Back to Blog
A Force of Nature by Richard Reeves5/22/2023 I lost count of the number of times we're told how loud his voice was.Ī popular book also needs excitement, and the author tries to generate this by imagining that Rutherford and his contemporaries were engaged in ruthless battles for priority and personal prestige. The result is to paint a distorted picture of Rutherford either as rough country boy from the "frontier" of New Zealand (there is and was no such place, New Zealand is not the Wild West), or a clumsy likeable buffoon, or a tyrannical leader roaring at his juniors. A popular book about science must primarily be entertaining, so this one is bloated with every amusing anecdote the author has come across, often stuffed into the wrong part of the narrative, and invariably distorted by misquotation and the addition of invented details which betray a lack of both scholarly care and understanding of the historical context. Everything is seen through the shallow distorting lens of contemporary American values. After reading widely in all the authoritative sources the author has come away with little understanding of his subject's intellectual life or the society and times he lived in. If you are a fan of Hollywood's superficial distortions of the lives of musicians and mathematicians this book will probably appeal to you.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |