reading for the author's analysis of the nature of that personality. Warren is the first to see a connection between the subject's spiritual life and his performance as a field naturalist, and he offers the surprising explanation for Rafinesque's "creative genius" as the consequence of "a kind of insanity" (p. 210).
   
   Perhaps it is because they see us naked that physicians, like the boy in Hans Christian Andersen's tale about the emperor, often are keen judges of character. Leonard Warren is a physician. Should we heed his conclusions about Rafinesque's character? Warren is not the first to attempt a psychiatric diagnosis of Rafinesque, whose contemporaries more bluntly declared him crazy. William Baldwin said Rafinesque was a "literary madman"; "crackbrained," sneered L. D. von Schweinitz; and Edward Barton pronounced him a "maniac." It remained for a later generation's Leon Croizat to pontificate that Rafinesque "wrote botany because he was of unsound mind," the same generation that also, in the person of the psychiatrist J. M. Woodall, decided he was a "paranoid neurotic," who had an "enlarged and hypertrophied" ego; yet for all that "was a genius" nonetheless.
   
   Siding with the odd judgment of Louis Agassiz that Rafinesque "was a better man than he appeared," Dr. Warren wrote this diagnosis (pp. 206-207) for our generation:
   
   "At the end of the twentieth century, Rafinesque might have been diagnosed as suffering from a bipolar, predominately manic disorder--chronic hypomania (mild mania), not violent, and therefore fully capable of functioning outside a mental institution, but becoming highly irritable and aggressive when challenged. Further, there were times when he seemed to manifest schizoid and paranoid tendencies. . . . Rafinesque's complex behavior, puzzling to all, may not only be ascribed to a manic disorder but also to a condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. . . . He could operate effectively with incredible energy and persistence within a rational, scientifically accepted framework, and only occasionally did he reveal underlying psychopathology when he ignored or grossly violated the accepted values of society and the bounds of reason."
   
   Perhaps so. However, Warren's posthumous diagnosis of Rafinesque's "bipolar disorder" is not the discovery he thinks it is, because it was anticipated nearly two decades ago by Joe D. Pratt, whose name is never mentioned in Warren's book.
   
   Four years before his death, Rafinesque himself granted with surprisingly little rancor that "I have been . . .laughed at as a mad Botanist by scornful ignorance" (New Flora of North America, p. 11). As those who scorned him slip one by one into oblivion, his own last laugh--crazed or not--does continue to command attention. His life deserves a more reliable biography than it has so far received.

1 comments about Mathematics With Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb.

1. If you watch the History Channel very much you will inevitably see a film clip of a rotating, garbage can looking, device being dropped from an airplane and see it skipping across the water. This was the bomb invented by Barnes Wallis to take out the Ruhr dams in Germany.
   
   On April 23rd, 1922 Barnes met Molly. They began to write to each other, at her father's insistence they could only correspond if he used the letters to teach her mathematics. So he taught her calculus.
   
   He proposed on Thursday December 21st 1922. She accepted on Friday September 12th 1924. They married April 23rd 1925. They were married for fifty years.
   
   This is an absolutely delightful book from a time long past. I can only imagine if I told my daughter that her boyfriend could only correspond with her if he were using the letters to teach mathematics.

No comments about The Book Of My Life: De Vita Propria Liber 1929.