Published in the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 20, 2017
Oliver Sacks Travels Down “The River of Consciousness”
Madagascar’s star orchid intrigued Darwin. He inferred a moth must exist that could reach its nectar.
After roiling the world by publishing his book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin retreated to his estate’s conservatories, not to putter about in retirement but to seek further evidence for his theory of evolution by natural selection. His greenhouses became, in the words of Oliver Sacks, “engines of war, from which he would lob great missiles of evidence at the skeptics outside.”
Sacks, the neurologist and writer who died in 2015 at age 82, relished writing about Darwin. “The River of Consciousness,” a collection of 10 previously published essays, reveals Sacks as a gleeful polymath and an inveterate seeker of meaning in the mold of Darwin and his other scientific heroes Sigmund Freud and William James.
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Review of the new documentary “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life.”
/in Reviews I’ve writtenPublished in Science, Sept. 18, 2020.
Biography of Dr. Oliver Sacks
/in VariaI’m incredibly excited to announce that my next book, a biography of Oliver Sacks, will be published by A.A. Knopf. I have exclusive access to the vast archive of The Oliver Sacks Foundation, and I have already found some new and intriguing information about Sacks’s life. Follow me here and on Twitter for updates on this project as my research continues.
Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship
/in VariaI am thrilled and honored that the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY, has selected me to be the first Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Science Biography for 2019–2020. I’ll be working on my biography of Oliver Sacks alongside fine biographers Abigail Santamaria, David Greenberg, Channing Joseph, and Matthew McKnight.
“The Secret Lives of Color” by Kassia St. Clair
/in Reviews I’ve writtenPublished in the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 29, 2017
Chromatic Experiences
A catalog of 75 colors and their histories, from lead white to pitch black. Laura J. Snyder reviews ‘The Secret Lives of Color’ by Kassia St. Clair.
The Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele was studying the element arsenic in 1775 when he came across the yellowish-green compound copper arsenite and recognized its commercial potential as a pigment. Soon “Scheele’s green” was used to produce wallpaper, fabric, and artificial flowers and fruits. Charles Dickens was keen to redecorate his entire house in the fashionable shade. Fortunately, he reconsidered. People were dying from the arsenic-laced items: a child who sucked on fake grapes, a flower maker—even, reportedly, Napoleon Bonaparte, who perished in exile on St. Helena island in a damp room covered in green wallpaper.
Read more“The River of Consciousness” by Oliver Sacks
/in Reviews I’ve writtenPublished in the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 20, 2017
Oliver Sacks Travels Down “The River of Consciousness”
Madagascar’s star orchid intrigued Darwin. He inferred a moth must exist that could reach its nectar.
After roiling the world by publishing his book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin retreated to his estate’s conservatories, not to putter about in retirement but to seek further evidence for his theory of evolution by natural selection. His greenhouses became, in the words of Oliver Sacks, “engines of war, from which he would lob great missiles of evidence at the skeptics outside.”
Sacks, the neurologist and writer who died in 2015 at age 82, relished writing about Darwin. “The River of Consciousness,” a collection of 10 previously published essays, reveals Sacks as a gleeful polymath and an inveterate seeker of meaning in the mold of Darwin and his other scientific heroes Sigmund Freud and William James.
Read moreBlanche Ames. Brief life of an intrepid botanical illustrator: 1878-1969
/in ArticlesPublished in Harvard Magazine, July–August, 2017
BLANCHE (AMES) AMES and her husband, Oakes Ames, professor of botany at Harvard and director of the Arnold Arboretum, were in the middle of the Yucatan jungle when their car stalled. As Oakes and the driver stood by helplessly, Blanche pulled a hairpin from her chignon, extracted a bullet from her revolver, and set to repairing the carburetor. She started the car—to this day, no one knows how—and the expedition continued.
Read more“The Seeds of Life” by Edward Dolnick
/in Reviews I’ve writtenPublished in the Wall Street Journal, Jun. 2, 2017
The Birth of Wisdom
It wasn’t until recently-the late 1800s-that we knew for sure where babies come from. Laura J. Snyder reviews “The Seeds of Life” by Edward Dolnick.
On an autumn night in 1677, a Dutch civil servant named Antoni van Leeuwenhoek rose from his bed immediately after intercourse with his wife. He rushed to his study, lit a candle, and examined a drop of his semen with his microscope. In shock, he watched as tiny eels darted this way and that. Nowadays you’re able to purchase medication that could potentially increase the volume and strength of your orgasm, you can read here for more information.
Leeuwenhoek was the first to realize that these little animals’ sperm existed in the semen of healthy men and were a crucial part of reproduction, with men nowadays using such medications as sildenafil to help with erectile issues that could be harming their reproduction. But it would be almost 200 years before anyone could answer that most fundamental question: How are babies made Edward Dolnick, former chief science writer of the Boston Globe, recounts the history of the search for an answer in his entertaining book The Seeds of Life.
Read more“The Zoo” by Isobel Charman
/in Reviews I’ve writtenPublished in the Wall Street Journal, Apr. 14, 2017 5:10 p.m. ET
A Zoo in Dickensian London
Society ladies and men of science came to visit Tommy the 2-foot tall chimpanzee. All were awed by his resemblance to a human child. Laura J. Snyder reviews “The Zoo” by Isobel Charman.
A curious sight greeted passengers boarding the Bristol-to-London coach one autumn day in 1835: occupying one of the seats was a 2-foot tall chimpanzee dressed in a tattered white shirt. His travel companion was Devereux Fuller, the head keeper of the London Zoo, who had just purchased Tommy off a ship that brought him from Gambia. The two had walked, hand in hand, along the quayside to the waiting carriage.
Isobel Charman, a television producer, introduces us to Tommy in “The Zoo,” her sprightly tale of the London Zoo from its conception in 1824 to the death of its longtime president in 1851.
Read more“The Glass Universe” by Dava Sobel
/in Reviews I’ve writtenPublished in the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2016 7:04 p.m. ET
The Lady Computers
Williamina Fleming, who had originally been hired by the head of the Harvard Observatory as a maid, devised a classification system of 10,000 stars. Laura J. Snyder reviews “The Glass Universe” by Dava Sobel.
When astronomer John Herschel captured the first glass photograph in 1839—a picture of his father’s 40-foot telescope—he could hardly have imagined that before century’s end stargazers would be able to glimpse on glass the entire firmament. In “The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars,” science writer Dava Sobel recounts the story of a group of remarkable women who read the secrets of the skies on glass photographic plates, discovering new worlds in the heavens while forever altering the scientific world below.
In the 1880s, the Harvard Observatory was led by Edward Charles Pickering, an astronomer focused on photometry: measuring the perceived brightness of stars. Up to this time, Ms. Sobel explains, “brightness, like beauty, was defined in the eye of the beholder.” Pickering aimed to establish a scientific scale for brightness—a project requiring thousands of calculations based on stellar observations.
Read moreCuriouser and curiouser: A cup of tea with Oliver Sacks
/in ArticlesPublished at ted.com, May 23, 2016.
A memorable conversation with Oliver Sacks reveals what might have been his greatest attribute: undying curiosity.
I remember knocking at his door, nervously clutching an inscribed copy of my book The Philosophical Breakfast Club and a bag from a local chocolatier. I hoped I had chosen my gifts well. He had written to tell me how much he enjoyed reading the book – he had even put it on a list of “Five Science Biographies that Inspired Me” – and I remembered hearing somewhere that he adored dark chocolate. I was nervous: Would I bore him? Was I wrong about the chocolate?
Out popped Oliver Sacks, peering at me uncertainly. His prosopagnosia, or face blindness, made him unable to recognize me from my author photo. When I told him who I was, he engulfed me in a great big bear hug. Pulling back, he gestured to his faded T-shirt from the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. “I wore this in your honor,” he proudly announced, knowing that I was finishing up a book about science and art in the Dutch Golden Age.
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