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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.

Telegraphing What Technology Wants

What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly. App published by Citia. Available for the iPad. Publisher's site. $9.99

Reviewed by John Hawks

College students slogging through a literature course have a tried and true method for keeping up with the reading: Chuck the book and read a synopsis instead.    

Nowadays this can be as easy as a book's Wikipedia entry. A look at the page for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice reveals character lists, maps of relationships, major themes, plot devices and even conversions of Georgian-era property values to 2010 dollars. A more specialized breed of online study site goes further, giving chapter-by-chapter synopses, study questions and sample topics for book reports.    

In the olden days before Internet time, students didn't get summaries through social media. They bought commercial book notes. These are still around, and CliffsNotes, SparkNotes and other series have moved into the digital age with online offerings in addition to the traditional study pamphlets. Even in the Internet age, there's a rich market for pre-digested literature.    

Why not the same for new books?     

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.

Reviewing Science Books: A Conversation in American Scientist Magazine

Anna Lee Phillips, a senior editor at American Scientist, recently invited me to join her and book critic Phil Manning in a roundtable discussion about reviewing science books.

Here's a taste:

ALP: Do you see differences in the ways science is communicated in books that are published solely as e-books and books published in print? What new strategies are you seeing that you especially like?

CZ: The best of the e-books are the products of from-the-ground-up thinking. Rather than simply cloning an existing book, the innovative people are making good use of the electronic format. That may mean publishing a great 20,000 word story that’s too short for a traditional book but too long for a magazine feature—something we’re seeing done well by sites such as Byliner and the Atavist. Or that may mean reproducing exquisite facsimilies of Leonardo da Vinci’s lost anatomy notebooks interleaved with interactive graphics showing what we now know about how anatomy works—something that Touch Press has just published.

Unfortunately, a lot of e-books have become victims of the general decline of editorial oversight in publishing. We’re coming across a lot of slick e-books about science that show no signs of being edited at all. Some people think that if they just dump some text into a digital format, magic fairies will transform the content into gold.

You can read the rest here.

Can the wonders of the universe fit on an iPad?

Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe. Published by Harper Collins. iPad (2 and 3 only) $6.99  iTunes 

Guest review by Jaime Green

When I was in fourth grade, I went to my first and only play date at my then-best friend's house. (We were just old enough that a boy-girl best friendship felt transgressive.) He showed me the periodic table poster in his bedroom, his mother stopped us drinking our sodas half-way through because they had aspartame, and we watched a NOVA special on sub-atomic physics.

It was in that suburban living room that I first fell subject to the power of the science TV program. The glittering animations, the serious but warm voice-over, the waves of knowledge washing over us. And sometimes, the enthusing host: Carl Sagan with his hair held aloft by an ocean wind. Neil de Grasse Tyson in a loud print shirt getting worked up about Isaac Newton. Their personalities and passions are the conduit not just into learning science, but learning to love it.

Brian Cox's Brian Cox's The Wonders of the Universe is one of the new attempts to render this experience portable, bringing Brian Cox – Manchester accent, wind-swept hair and all – into your hands in the form of an app for the iPad 2 or 3.

The Frankenstein Universe: How The New York Public Library Blew Up the Ebook

Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley's Circle. The New York Public Library. Web site. iPad app. Free.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

"Reviewed" is too generous a term for this post. If I set out to write a proper review this colossal labyrinth of an ebook, you would have to wait for weeks, perhaps months, for my verdict. But since this particular work is free, I think the most that's necessary is to point you in its direction and wish you well. I downloaded Frankenstein this morning, and I've been enjoying perusing it greatly. While it's not a perfect ebook, I expect I'll be delving back into it for a long while.

Frankenstein comes to us from the New York Public Library. If you've ever been there, you've probably seen one of their impressive exhibits. As one of the greatest libraries in the world, the New York Public Library is also a great literary museum. To put on an exhibit, they will typically select some of the finest treasures from their collections, such as rare books, letters, maps, and prints. Frankenstein is like an exploded version of one of their exhibits. It's drawn from the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. As I wandered through the app, I sometimes wonder if there was anything in the collection that they didn't include in it.

At the core of this ebook is Mary Shelley's classic meditation on science and humanity's urge towards creation. Here you can listen to a dramatic reading from one chapter. The ebook contains accounts of the making of novel, as well as its reception. Essayists contemplate the powerful hold the story has had on us ever since, and how we've adapted its themes to science's progress, from the advent of nuclear weapons to our age of stem cell manipulations and genetic engineering. The whole project is lavishly illustrated with paintings and photographs.

This morning on the ArtsBeat blog at the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler wrote that "the app spins out widely and wildly." I have to agree with her. I found myself paging through stills from a disastrous 1981 Broadway production of Frankenstein that closed after one night, and asked myself, "Why am I looking at this?" I can't say that the experience gave me any insight into the book's place in our culture. The essays on Shelley's circle of friends veer off far from her novel. The app includes not one but two graphic novels. Frankenstein is also loaded with interactive features, which are nicely integrated technologicaly, but not thematically. While reading the piece on the making of the novel, you are invited to pop out a poll: "Do you get the most inspiration from creating on your own?" Why, yes I do! The app then informed me that 84% of the 13 people who voted agree with me. How 'bout them apples?

The ebook also has some technical flaws. I'm still clinging to my iPad 1, and I find that Frankenstein slows down its performance like no other ebook I've used. On more than one occasion, it even crashed. Which is odd, given that Frankenstein deals mainly in texts and pictures, which should make pretty modest demands on a tablet device. On top of the app's slow performance, it displays its essays in small windows that you have to scroll through, which took me back to the early days of the web. Sometimes when you follow a link, the app dumps you into the web-site version, as if you've fallen into a parallel universe. 

If you find yourself annoyed by anything in Frankenstein, bear two things in mind. 1. It's free. 2. One touch of the screen will quickly take you to a different part of the app. Any time I've gotten bored by something in Frankenstein, I've found myself intrigued seconds later by one of the hundreds of elements of this app.

Perhaps that's the true sign of the greatness of Shelley's novel. The book was a Big Bang, and the universe it created is still expanding.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Wonders of Geology: Getting High On Mountains

Wonders of Geology; An Aerial View of America's Mountains by Michael Collier. Published by Mikaya Press. iPad (iOS4.2 or later required), $12.99.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

“All true paths lead through mountains.” When I was growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, this line from the poems of Gary Snyder was a family touchstone. It probably came via my dad, who is mountain-obsessed, a chaser of summits and cirques who has hiked and trekked on five continents and now lives in the Alps. I've felt vaguely uneasy the past eight years or so, living here among the extremely low hills of the Eastern United States, and the photographs of Michael Collier, in the Wonders of Geology app, bring it all back: Yes, mountains really are where it's at.

The app was written and narrated by Collier, a geologist and physician who has been taking photographs from the cockpit of his 1955 Cessna professionally for more than 40 years. Based on his book Over the Mountains (An Aerial View of Geology), it is laid out in several sections that first teach you how to read a landscape's history from geological cues, then lead you through various American ranges to see for yourself how the mountains were formed.

$12.99 might seem steep, when there are plenty of ebooks out there for a buck. But this app is worth it. You'll be revisiting it for a long time, even after you've absorbed its lessons.

Most of the information comes to you in Collier's own rich, craggy voice. He describes the Earth's inner workings while a seemingly endless parade of fantastic scenes slips by--dunes, alluvial fans, thick, crystalline glaciers. The images are stunning, saturated with color and full of light. In one of my favorites, a Sierra valley cradles a string of glacial lakes that reflect a fierce gray-blue sky. In another, a peak in Morro Bay is bathed in the soft pink of a sunrise, and you can zoom in to see the ripples of the surf.

Collier is a deft and expressive narrator, peppering his explanations with charming turns of phrase. Tectonic plates bomb around the Earth's surface like “irresponsible bumper cars”; ridges caused by spreading centers ring the planet “like the stitches on a baseball.” He shifts expertly from the profound to the colloquial. “Plate tectonic theory has ushered in a new consciousness of the Earth's age,” he says, with grave wonder. Then his voice slips into a smile, and he quips: “How much time we talkin' bout? Lots.”

In fact, Wonders of Geology is less an ebook than a kind of hand-held, interactive exhibit, with ever-present audio guide. Photos and explanatory graphics outnumber pages of text many times over. When you do come across a page of prose, it's almost an interruption. I found myself thinking petulantly, Wait, I have to read this? Why aren't you reading it to me?!

Occasional textual interruptions aside, the app is a delight. I particularly enjoyed seeing glamor shots of mountains I know well, like the Panamints of Death Valley and the sere Eastern Sierra, where I learned to core bristlecone pines as a high school kid. The app includes so many ranges that any fan of North American mountains should be able to find their own familiar faces.

To be honest, though, I don't remember these mountains ever reaching quite the height of gorgeousness evident in Collier's photographs. Maybe you have to be several hundred feet up in a 57-year old biplane to get this level of insight. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is how my dad experiences them: intoxicatingly beautiful, mountains as drug.

 

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, TheAtlantic.com, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter .

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.

****

At the Edge of Life

Dead or Alive by Erika Hayasaki. Kindle Singles, $1.99.

Guest review by Jude Isabella

About 42 percent of the way through Erika Hayasaki’s Kindle Single, Dead or Alive, a book about Near Death Experiences (NDEs), I experienced a freaky coincidence. I was in the field with a team of scientists when a member of the crew started telling me about a horrific accident he had been in a year before. I asked him if he still had nightmares. Not as often, he answered, before telling me about the out-of-body experience he had in the operating room, when he suddenly found himself above the action, looking down on his body as doctors and nurses struggled to save his life.

"I don’t know why I’m telling you this," he said. “I’ve told almost no one and I don’t like to talk about it.” The subtext being, he keeps it to himself to avoid either one of two reactions: disbelief or way too much belief.

Hayasaki explores this treacherous territory in Dead or Alive, investigating the science behind NDEs. The story is perfect for the length of a Kindle Single: the study of NDEs is in its infancy and so there's little solid scientific evidence. A longer book would be repetitive, recounting endless anecdotes and relying too heavily on speculation.

Hayasaki opens Dead or Alive with the NDE experienced by her uncle, Richard K. Harris, a lawyer turned writer. It sounds like the typical NDE description familiar to anyone who reads, watches movies, television, or roams the Internet, complete with tunnels, brilliant lights, and the presence of already departed loved ones.

It’s a brave place to start. If not for the fact that Hayasaki is a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, (where she wrote several articles that inspired this book), I might have rolled my eyes and left Dead or Alive to languish in the “Books” collection of my Kindle. But Hayasaki understands something fundamental about NDEs — the universality of NDE descriptions can make them less credible, since anyone can describe an NDE whether they’ve had one or not. To give the experience some specificity, she focuses on Harris, recounting his experiences before his own brush with death.

By introducing both Harris and his NDE, Hayasaki hooks the reader. It becomes paramount to find out if NDEs can be scientifically explained. Is it just the product of a brain trying to make sense of dying? Or is it possible that a meta-consciousness awaits us all at the end?

Hayasaki delves into past writings about NDEs. In the mid-1970s the psychologist Raymond Moody interviewed 150 people who had been declared dead and were then revived. From the interviews he drew a universal description of NDEs, which, it turns out, have been reported throughout history. Research has accelerated since Moody’s study. A number of studies suggest that a lack of oxygen to the brain may be the cause of NDEs. Hayasaki interviews NDE researchers, even finding a neurosurgeon who experienced an NDE himself.

This is compelling reading. Who does not want to know if science can determine if death is final? (Less compelling is Harris’s story, which Hayasaki weaves into her narrative. Hayasaki never knew her uncle well. He had distanced himself from his family, and he died of cancer soon after they met.) And when it comes to the subject of NDEs, Hayasaki’s timing is impeccable. Baby boomers are reaching the age when their family and friends are starting to die. The cynic in me says the latest research on NDEs is driven by a dominant generation accustomed to questioning the status quo. Boomers, after all, made 40 the new 30 and 50 the new 40. They can’t cheat death, so they’re questioning it through science.

The non-cynic in me says technology is the true driver of this research. It’s easier than ever to study NDEs. Better brain maps courtesy of medical imaging equipment have allowed scientists to stimulate specific parts of the brain with electrodes to induce out-of-body experiences in test subjects, for example. With MRIs scientists can study test subjects’ brains as they recall NDEs. And scientific papers on the topic have turned up in journals like The Lancet and Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Although studies often focus on the out-of-body experiences associated with NDEs, I didn’t know until reading Dead or Alive that people near death frequently say they feel nothing as they gaze at their corporeal forms, however broken and distressed they might look. When my new acquaintance, the accident survivor, expressed the same sentiment, I hadn’t read far enough into the book to know that about NDEs and I doubt he scoured the Internet looking for lesser known details. This volunteered bit of information, his hasty retreat from the conversation, and reading the book, made me think the NDE experience — brain-based or not — is more real and profound to people than I had previously accepted. 

It’s hard to tell if Hayasaki believes NDEs reside only in the brain or that consciousness lives on despite the body’s death. The balance of probabilities tips toward the brain studies and their conclusions so far. But ultimately no one knows what happens after death and in Dead or Alive I get the sense that Hayasaki is asking us all to keep our minds open. 

 

Jude Isabella writes about science for kids and grown-ups. She has written for The Walrus, New Scientist, Archaeology Magazine, Canadian Geographic, and other publications. Her books, Chit Chat, a Celebration of the World’s Languages will be published fall 2013 by Kids Can Press, and Salmon: a Scientific Memoir in spring 2013 by RMB. Follow her on Twitter.

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.