The Canon: A Whirligig Tour Of The Beautiful Basics Of Science (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
The subtitle" A whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science, should have been my first clue, but i translated whirligig as more whirlwind and i bought the book. I assumed we would dash through the basic concepts of science, and through the race it would be a fun read for a topic I long to get my hands into again. But whirligig is actually a more accurate term for the spinning, circular prose, cliched phrases, lists of adjectives, and nonsensical metaphors plucked from thin air without bothering to establish a relationship to the topic. Reading the book was like watching a whirligig beetle dash in circles on the water, tossed about by its own wake and with no real direction or purpose. By way of example I give you this gem from page 134 , "Perhaps nothing underscores carbon's chemical genius better than the breadth of its packaging options, from the dark, slippery, shavable format of graphite on one extreme, to fossilized starlight on the other- translucent, mesmeric, intransigent diamond, the hardest substance known, save for a human heart grown cold." Now, overlooking that this paragraph is one long rambling sentence, the author almost lost me when she described diamonds as fossilized starlight. The description struck me as overly fanciful, and if she had stopped there i would have given a nod to the poetry and continued to read. But the next part of the sentence offered me a long list of characteristics including the word mesmeric. In a book that is striving to be conversational, she chooses rather obscure and heady words to toss around. This gives me the feeling that while breaking down the science concepts into bite sized bits, she still wants to emphasize that she is a big, important writer. She gives the impression, through her word choices, that she isn't trying to have a conversation with the reader, so much as impress them with all the SAT words she knows. But even that is forgivable up to a point. She is very knowledgeable and I can trust she has done her homework and is writing accurately about her subject. However, then we come to the last part of the sentence, tacked on as if it were ashamed to even be a part of it. "Save for a human heart grown cold." made me stop reading, full stop. I couldn't get past it. Oh, eventually I did, but I had to take a break. There are many books and many pages in the world I want to read, and it is generally advisable for authors never to give readers an excuse to put down their book and pick up someone else's, because we may never pick their book up again. There was also this gem on page 119, "It is a cold, hard, tepid, flaccid, probabilistic truth." that was both an unnecessary list combined with terrible and nonsensical metaphors with an SAT word thrown in at the end that represents all I disagreed with about the writing style of this book. The prose is also littered with popular cultural references to try and draw parallels between the cool things everyone knows and the cool things Natalie Angier wants us to know about science. The problem was that while i understood the science concepts just fine, I often got stumped on the cultural reference that was supposed to make it clearer. (PBS broadcasts of Suze Orman?) The chapters were so littered with random metaphors and references that I found them to be distracting rather than further illuminating of her point. She likens chemical bonds to James Bond, referencing several actors who played the character out of context from the original comparison, which then drags the metaphor in fits and starts along for five or six pages. She talks about incompetent sewing in home ec, likens polarized molecules to Mickey mouse, and mentions how the grand canyon was made in the most convoluted way possible: "Give polarized water molecules about 6 million years, and they'll squeeze blood read beauty from stone, chipping 6,000 feet deep and 277 miles wide into Arizona's northern plateau, through limestone and sandstone and iron-rich shale, to scoop out a canyon the whole world can call Grand." pg 131All of these widely disparate cultural references, packed into a chapter and overlaid with the long running James Bond allegory made me feel like a Whirligig indeed. She has obviously limited herself to a strictly American audience by including so many cultural markers, but even as an American myself, her references spanned so many topics and generations that I lost more than a few myself. Scattered amidst the whirling prose were solid facts, truly witty quotes from scientists, and interesting ideas. The problem became there were so many bugs littering the surface, it was impossible to find the gems underneath.
This book is a fine review of about nine or ten meta-categories of introductory college science concepts. Presented in an easily understood format by Natalie Angier who calls herself, not a scientist, but a science writer.There are several types of literature. The large bulk of material which does a fine job of presentation on the professional stage, but doesn't have a big wow factor. And then a small group at the very top which knock you over with the beauty of their well crafted work.Ms. Angier strives, and STRIVES for the beautiful, well-crafted WoW! And with the first sentence, you think, yup, this is it. But then another beautiful sentence is thrown at you and you go, OK. With the next (beautiful) sentence you go, umm... the aim may be for beautiful, but the target is way overshot, and ends up on cute, and beyond even that and hits cutsey (this is not a compliment).It makes me think of when I was a little kid. I loved cotton candy, and only got it once a year at the county fair. Expectations ran high. My first bite was all I remembered and dreamed it could be. My second bite was great. My third bite was, wow, this is a lot of sugar. By the time I got to my last bite it was sickeningly sweet, and I didn't really enjoy it, just endured it. That was this book. A few beautiful sentences scattered naturally throughout the book, would have made it a masterwork. But being force fed every other sentence? Well kudos for writing creativity, but by the end of the book I was throwing it out with the last of my cotton candy. Too, too much syrupy sweetness.Edit (2015.06.24)This review was flagged as 'inappropriate.' I edited paragraph three to make it clear I was reviewing the writing style of this book and not the writer herself. Hopefully this addressed the flagger's concern, while staying true to my original evaluation.
What do You think about The Canon: A Whirligig Tour Of The Beautiful Basics Of Science (2007)?
SO bad! In so many ways! The prose is just too annoying; the author seems to think her topic, which she defensively insists is so fascinating, is actually quite boring. At least that's the only explanation I could see for her insistence on inane one-liners and hip, alliterative inside jokes. Her command of science is also a bit off. She makes many inaccurate statements and gives misleading examples. She is inordinately defensive over the question of evolution vs creation. In fact, it seems to be the overall theme of the book, as if that one topic, which should be just a footnote, is all she really wanted to write about.In fact, I'd say that reading this book greatly strengthened my doubts over evolution, because if her argument is the best a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer could come up with.....
—Matthew
I gave up on this one after about 100 pages. I hate not finishing books, but this one was so irritating it started to make me angry. Too often it seemed like the book was less about science than about showcasing Angier's insufferable cleverness. She couldn't seem to decide whether she wanted to be playfully incomprehensible in a Finnegan's Wakean way, or drolly incisive in a kind of Popish verse. The result was a bastard child caught somewhere between the two that had an annoying sing-song quality, a Dr. Seussical nonsensicall-ness that extended to making up words, a ludicrous love of alliteration (just like that last two clauses, in fact, but found in virtually every paragraph), and pop culture allusions so obscure that I spent more time on the semiotics than the science. For example, it took me a few minutes to puzzle out the connection between the Earth's core, soccer, and the name Wilson, until I finally realized she was referring to Castaway--some of the difficulty coming from the fact that Wilson was a volleyball, not a soccer ball--and by the time this all clicked together I had forgotten that the whole point of the weird connection was supposed to help explain atomic nuclei. This got to the point that I started to feel dumb, not because I couldn't understand the science, but because I couldn't parse her goddamn sentences. Anyway, if there's a main idea here, it's that the book blew.
—Matthew
Angier is thorough (a lot more so than I expected going into this) and accessible, and while some chapters covered more familiar ground than others, I felt I got something from each of them. Even in the driest sections, the conversational tone was intact and my interest was held. There are a lot of little literary/cultural winks thrown in with the substantive material, some working better than others. For some reason, the only one explained with a footnote was the reference to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead in the chapter on probability. My guess on that is is that the Stoppard reference was actually useful in understanding the concept, and thus the context was necessary. A lot of the others seem tacked on and as a way for the author to show off her cleverness. And besides the references, there are bits in here that seem like Angier was trying to prose it up and failing to do it well, falling into the trap of being overly cutesy. Unless you're talking to an eight year old, sentences like "Star light, star bright, Brown wishes you'd try this trick at night" are not really appropriate. She should have gone a little easier on the lit dust when it wasn't being used in a particularly helpful way. Which was often.
—Kaitlyn Dennis
