home | Psychology of Video Games | contact | about | RSS 
« Movie Review: Duck Soup (1933) |Main| Book Review: Nudge »
Book Review: The Invention of Air February 20, 2009
In The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, author Steven Johnson calls forth a number of players, but if we had to pick out one main protagonist it would probably be Joseph Priestly. You may (or may not) remember Priestly as an 18th century contemporary of folks like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to whom credit is often given for isolating gaseous oxygen. Interestingly, he was also the first person on the planet to realize that the oxygen that makes air breathable to us isn't something that is de facto just there; rather, it's produced by plants. In this way, Priestly isn't just the father of modern chemistry, but the whole science of ecology --the study of how organisms and environments interact with each other.
But let's back up a little bit. Much like he did in The Ghost Map, Johnson uses The Invention of Air to examine a wider set of interrelated subjects through events that seem unrelated at first. We get information about British coffee house culture, natural philosophers, coal mining in northern England, photosynthesis, burgeoning American revolution, riots over Unitarianism, the blending of religious faith and science, giant ferns from Carboniferous Era, Thomas Kuhn's codification of the scientific method, and the aforementioned founding fathers. Priestly is at the center of most of this, with the unifying theme that all these things interconnect and affect each other --a concept parallel to Priestly's own discoveries about the ecosystem involving oxygen, animals, bacteria, carbon dioxide, and plants.
So far, this sounds a lot like a history of science that you'd think I would enjoy if you were familiar with my reading list. Unfortunately while it's an interesting topic and approach, The Invention of Air falls kind of flat for me. It's just that Priestly either isn't that interesting a person when you get down to it, or Johnson fails in his job at storytelling and keeping things interesting enough. I found the big ideas here to be full of promise, but the execution just left me with my mind wandering off time after time. To continue the Ghost Map comparison, it didn't have a strong hook like a cholera epidemic to really pull you in and keep you there. It really needed something like that to make it both educational and entertaining at the same time.
Comments (0) |
Permalink | 
File under:
Books
Tags: Book Review, Nonfiction, Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air
