Here's a recipe for a nice Sunday morning: you get to spend it at home for the first time in weeks, and the Times Book Review runs a very nice and thoughtful review of your book, in this case authored by Russell Shorto, who wrote The Island At The Center Of The World, which I have been dying to read. (And now I really have to!)
It's always fun to read reviews like this where the book is put into the context of my other work:
Johnson is an exemplar of the post-categorical age. In
“Everything Bad Is Good for You,”
he brought brain chemistry and other disciplines to bear on pop
culture, and argued, among other things, that video games make you
smarter, not dumber.
“The Ghost Map,”
his 2006 book about the great cholera epidemic in 19th-century London,
mixed bacteriology, epidemiology and history. Johnson’s new book, “The
Invention of Air,” shows its genre-mixing in its subtitle; it uses
Priestley as the fulcrum for a story that blends “science, faith,
revolution and the birth of America.” What enlivens the book is that
Johnson does not simply describe the system within which Priestley and
his contemporaries hashed out the features of classical science; he
sets it against other, later systems for comprehending physical
reality, showing laymen how far we have come from the classical age of
science.
I also really liked the emphasis on the open information networks theme of the book, which comes at the end of his review:
One reason Johnson seems to have been drawn to Priestley is because of
his style; Priestley was irrepressibly open, sharing his data and
observations with whoever was willing to listen. This may have cost him
some credit in discoveries, but to Johnson it makes Priestley the
godfather of the open-source era. And this may be where Johnson’s
genres blend together most fully. As a “compulsive sharer,” Joseph
Priestley believed wholeheartedly in the free flow of information: in
letting insights from science flow into the streams of faith and
politics, in trusting in the human mind as the ultimate homeostatic
system, able eventually to find its internal balance no matter how
large the disruption. In his day, the French and American Revolutions
were the major tests to that theory. We in our age have our own.
There's a slightly strange paragraph where it seems like I'm arguing that Priestley's great discovery was carbon dioxide, and not the production of oxygen in plant respiration, but in general it's a very engaged and flattering description of what I was trying to do with the book. Even the one or two criticisms he has of the book I think have a lot of merit. He mentions, for instance, Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men as a richer description of the Lunar Society, Priestley's intellectual posse during his Birmingham years. It most certainly is a richer description of that fascinating group, and I recommend that book to anyone interested in the period -- it's really a classic, I think.
