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Get Out Your Monocle! Exploring the Past in the Public Domain

Switzerland, by Sir Frank Fox. 

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free. For this review, I read Switzerland, published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity, projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.” His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use, but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his style.

It's worth noting, too, that this pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping generalizations about why they are the way they are, while simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble) nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience, revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the ride, Switzerland is fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain, and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay of mountains, includes this note:

“M. Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

 

 

Veronique Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

 

Autism, Inside and Out

Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect by Amy Harmon. A New York Times/Byliner Original. Available for Kindle, iPad, Kobo, and Nook, $2.99.

And Straight On Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance, edited by Julia Bascom. Published by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Available for Kindle, $2.99.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

In the early 1990s, a mother told a conference of autism professionals that the upside of having a teenager on the spectrum at home is that they will never want to do the things that often get kids in trouble. There will be no need for awkward conversations about sex, because people with autism are either uninterested in or incapable of intimacy. Parents won't have to worry about a late-night knock on the door from the local sheriff, because autistic teens have no desire to party. If these generalizations now seem naïve, offensive, or some combination of the two, this mother had a lot of company in her assumptions. The notion that people on the spectrum are disinclined to seek connection with others is embedded in the very word autism, which is derived from the Greek word for self, autos.

One of the world's leading authorities on the subject, psychologist Tony Attwood, devotes only a handful of pages in his Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome to sexuality and relationships. Specifically, there are two references to "lack of desire," four to pornography, two to exploitation by predators, and two to celibacy. Casting a further chilling effect on the notion of romance, Atwood cautions potential suitors that people on the spectrum may find a friendly touch on the arm "unpleasant and even difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy" because of sensory sensitivity, and compares embracing an autistic partner to "hugging a piece of wood." This is the historical backdrop that looms -- albeit invisibly to most readers -- behind the publication of a new ebook by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect.

Fear and More Fear in Central America: An Ebook Look at John McAfee

John McAfee's Last Stand by Joshua Davis. Published by Conde Nast. Kindle, $0.99, or as part of Wired's Nook ($4.99) and iPad ($3.99) editions of the Jan 2013 issue.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

When the Belizean government announced on November 12 of last year that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning about the murder of his neighbor on the white-sand island of Ambergris Caye, it was just the latest, grimmest installment in one of the strangest tech stories of 2012. The former anti-virus tycoon's Central American escapades had become news six months prior, when his jungle compound had been raided by the government on suspicions that he was manufacturing meth.

No drugs were found, but after the raid, Joshua Davis, a Wired contributing editor, began investigating McAfee's doings, spending time with the gun-spangled man himself and his array of young female companions. When McAfee went on the lam after the murder, saying he'd be killed if he turned himself in, Wired published Davis' profile as a 47-page ebook, John McAfee's Last Stand. It paints a picture of a fascinating paranoiac whose fear brought him to the top of the anti-virus industry and to the bottom of a hole dug in the sand where he hid, covered by a piece of cardboard, while officials searched for him after the death of Gregory Faull. It's an engaging read, even now that further chapters, including an escape to Guatemala, an accidental disclosure of his location by Vice magazine, and expulsion to Florida, have been added to McAfee's story.

The Serial Ebook: Margaret Atwood's Positron

I'm Starved For You (Positron), by Margaret Atwood.  Published by Byliner. $2.99. Available for Kindle, Nook, iPad, and others.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

There’s something a little bit retro about the scorn heaped, in some quarters, on ebooks: As Download the Universe overlord Carl Zimmer has noted, similar charges of cheapening the reading experience were once leveled against paperback books.

It’s fitting, then, that publishers of ebooks are continuing to rediscover the promises and perils of earlier publishing forms. Serialized novels are one of the latest experiments: In September, Amazon launched its Kindle Serials, and in August, Byliner, known primarily for long-form nonfiction, announced that it would be publishing several new novels, including Positron, by Margaret Atwood, in installments.

Deep Water: A Pretty Good TED Ebook (Really!) About Climate Change

Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise, by Daniel Grossman. TED 2012. TED App for iPhone/iPad, Kindle, Nook. Book web site

[Editor's note: John Dupuis, the author of this review, is the Acting Associate University Librarian at York University in Toronto. He's joined me and other Download the Universe editors on several panels about science ebooks, and he's tempered our optimism with thoughtful skepticism about how ebooks can add to civilization's body of knowledge. (What happens when no one makes Kindles anymore?) Recently, Dupuis wrote about a new ebook from TED on his own blog, Confessions of A Science Librarian. I asked him if he could write an expanded version for Download the Universe.--Carl Zimmer]

Guest review by John Dupuis

I feel a little weird reviewing this book. It's a TED book, you see. What's a TED book, you ask? I'll let TED tell you:

Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article--a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words--long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.

They're like TED talks, in other words, but they provide longer, more in-depth treatment than is possible in a short talk. On the surface, that's a really great idea. In practice, it can be a bit problematic--just like TED talks.

Carl Zimmer and Evgeny Morozov have gone into fairly extensive detail about the dark side of TED talks and TED books. Basically, the format encourages a kind of hip superficiality and fame-mongering. Ideas want to be famous, to paraphrase the famous saying that information wants to be free. In fact, ideas should be deep and well thought-out. And, you know, even perhaps a little on the valid side, too.

Which brings me to this particular TED book: Daniel Grossman's Deep Water. Here's how TED describes it:

As global warming continues, the massive ice caps at Earth’s poles are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Water once safely anchored in glacial ice is surging into the sea. The flow could become a deluge, and millions of people living near coastlines are in danger. Inundation could impact every nation on earth. But scientists don’t yet know how fast this polar ice will melt, or how high our seas could rise. In an effort to find out, a team of renowned and quirky geologists takes a 4,000-mile road trip across Western Australia. They collect fossils and rocks from ancient shorelines and accumulate new evidence that ancient sea levels were frighteningly high during epochs when average global temperatures were barely higher than today. In Deep Water veteran environmental journalist, radio producer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Grossman explores the new and fascinating science — and scientists — of sea-level rise. His investigation turns up both startling and worrisome evidence that humans are upsetting a delicate natural equilibrium. If knocked off balance, it could hastily melt the planet’s ice and send sea levels soaring.

The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Scientific American $3.99   Kindle, iBook, Nook,  Sony Reader

Guest review by Jaime Green

I love the Olympics, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the special-occasion feel, or the every-two-years anticipation--a longer wait than for next Christmas. (I do remember when both summer and winter games were held in the same year, though not well enough to recall whether the four-year wait heightened the thrill or if the crush of excitement was too much, gymnastics and archery only six months from figure luge and ski jump.)

The exotic sports at the Olympics also add to its thrill. Sure, people will snark about the two weeks a year we care about synchronized diving --“Where were you during world championships last year!?”--but for those two weeks we do care! We cram our brains with obscure knowledge. Every four winters we learn about triple axels and the salchow--how the heck to spell salchow--and then we let it all go dormant for the next four years, until we can debate the finer points of fencing again.

It's this thrill of the unusual, and of learning its finer points, that I was looking for in Scientific American's ebook, The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. And coming into it looking for that angle, I was disappointed that the book stayed so true to the first part of its title: the science of sports. That's what this ebook is full of. What it is not full of, and what I missed, was the science of the Olympics.

This first ebook from the editors of Scientific American reads much more like a collection of articles than a single work, and as such it is a perfectly serviceable survey on the science of sports. Pieces are divided into eight sections: The Psychology of Winning, Pushing Human Limits, Drugs and Doping, Concussions, Comeback from Injury, Gear that Gives an Edge, Fitness: Expert Advice for You, and Closing Ceremonies. The pieces, written especially for this ebook by individual Scientific American editors and contributors, explore the physiology, biochemistry, and neurobiology of sports. They also examine recent incidents, such as doping scandals, that bring science and sports together in less savory ways.

Although the lack of unity was sometimes frustrating on a straight-through read--back-to-back articles sometimes retread each other's ground, re-explaining a concept or re-defining a blood protein--it still makes for a nice collection to pick your way through. There's no need to read in order, so you can follow your interests, from the mental acuity of an elite athlete to the most common Olympic injuries and then over to how playing sports can boost children's brain power. You'll learn something cool whichever path you take. And there's a lot to learn. Even if you didn't need this ebook to teach you that the ACL isn't the Achilles tendon but is actually in the knee, there is satisfyingly deep discussion of topics ranging from psychology to blood doping to the physics of prosthetic legs.

The questions tackled in this ebook go beyond the science of sports, too, in several cases engaging with the ethical questions that scientific advances raise. Do steroids make better athletes, or do they make cheaters? How many restrictions should be put on young athletes to protect their brains from concussions? Where does an athlete find the balance between improved performance and dangerously low body fat? These questions make interesting food for thought, and perhaps also foundations for important decisions. The ramifications extend far beyond the Olympic arenas.

Yet I still wished this ebook spent more time within those Olympic arenas. Many pieces focus surprisingly squarely on the topic of the ebook's subtitle: winning. It's as if the ebook's authors decided that Olympic equals elite, and then just wrote about how elite athletes win. But I don't care if Michael Phelps gets the gold. I care that he is stunning to watch. (In the pool, I mean.) And I want to know the science behind his performance--of something that feels specifically, uniquely Olympic. Articles that focused on baseball and American football felt similarly dissatisfying. They're sports, yes, but hardly what we think of as Olympic sports. (In fact, now that baseball's been dropped from the games, neither is an Olympic sport.) For readers drawn to this ebook for the Olympics and not for the sports, this may be a disappointment.

Also potentially disappointing--or virulently frustrating, depending on your level of investment--are some gaps in the scientific and athletic arguments. Jesse Bering's piece, “Why We Love Sports: Success of the Fittest,” proposes that sports compel us as fans and spectators because they serve as a demonstration of reproductive prowess. (Think of football as the peacock tail-feathers of our species.) This argument itself is a stretch. Sports audiences are so dramatically weighted toward men who are not looking to the field for mates. Bering doesn't even give the plausible counterarguments lip service. What about the primal need for play? Tribal affiliations and the strengthening power of us vs. them? The evolution and ritualization of hunting and combat practice? Heck, maybe even mirror neurons, who knows?

In a piece called “Does Exercise Really Make You Stronger?” Coco Ballantyne asserts that “the longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits.” She fails to offer the important caveat against overtraining, which plagues professional and devoted amateur athletes alike, with increased risk of injuries and often dramatic negative effects from overstressing the body. An article on preventing shin splints was similarly narrow-sighted, failing to mention the calf-strengthening exercises that have saved the shins of every new runner I know. 

The highlights of the book examined the subjects that I, and most readers, have no experience with. The articles on top-level cyclists and swimmers, on Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious' prosthetic legs, drew me in much more and carried that charge of the slightly esoteric that make me love the Olympics. Even an article on advanced swim gear brought a little frisson of elite, advanced technology. And “Who Wins the 40-Yard Dash: Squirrel, Elephant, Pig, Human?” armed me for some fun small-talk to fill the breaks between track and field events over the next two weeks.

For the most part, though, the science here is decidedly pedestrian. Readers who want to learn about the geometry of a rhythmic gymnast's twirling ribbon or how a pentathlete slows her heart rate before she shoots will have to wait. Maybe there will be something for us in another four years.

 

Jaime Green is a graduate student in Columbia's MFA writing program. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Spezzatino, The Hairpin, and Parabasis. She is writing a book about the possibility of life in the universe.

Rudy Rucker Resurrects a Lost Classic of Psychedelia

Be Not Content: A Subterranean Journal, by William J. Craddock. Originally published in 1970 by Doubleday. Reprinted in 2011 by Transreal Books. Available for Kindle and NOOK from publisher Rudy Rucker, $6, or in paperback from Amazon, $16.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

A Place You'll Never See

In the late 1960s, my family lived in a middle-class housing development in New York City called Fresh Meadows. An attempt to build a suburban-style utopia in the middle of Queens for returning World War 2 veterans, it was a cheerful place to grow up, with lots of trees, playgrounds linked by winding paths, and a grassy slope behind our apartment complex that was perfect for sledding in the winter. It was on that hill, one day in 1968 or so, that I met a group of refugees from another brave attempt to construct utopia in the midst of an American city.

It was a strange time to be a kid. Every night the sober, gray-faced men on TV issued dispatches from the ongoing apocalypse: liquid fire raining from the sky onto huts in Vietnam; mobs of police charging into crowds of college students, clubs flailing; flags torched, ghettos ablaze, and an actual pig running for President. Meanwhile, when my mother and father took me and my sister to Central Park on Sundays, Bethesda fountain was filled with longhaired men and women splashing around naked. I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be like them. I turned my room into a little shrine of freakdom lit by candles weeping rainbow tears down the straw sides of chianti bottles.

In that context where anything at all might happen, it didn't seem unusual to walk behind our building on 69^th Avenue one day and find a group of older kids lying on a blanket, limbs intertwined, gazing up at the clouds and giggling occasionally between lengthy intervals of silence. Always curious, I walked right up and started asking questions. They were very friendly, and invited me to join them in playful activities like cutting leaves out of paper and hanging them in the trees. Every now and then, one of them would utter a cryptic remark along the lines of, "Should we drop another tab of blue or wait?" Even at age nine, I was savvy enough to realize that they were talking about something illegal, probably drugs. It didn't matter. The sly elves that had mysteriously appeared in my backyard were obviously harmless, and I wasn't surprised when I walked out the next morning and found them still camping out beside the basketball court.

After another day of soaking up the ambience of their psychedelic idyll, I invited them upstairs to meet my parents. This wasn't as foolish as it appears: my parents were anti-war radicals, albeit of the academic, buttoned-down, cigarette-smoking, Marx-and-Engels-quoting, Mao's little-red-book-reading, New Leftist type; but I hoped everyone might see eye-to-eye on the coming revolution. I don't remember how my parents reacted to my new pals from the backyard, but all seemed to go well. And I'll never forget what one young woman in the group said to me, right before they were sucked back into the space-time continuum, when I asked them where they came from: "We're from a place you'll never see -- the Haight-Ashbury."

O the patchouli-scented portents, O the irony! Because, dear reader, I have now been a resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco for 33 years -- a fact I definitely attribute to my chance meeting in Fresh Meadows with those echt hippies. But in truth, the nice lady in the purple paisley schmatte was right on. As it has been since I moved here, Haight Street is a tie-dyed dump, a dreadlocked tourist trap lined with sleazy smoke shops and prep-school refuseniks on the road to rehab under macabre murals of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix -- hardly the shining New Jerusalem that the first-generation hippies hoped to build here in the belly of the beast.

As it turns out, even seeing the Haight-Ashbury of that era through the borrowed eyes of eyewitnesses and historians has been difficult. The Paradise Now! aesthetic of the lysergic lotus-eaters didn't lend itself to careful chronicling and recollections in sober tranquility, as anyone who has tried to sit through the cosmically tedious home movies of the Merry Pranksters sloshing in the mud can attest. Ironically, a book that was thought to be insufferably square by anyone who appeared in its pages -- Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968 -- has stood virtually unchallenged as the most vivid literary representation of the era, with its hurtling descriptions of the young Grateful Dead in full fury at Ken Kesey's multimedia clusterfucks, shining in the chaotic din "like a light-bulb in a womb."

Few certifiably clued-in alumni of that scene, it seems, were left with enough cognitive fortitude to compile the definitive tale of the tribe. Charles Perry's The Haight-Ashbury: A History is a dutifully researched, workmanlike account of events, but it lacks the bravado and flash that gave the era its lasting mythological dimension. Before ODing on a New York subway, Emmett Grogan, the swashbuckling founder of the Diggers -- the prototypical commune that kept the pilgrim hordes fed with dumpster-dive cuisine until the Mafia, speed, and busloads of free-love rubberneckers trampled down flower power for good -- wrote a memoir of the Haight called Ringolevio that had an appealing hip swagger, but never quite rose to the level of great art, as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's On the Road had done for the previous Beat generation of seekers.

Now, however, another title has been added to the very short list of engaging books about the golden age of neuro-hacking, when a bunch of scruffy street kids laid claim to the most potent "mind-manifesting" molecules in history, and used them to storm the synaptic gates of Heaven. First published in 1970 and long out of print, moldering on a few select dusty bookshelves beside copies of A Separate Reality, Das Energi, and The Whole Earth Catalog, William Craddock's Be Not Content is now back as an ebook and limited-edition paperback, snatched out of the memory hole by Rudy Rucker, the computer scientist and mathematician who helped launch the cyberpunk genre of fiction with his Ware tetralogy and "transrealist" novels like White Light.

Ballsy, redemptively honest, astonishingly inventive, flawed, and ultimately heartbreaking, Be Not Content made a significant impact on the handful of freaks who read it, including Rucker himself, who writes on his website, "I quickly began to idolize Craddock. I had my own memories of the psychedelic revolution, and when reading Be Not Content I felt -- Yes. This is the way it was. This guy got it right." Rucker's act of digital resurrection also represents another appealing potential for the ebook format: the revival of obscure, obsolete titles by readers obsessed enough to secure the reprint rights.

A Journey to the Island of Tree Kangaroos

The Island of Secrets, by Matthew Power. Published by the Atavist. $1.99 - $2.99. iPad and iPhone version available through the Atavist app. Kindle, Nook.  More information available from The Atavist.

Guest reviewed by Oliver Hulland

Matthew Power is the kind of writer everyone dreams of becoming. In the vein of John McPhee and Paul Theroux, Power writes about exotic far-away places, not from second-hand accounts but instead from personal experience. The cuts, bruises, insect bites, and close encounters he records are just as likely to be his own as the adventurers he profiles. 

The Island of Secrets is Power's most recent attempt to understand the indomitable urge to explore. We find ourselves thrust into the world of John Lane, a California scientist who looks for fossils in caves and who had accidentally discovered a new species of tree kangaroo on the side of the road while on an expedition in New Britain, an island off the coast of New Guinea. Upon learning of its novelty he later returned for the specimen only to find that it had, to his dismay, been eaten. And so Lane, with Power in tow, mounted another expedition to rediscover the kangaroo he believes holds the key to preserving what's left of the island's vanishing forests. 

The Island of Secrets reads like a twenty-first-century explorer's diary, rich with multimedia content documenting an expedition deep into New Britain's jungles. Inline links pop open locations on maps, historical factoids, or images from Power's trip. The intimate photos provide a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the haphazard expedition, including shots of an impromptu shoddily-made raft, the science team's dilapidated jungle base camp, and the odd detail like a local's "Calvin Klain" underwear.

While the quality of the photographs are nothing like those found in glossy magazines, they serve as evidence of the journalistic process, and of the realities of Power's research in New Britain. Even better than the photographs, though, are the small video clips that are peppered throughout the text. One clip records a slapdash attempt to sew shut a careless machete wound, while another shows the slow, laborious process of hacking through the dense Tanglefoot fern underbrush. These short clips are the antithesis of slick BBC nature documentaries, and as a result they succeed in providing gritty, blurry proof of the day-to-day struggle of science in far-away places.

Along with the text, The Atavist app also includes a superbly produced audiobook version, ready by Power himself. You can also listen to snippets of sounds from the jungle including the whirring of cicadas or samples of the local language, Tok Pisin. Some may find these audio-visual elements distracting or unnecessary (notably the looped chirping crickets that function as a soundtrack), more often than not they work in concert to create one of the richest media experiences available on an iPad or iPhone. 

None of this would work, however, if it weren't for Power's talent in telling the story of John Lane's obsession with finding the tree kangaroo. By building off the foundation of a good story, The Atavist’s adaptation of The Island of Secrets creates a hybrid of narrative nonfiction that succeeds in bringing the journalistic and scientific process to life.

 

Oliver Hulland is the editor of Cool Tools, a site dedicated to finding tools that really work. When not reviewing tools, he can be found foraging for mushrooms, exploring caves, and applying to medical school.

I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. TED Books. Kindle, Nook, iBooks, $2.99

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Tonight, I want to talk to you about a national crisis. A global crisis. A crisis of such tremendous proportions that you may not even be aware that it is engulfing you and your loved ones and your neighbors in flames.

What is this crisis? It is a crisis of our brains. The brains of our fellow citizens are being digitally rewired. How? Here is how. Hundreds of millions of people are gazing at online videos, spending billions of aggregate hours slack-jawed in front of their monitors. These videos are sucking up all the time that these people would otherwise spend reading the great books that you and I grew up with. Remember those days back in the Reagan administration when we little tykes would page through Cicero and Racine? No more. Instead, we face an epidemic of short-term distraction. These videos last no more than 18 minutes, and often less. As soon as one video is over, we can choose from hundreds of others with the click of a mouse. Each one is different from the last, flooding our brains with an unnatural wealth of variety. Very soon, we even become addicted to that variety. Yes, that's right, addicted. It's an addiction no different from cocaine, heroin, vodka, bingo, Ben & Jerry's, Law & Order streamed on Netflix, or MySpace.

Wait, I meant Facebook. Nobody uses MySpace anymore, so that can't be addictive.

Right. Where was I?

These videos are so addictive that they are cracking the very foundation of human civilization. The endless barrage of these tiny films erodes the circuitry in our prefrontal cortex that normally enable us to focus for long periods of time and compose Petrarchan sonnets to our loved ones. These videos evade the true complexity of life. They provide us with easy resolutions. They flatter us, rather than forcing us to ask tough questions about ourselves or our political system. We become zombies as the reward centers of the brain explode like fireworks, leaving us helpless victims for mind-controlling masters. Is it any wonder that the rise of these videos to global domination correlates perfectly with the rise of Kim Kardashian? What else could possible account for this coincidence?

Therefore we must take immediate steps to ban TED talks.

****

Science by Candlelight

The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, (Griffin, Bohn And Co., London, 1861), available free from Project Gutenberg in multiple e-reader formats and also from LibriVox as a free audiobook.

reviewed by Deborah Blum

 "There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

 

It was the above line that first caught my attention. The recognition that we often best appreciate our extraordinary natural world by seeing it through the lens of the ordinary: crystalline structure as revealed by the stitchery of winter frost, the chemical dance of light and life found in the changing colors of leaves, the hot whisper of oxygen as it sends the flame higher.

That recognition has driven much of my own science writing – the idea that we can often illuminate science through tales of the everyday.  I wish I could tell you that I'd thought of it first, that it was somehow primordially my own.  But, at best, I think I can claim to be carrying on a time-honored tradition. Because it's very clear that the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday was doing that and doing it exceptionally well some 150 years ago.

Here at Download the Universe, we reviewers are mostly looking toward the future - what we hope is the promise of e-books, their potential to transform the reading experience. Possibly transcend it. But I want to take this opportunity to explore another aspect of the electronic publishing world, the ability to explore our past, the free archives offered by publishers like Project Gutenberg. 

Founded in 1971 by the late Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg began as a labor of love, the painstaking transfer of books in the public domain - many of them once forgotten-- into digital life. The Gutenberg website now makes 39,000 free e-books available. It also links with digital partners to provide access to another 60,000 e-manuscripts. Like Faraday's candle--to stretch that analogy a little here -  it offers an open door, a brightly lit access to the words, and even the wisdom, of our past.  Like no other generation, we can explore this virtual library,  stumble across old chemical histories of candles and learn to think differently about our own work.

And stumble is exactly what I did.

I see you are not tired of the candle yet, or I am sure you would not be interested in the subject in the way you are.

Not that it was much of a fall.  More of a sidestep. I spend a lot of my time writing about and researching the history of science, for books like The Poisoner's Handbook, my recent story of poison, murder and the invention of forensics in the early 20th century. I do so because I believe--no, really, I know--that we cannot understand who we are unless we understand how we got here. And so I was doing some research into the history of chemistry and Faraday's book almost immediately appeared in my browser.

This, I think, is the other magic wrought by on-line publishers like Project Gutenberg. You can be happily rambling through the history of chemistry (a phrase, I know, that only a geek could write) and suddenly discover that a scientist born in the close of the 18th century (1790) understood perfectly the very principles of science communication that you'd been preaching in the 21st century.