WHAT do theoretical physicist Janna Levin and psychiatrist-broadcaster Raj Persaud have in common? A passionate interest in getting complicated ideas across to an interested public, for one thing. So they’re worthy judges for this year’s Science Book Prize, sponsored by Aventis.
Now in its 13th year, this £10,000 award goes to the best populariser of science. Winners include a clutch of professors—Stevens Pinker and Rose and the late Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose, and Jared Diamond (the only person to win twice), plus science writers such as Pat Shipman and Roger Lewin. It’s a distinguished crowd.
This year’s shortlist is evenly split between the profs and the writers, and their subjects range from the overwhelming to the often overlooked. Stephen Hawking takes on The Universe in a Nutshell, while Hannah Holmes tackles The Secret Life of Dust. In Rivals, Writer Michael White makes a case for fierce rivalry as the fuel that drives science ever onwards. Writer-broadcaster Martin Gorst considers the origins of time in Aeons. Biologist Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoirs gets down to the nitty-gritty of life with baboons—and David Horrobin goes for the origins of our kind of humans in The Madness of Adam and Eve. Something for everyone.
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Hawking’s name on the list must give pause to the other authors after his A Brief History of Time. This is far more readable. The diagrams and a non-linear structure will, he writes, help those readers who got bogged down in early chapters of his previous books and didn’t reach the exciting stuff at the end. But it’s a serious, solid book all the same. Far more fun is Gorst’s romp through time and its keepers. There are plenty of anecdotes and asides, said our reviewer Edwin Colyer. And Holmes on dust is riveting. She goes far beyond the household stuff to the cosmic dust that’s the raw material of planets and the dusts of the Sahara that replenish rainforests. Meanwhile, White’s take on scientific rivalries has, said reviewer Jane Gregory, been done before and better.
So to the best: Horrobin’s fascinating sideways look at the origins of the modern human mind and Sapolsky’s stunning account of what it’s like to do science in the field. Horrobin’s answer to what makes us modern is deceptively simple. It’s fat, or rather a dance of lipids, that allows all those rich clusters of connections in the brain. Curiously, he discovered that families of the brightest—including past geniuses and present Nobel winners—also included people diagnosed as schizophrenic. He links the biochemical changes that produce schizophrenia to those that made us human. Horrobin’s hypothesis is gripping and produces more questions than answers, as all good science should.
And then there’s Sapolsky: one of the great storytellers, who makes even the grinding work of field observation extraordinarily interesting. He gives “his” baboons biblical names, and watches them suffer terrible deaths. But beyond the bizarre detail, he makes you understand why this work is done, and why it inspired him. A winner, I hope.
The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking, £20, ISBN 0593048156 6/4
The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes, Wiley, $22.95, ISBN 0471377430 9/2
A Primate’s Memoirs by Robert Sapolsky, Vintage, £7.99, ISBN 0099285770 5/1
Aeons by Martin Gorst, Fourth Estate, £7.99, ISBN 1841151181 4/1
Rivals by Michael White, Vintage, £7.99, ISBN 0099273241 5/1
The Madness of Adam and Eve by David Horrobin, Bantam, £18.99, ISBN 0593046498 3/1
