Lives of the Scientists: Experiments, Explosions (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Lives of the Scientists: Experiments, Explosions (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull
Yes! Krull and Hewitt are back with another of those books, the eighth entry in their delightful Lives of . . . series (Lives of the Musicians, BCCB 4/93; Lives of Extraordinary Women, BCCB 9/00). This time around, readers meet twenty scientists in eighteen compact entries (William and Caroline Herschel, James Watson and Francis Crick appear as teams), with a whimsically caricatured portrait and touch of spot art, courtesy of Hewitt. Scientists appear in chronological order and range across cultures from Zhang Heng, a Chinese scholar who devised an earthquake seismometer, and Ibn Sina, a Persian doctor who "considered medicine a science, not a craft, nor a matter of magic or evil spirits," to programming-language developer Grace Hopper and waitress-turned-primate-expert Jane Goodall. Once again, each entry makes clear what its subject contributed to the field, but the emphasis is on humanizing persons of daunting accomplishment and stature with scraps of mildly naughty tittle-tattle tossed in wherever possible. Tippler Grace Hopper, for example, was arrested for disorderly conduct; Barbara McClintock frightened her genetics grad students; Ivan Pavlov sold bottles of canine gastric fluid as an appetite stimulant. Readers charmed by the gossipy style will transition easily to Krull's longer works in the Giants of Science series; those who prefer their biographies in chatty little articles will have to wait and see what she comes up with next. How about Lives of the Mathematicians? Hint, hint.
