Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

This book is the last in the acclaimed Cambridge series devoted to the history of science, ranging from antiquity to the present. It cuts across all the sciences in surveying the modern period (since about 1870) in two sections. The first part approaches the subject through selected topics, focusing on such issues as missionary science, museums of natural history, national scientific surveys, international science in Antarctica, and "expeditionary science" in general, the latter covering "surveying, adventuring, collecting, testing, and probing." The rest of the book is organized by regions, beginning with a country-by-country survey of science in Europe, followed by surveys of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia; East and Southeast Asia; the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania; and Latin America. Although there are no tables or illustrations, this very illuminating volume is a valuable reference work on specific topics. What makes this a unique survey of the history of science in the modern world is that each regional survey concludes with a careful critique by a noted specialist of what the other specialists have written, adding balance and helping readers to further appreciate the complexities of the rich material presented here.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

Von Hippel (Univ. of Arizona) has accomplished something remarkable in having written a book on science and modern history covering famine, plagues, wars, and ecology that is very readable and even compelling. The development of modern chemistry had profound consequences for every aspect of life. Von Hippel begins his text by recounting the tale of the 19th-century potato famine and ends it with a note about his own great-grandfather, Nobel laureate physicist James Franck, who worked with Nobel laureate chemist Fritz Haber testing gas masks during World War I. These two narrative bookends--one about a natural calamity, the other recalling a human-made nightmare--share a semantic feature of using science to avoid harm. Throughout the book, the reader is struck by the dual and conflicted role of chemists and chemistry in both preventing death and destruction while also creating them. Haber tested gas masks; his co-creation of a process to synthesize ammonia led both to synthetic fertilizers and to high explosives. Chapter 9, highlighting the German chemical conglomerate I. G. Farben, is particularly striking in showing how corporate power and wealth grew in a symbiotic relationship with Nazism, magnifying the horror of the Holocaust and the destruction of World War II.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.