1 comments about The Imperative Call: A Naturalist's Quest in Temperate and Tropical America.

1. Dr. Alexander Skutch passed away in 2004 just short of his 100th birthday.
   He was an acclaimed biologist and had published a multitude of studies, articles and books on tropical botany, nature and ornithology.
   
   In this book he describes his early days in Costa Rica just after concluding his work with the banana producing companies in the 1930's. In 1941 he purchased a farm in the rich San Isidro Valley in the South Central part of the country and named it Los Cosingos after the Fiery-billed Aracari, a species of Toucan that was common in the area. Skutch then devoted his time to studying the birds and plants of the area and worked to save some of the forests and preserves of the country. He along with Dan Janzen were two of the most influencial biologists that helped Costa Rica shape a system of national parks that may be the best of any country in the world.
   
   In this book Skutch writes of the early days on the farm, what the area was like before the main rush of settlers and how it changed into an agricultural center. His farm, or better called his sanctuary is the last forest left in the area and still shelters many of the birds, animals and plants once found in the valley before it changed to cropland.
   He describes journeys across the Cerro Muerte before the road when it was just a horse trail and travelers would sometimes freeze on its heights here in the tropics. He describes fantastic natural phenomena such as migrations of irridescent winged butterflys that stretched from horizon to horizon that sadly dwindled with time and are no more.
   
   I had noticed that no one had reviewed this book which I imagine is an indicator of the present interest in this book. This is very unfortunate as it is an excellent read and will illuminate aspects of tropical life that have all but disappeared in Central America.

No comments about A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-1930 (University of Arizona Southwest Centre).

No comments about Scientific Lives (Hesperus Classics).

5 comments about Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution.

1. Biographer Cyril Aydon drew upon a lifetime's interest in Charles Darwin and his work to write Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started A Scientific Revolution. The result is a fascinating and informative biography of the famed author of "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man". It was Charles Darwin whose theories of evolution (and whose proposal that the descendants of primordial primates could, over thousands or millions of years, eventually become men through the process of natural selection) would change forever how human beings think of themselves and understand their own genesis. This accurate and engagingly written biographical account blends an overview of natural science with the events of Darwin's life before, during, and after the publication of his trailblazing scientific treatises. Charles Darwin is a very highly recommended study of a truly great man whose trailblazing contribution to biological science is still a substantial part of public debate and controversy today between religious creationists who deny, and the scientific community which supports, Darwin's concept of human evolutionary development.



2. To read the biographies of great men has always been a fascination. Great men of sciences, technology, philosophy, politics, Charles Darwin features prominently among them, both personally to me, and in the annals of history. The biography by Aydon is a very simple yet charming story of the man who "created a scientific revolution".

   Aydon presents the story of Charles Darwin in a chronological way, a standard fare in biographies, but with chapters to add the thematic approaches for the book. The author uses personal letters sent by Darwin to his friends and mentors as `personal touches' to this biography. They add to the overall charm of the book and reveal a lot about the man and his thinking. Most helpful is a map of the Beagle's voyage, which I not infrequently referred to when reading the chapters on the round the world trip of the famous Beagle.

   I personally analysed two points, which the author have emphasised throughout the book. Firstly, Darwin was helped in his success by the wealth and support of his father. There are many references in the book, to the pecuniary benefits accrued to Darwin by his father. This facilitated his rise as a devoted naturalist, who had no care and worries for material pursuits and with such wealth and support, he was able to network and make gains otherwise not possible for a poorer Darwin. Secondly, was his fortuitous inclusion in the Beagle's voyage. Had it not been for the 5-year voyage, Darwin would not have been able to realise his childhood dreams of collecting and observing specimens and most importantly, Darwin would have ended up as a clergyman.

   The later part of the book, after detailing his voyage and subsequent settling down, revolves around his industry to complete his "big book" and his moral and intellectual dilemma. Not insignificant is the loving support given by Emma, Darwin's beloved wife.

   Having read this book, I feel that Darwin's life was full of lucky breaks and that he was one of the sickliest scientists around. However, the industry and power he brought to his book, "The Origin of Species" made him a revolutionary scientist. This book is recommended for the neutral reader, who simply wants a good story about a giant scientist. I have a further feeling that to satisfy my curiosity about this man, a more detailed biography is essential.




3. For those interested in the life and thought of Charles Darwin, this is the perfect place to start. There are several other biographies of Darwin in print, some of them quite lengthy and quite technical. But if you are interested in a relatively short (ca. 300 pages) but very substantial treatment that is elegantly and engagingly written, Aydon's contribution delivers. The hardcover edition is beatifully printed and bound, with very clear type and the most generous line-spacing I've ever seen, making Aydon's tightly focused and well paced narrative a pleasure to read. There are sixteen pages of black-and-white photographic plates that are sharp and clear, plus four maps and one table. Reading this book is a very satisfying experience and makes one eager to move on to Darwin's own writings and to more in-depth biographies. Bravo and many thanks to author Cyril Aydon!



4. Aydon's biography is a lively look at Darwin and the development of his theory of natural selection. Examining Darwin's character and work is timely as Darwin continues to be inseparable from the debate about evolution's implications.
   
   Read as a companion to Darwin's autobiography, Aydon provides detail and context for the events that Darwin recounts. Just as Darwin comes alive in his autobiography, Darwin's world comes to life in Aydon's biography through descriptions of episodes in Darwin's life like his tedious documentation of barnacles, the personalities of his family and friends, or the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce.
   
   Aydon's discussion of the people who influenced Darwin's life was especially helpful. These people include his father, Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, his wife Emma and their children, and his loyal friends Hooker, Huxley, and Lyell. Seen in terms of his relationships with these influential people, Darwin is far more humble and far less singular than he might seem on his own.
   
   According to Aydon, evolution was in the air during Darwin's lifetime; had Darwin not articulated his theory on the origin of the species, it seems likely that someone else would have. However, Aydon's Charles Darwin makes the argument that no other person had the resources, the experiences, and the force of personality to deliver the theory of evolution nearly as well as Darwin did. I think Aydon is right.



5. Aydon's book provides a relatively short account of Darwin's life. I found the prose easy and accessible. The writing is direct and packed with the facts; this is a good place to get a "birds eye view" of Darwin's life. While the autobiography provides the first person view, it is difficult to see many of the outside influences which greatly affected Darwin's life. Aydon does a good job of bringing these to the forefront.
   
   One of these outside factors which I didn't really pick up on so much while reading the autobiography was the wealth Darwin was born into and all the things this afforded him. Without this safety net, it is debatable whether Charles would have had many of the opportunities which influenced him on his scientific journey. One of these was the ability for him to try out medical school and studying theology before finding himself unhappy in both these endeavors. Another, and possibly the most important factor, which this wealth afforded was his Beagle trip. Not everyone had the wealth to take a 5 year journey sailing around the world, but luckily, Darwin did.
   
   Another big factor which I didn't quite pick up on in the autobiography was the extent to which Darwin's illnesses affected him. His sicknesses were very pervasive throughout his life and always seemed to be hindering his work. Who knows how much more he could have accomplished had he not had to rest so frequently.
   
   Aydon does a good job of bringing to the forefront large factors like these, which Darwin didn't put too much emphasis on in his autobiography. This book is a good for those who want an easy, interesting read and want to know the major factors surrounding Darwin's life.

No comments about A to Z of Women in Science and Math (A to Z of Women).

1 comments about Albert Einstein: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies).

1. .This book gives a very thorough detail of Albert Einstein's life from his ideas amounting to his development of the General Theory of Relativity to his difficult family life and his disabilities as a child. It explains many interesting facts and disproves any common misconceptions about Einstein's life. Calaprice and Lipscombe are able to magnify important points in Einstein's life and captivate the reader just through these events. This book also goes into detail describing how Einstein developed each of his theories and explains the ideas that are included in many of them so that any person can comprehend his incredible ideas. This enables the reader to feel they are in Einstein's head exploring the almost inconceivable thoughts of this brilliant scientist. I am sure that both Calaprice and Lipscombe desired to recount Einstein's life because of his varying life status as he became one of the most famous scientists in world history. Einstein's compelling life story is reason enough to read this book. If you have not already become acquainted with Einstein and his discoveries, I would highly recommend that you take time and get informed by reading one of his biographies. Einstein had an incredible life that is thoroughly summed up in Albert Einstein: A Biography by Alice Calaprice and Trevor Lipscombe.

5 comments about The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter.

1. We will forever wonder if Charles Babbage could have given the computer age a jump start of a century. His brilliant designs for intricate and complicated calculating machines included the never-built Analytical Engine, which would have had a memory and a processor like our electronic versions, and would have run on punched cards, programmable and flexible enough to vary its routine through the If-Then steps familiar to any programmer. It never got funded because others were not able to envision just how singularly useful the gadget could have been, but Babbage had one friend and interpreter who knew the potential of his creation, and who handed the world a prescient account of what this computer might be expected to do.

   Her name was Ada Lovelace, and although her ties to Babbage and his machine give her a connection to our century, she was a sensation in her own times by right of birth. As told in the exciting biography _The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter_ (McGraw-Hill) by Benjamin Woolley, everyone knew about Ada because she was the one child of Lord and Lady Byron. Their stormy marriage had endured only eleven months when Ada was born, and a month later, Lady Byron left him; he left for the continent, never to see his daughter again. Lady Byron was motivated ever after to vindicate herself against Byron, and she raised Ada to be a soldier in this cause; she tried to make sure that the child was raised on mathematics to suppress imagination and keep any elements of the Byronic temperament from breaking out.

   Raising Ada was thus a science experiment, one that didn't work. She remained curious about her father, and as she got older, she was convinced that she had genius from him and was impelled to express it. She couldn't do it through mathematics, as despite all the intense training, she wasn't a mathematician. But she was introduced to Babbage, and in 1840, set out to translate a paper he had presented on his Analytical Engine in Italy. She didn't just translate, but with Babbage's help, she made her own notes on the meaning of the computer and what it could and could not do, amazingly prescient for her time.

   Woolley has not only given a fine biography of a limited woman who happened to be at the center of events that presaged our future. He has given capsule biographies of Lord and Lady Byron, Babbage, and many others who were connected with her. Furthermore, he has given historic notes on phases that touched Ada's life, such as phrenology and mesmerism, which are extremely interesting and valuable, and his argument that the Analytical Engine could not catch on because the Victorian world was not ready for the computer is fascinating. Even feminists and cyberhistorians who want to make Ada something she wasn't (and there are many of these) should be thrilled with this portrait of what she really was.




2. Every computer programmer knows (or should) that Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, honored with the name of the DoD's official programming language. What I didn't know was that she was the daughter of Byron, the poet.

   Her parents were a very strange match, actually: Byron the flamboyant Romantic poet and Annabella Millbanke, a coldly rational woman he dubbed "the Princess of Parallelograms." Their relationship was a brief one, followed by a bitter estrangement, but it produced a daughter, Ada.

   Ada was raised exclusively by her mother, seemingly more as a science project - a demonstration of rational childraising principles - than as anything involving parental affection. Not surprisingly, she grew up to be a brilliant woman prone to nervous disorders which, when combined with attempts at treatment, led to a short life, with her dying at 37.

   The focus of this book is set by the dichotomy between science and poetry exemplified by Byron and Annabella. The time period is one of extraordinary technical advancement, with the locomotive and the telegraph shrinking the world in a way that even our jet planes and satellite links can't compare. Some embraced this revolution, even some of the poets, while others rejected it.

   Those like me who came to this book looking for a detailed account of Ada and her association with Babbage and his Difference Engine will come away disappointed. It is indeed covered, and Woolley describes Ada's monograph on the principles of the Engine as being a hundred years ahead of its time. But after providing a copious lead-in (to such an extent that Annabella seems as much the subject as Ada), he quickly moves on to the latter part of her life.

   Still, this is an interesting book about a fascinating age and fascinating people.




3. Ada Lovelace had a rich intellectual life.

   As a huge disservice to her, this book is one extended gossip column of speculation and opinion about her personal life and that of her parents. In contrast, only a few pages are devoted to the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.

   At first I thought the author was gossiping about her parents as what he considered a necessary background to understanding Ada, so I kept reading, hoping to get to the substance of the book soon-- but the gossip never stopped, right through the description of her death.

   If you too have a rich intellectual life, you will enjoy this book as much as you enjoy reading gossip about celebrities in the National Enquirer.




4. As a historian of science and technology, and also a person very interested in computer science and fascinated by poetry as well, this book looked like a full 5 stars at first. Like some of the other reviewers, I felt swamped by the details of Ada's emotional life; yet, there are flashes of brilliance where the author makes a clear connection between her social position, her interior life as we can best judge it, and her pursuits. I wonder if there would have been a better way to organize the book; as it stands now, the book is almost purely narrative (with some asides and flashbacks), and appears to be aimed at the popular reader with a seasoning of technical information to goad the more serious critic into reading on. On the positive side, I was pleased to read a clarification of Ada's role in the Babbage Difference Engine's precocious presentation. And at times, the story was fascinating. Other times, it was just plain soggy.



5. I bailed out of this about a third of the way through, having gotten extremely frustrated waiting for the author to discuss Ada Lovelace. She never was as vividly portrayed as her parents; I have learned more about her from snippets in books about Victorian intellectual life. Even when she is on stage, it is as the puppet of her domineering mother - the incidents are at least as much about Lady Byron as about Ada. I suggest that my review title would be a more accurate description of the contents. Or perhaps, the Martyrdom of Lord Byron at the Hands of His Demented Wife.
   
   It appears that the author's real interest is Lord Byron, who appears in what is supposedly a biography of his daughter more than can be justified, since he had virtually no involvement in her life after the shipwreck of his marriage. I am somewhat skeptical about how good a father Byron would have been in any case - writing touching lines about the loss of one's child is a far cry from the actual inconveniences of being a parent. This really isn't the point. Byron must have haunted Ada's life: he was famous, and Woolley would have it that cleansing his daughter of any similarities was the obsession of Lady Byron's life. But this wasn't the flesh-and-blood Byron, but society's and Lady Byron's view of him. Woolley rambles on about his doings that were probably irrelevant to Ada. Meanwhile, she is a dimly glimpsed cipher.
   
   Despite the one star, this might be an interesting book for someone who wants to read about Byron and his marriage, particularly a reader who isn't expecting something else.
   
   It's a pity that the Byrons' marriage was such a disaster, but really, I picked this up to learn about Ada Lovelace, not how vicious unhappy marriages can get. For that purpose, an article would have sufficed.

No comments about Eilhard Mitscherlich:Prince of Prussian Chemistry (History of Modern Chemical Sciences) (History of Modern Chemical Sciences).

No comments about Possessing Genius: The True Account of the Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein's Brain.

4 comments about Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life.

1. Is this the story of a blind scientist? No! This is the story of a great scientist who happens to be blind, but who is certainly not without a vision of the world around him. Dr. Vermeij chronicles his life and development as a scientific thinker and worker. He draws the reader in as he tells what it's like to work one's way through the ranks and halls of academia, and how he had to simultaneously overcome prejudices and preconceptions others hold about what it means to be blind. He also tells of an ongoing life centered on the accumulation of knowledge, contemplation of those ideas, and the generation of important contributions to his field. The account of his development as a scientific thinker and worker was a great read, but the perspective he provides on life without sight is outstanding. I'd rate the book 5 stars for myself, and 4 stars for a more general audience: five stars for myself because, as an invertebrate zoologist, I felt a strong connection to the topics and experiences described; and 4 starts for a non-scientific audience. It's clear that this book was written prior to the end of his career, and I hope to see another installment on Dr. Vermeij's life in another decade or two.



2. I wish Geerat Vermeij's "Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life" would earn the wide readership it deserves. Surely Vermeij's remarkable life is one which should resonate strongly with many readers, especially those accustomed to reading tales of poverty and woe told with ample literary grace and skill by writers as diverse as Mary Karr and Frank McCourt. Like Karr and McCourt, Vermeij is a splendid writer too, and yet in many respects, his own life story seems far more remarkable, if not as mesmerizing as theirs. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, Vermeij clung to his childhood fascination with mollusk shells, had a successful graduate career at Yale University, and is now a prominent evolutionary biologist. Presently a professor of geology at the University of California, Davis, Geerat Vermeij's major scientific contributions range from advancing our understanding of molluscan shell architecture to his idea of escalation, in which he recognizes that the history of life on Earth - at least during the past half billion years or so - has been a coevolutionary arms race between predators and prey. Without a doubt, "Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life" is the finest recent personal saga on science told by one of the world's greatest scientists. It is also a poignant personal odyssey on blindness, made remarkable by Vermeij's determination to overcome what would be in others a crippling disability; instead, he has turned it into an important asset for his brilliant scientific research.



3. I think I might be a little critical of this book because I personally did not care for the way it ended. His life is an amazing one and being able to view the world through his thoughts was a wonderful ride. However, unfortunately, I felt that his stance on a supreme being towards the end seemed to bring a "cold" ending to the book. Science and God go together just fine, even though I can understand his frustration with highly religious people. Otherwise, I learned a lot and really enjoyed being able to see the world through a person without sight. Great!



4. This book, autobiographical though it may be, is really about all scientists, particularly those of us who study natural history. Why do we do it? What motivates us, inspires us, even drives us? Geerat Vermeij chronicles his own voyage of discovery, along the way offering some hints, and not a little insight, into just exactly why anyone would choose to "do" natural history.
   
   I bought several copies of this book to give to friends and family, including my non-scientist wife. It explains why I do what I do much more elegantly than I have ever been able to. I highly recommend this book. Read it if you want to know what makes natural historians tick. Give it to someone you wish to understand you a bit better.
   
   Incidentally, Vermeij also happens to be blind. But that is, at best, a leitmotif in this story.