Michael D. Lemonick

Lonni Sue Johnson was a person of huge abilities. She was a gifted artist who, among other things, created many ‘New Yorker’ covers. She was a skilled and passionate violist. She got her private pilot’s license and had her own plane and airfield. She wrote a newspaper column. She, with a partner, started an organic dairy. When she was interested in something, she flung herself headlong into it and mastered it. She never met a challenge she couldn’t best.

Then she got sick. She ran a high fever with encephalitis. For a while it looked like she wouldn’t live, or, if she did, that she would have severe brain damage, and possibly never wake up. The fever burned out the temporal lobes of her brain- the hippocampus- which is where our memories are made and stored. While she remembered her family, she remembered little else of her past. And she couldn’t lay down new memories- everything that happened to her was forgotten in ten or fifteen minutes. Anyone other than her sister and mother were greeted with “Hello. My name is Lonni Sue; what’s yours?” even if the person has just returned to the room after an absence of mere minutes.

Her abilities, on the other hand, remain intact, although they took time and work to regain. She can play the viola, but her music is deemed emotionless. She can draw and paint, and her passion right now is creating word search puzzles that are embellished with drawings. But… the four page puzzles are never finished. Not a single one. Something makes her give them up before that final page is created.

She has been endlessly tested by neurologists, and has contributed to the knowledge base about the working brain. She charms everyone she meets; scientists and techs love her as a subject and a person.

The book is a combination of personal history and neurology, including information on another famous case of hippocampus destruction, H.M., although in his case, the hippocampus was removed surgically in hopes of stopping uncontrolled seizures. While the book is interesting, it’s not in the same league as other neurology/neuropsychology books like those written by the late Oliver Sacks or V. Ramachandran. There are a large number of pages devoted to Johnson’s family (who dedicated their lives to keeping Lonni Sue as normalized as possible), and to her past that, while they make us closer to her, don’t really advance the story of her brain. It’s an okay book, but not a really gripping one.… (meer)

A workmanlike biography of a workmanlike figure. This biography focuses on William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Their major accomplishment was the discovery of Uranus, the first new planet to be discovered since around the time of the Babylonians. Although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Herschel was neither the first to see it and that even after months of detailed observations he thought it was a small, near-by comet -- and only after others decided it was a planet did he go along. In addition to being a keen observer, Herschel was also a top-notch instrument maker and a theoretician.

It's not entirely obvious that it is the fault of the biographer (Michael Lemonick), but somehow the book is not as interesting as one might have hoped. It spends too much time on Herschel's early life as a court musician, which is not really informative about his future scientific pursuits nor is it a topic that is intrinsically interesting enough to justify spending much time reading. Lemonick is good on the science and context, but somehow that too ends up not being overly exciting or revealing.

But none of these are obvious faults or flaws, just not the highest priority book I would recommend reading.… (meer)

Books written by science journalists are always suspect, but Lemonick does a good job of parsing the science while still keeping the language of the layman. He discusses the history of the Big Bang theory, and the process of collecting evidence to support or disprove Big Bang. The book goes into great detail about the process of acquiring and launching the satellite, and as such is probably more interesting to engineers and technophiles than to those who are interested in the actual science of the Big Bang. There is a decent discussion of what was discovered, but it is condensed into small bits that are less than fully satisfying. If you're interested in the ins and outs of the building of the satellites, or the process of obtaining grants from NASA and others, than this is the book for you. If you're looking for the actual science in detail, there are books that do a better job of covering this, and several that are more recent, which is crucial in cosmology.… (meer)