Medicine Inside

I bought this books based on Amazon reviews. I read first two chapters last night. This is one of boring books I have read recently on science. Based on the reviews I expected this to be better readable book than Bill Bryson’s or Simon Singh’s books. So far it is lot of rumblings about why kids are loosing interest in science. I thought I will recommend this to my teenage daughter’s summer reading list. Based on what I read so far this is the kind of book that makes science boring. She is no Brian Green. Some times I do wonder weather Amazon.com is cooking up its top 100 books list
Rating: 2 / 5

The wordiness of The Canon is just as the other one star reviewers say. At times it is embarrassing. But it was the smugness that got me. This is really to the fore in the audio version which is read by a woman with a voice shrill enough to make your bones ache. Yet, she the fits Angier’s writing perfectly; one gets the impression throughout that Angier is just dying to write, “I’m clever and know stuff, and you don’t.”

But we are warned. The book is called “The Canon” for a reason. I get the impression that Angier truly believes that what she has put down in her tedious book is what all right thinking people should believe. And just to ram the point home she makes snide comments about the Bush Administration and Creationists and — by extension — all of us who don’t buy into the whole “science is the way, the truth and the light” thing.

As a result the opening sections on scientific methodology and probability theory are critical to what Ms. Angier seems to be trying to achieve. And boy are those sections l-o-n-g. They also have a sort of frantic air about them as Ms. Angier dances back and forwards trying to explain why scientists are so often wrong, but why we should believe everything that the latest scientific consensus says anyway.

Although the title is accurate in the sense outlined above, a better title would surely be “The Politically Correct Guide to Science.” For example,if this was the only book that one had ever read on science, one might be forgiven for believing that almost all American scientists were women, since that is mostly who Angier interviews.

In the past few years there seems to have been an extreme outburst of insecurity among parts of the scientific community. We are told that if we do not do/think as we commanded by the scientific elites on matters of public policy, philosophy and religion, the world will come crashing down on us. None of the advocates of this point of view have ever said what makes them expert on anything outside their field of science. This should make us all very comfortable in rejecting what we hear from scientists, whether it is their adolescent atheism or the perverse ludditism that many of them see as the only reasonable response to global warming. (Or is it Global Warming these days.)

But if scientists are really worried about the state of the world, The Canon is there to give them some comfort. No doubt people of a certain kind will lap it all up as if. . . well as if it was really canon law.

Rating: 1 / 5