A mostly entertaining rogues’ gallery of scientists gone bad.
Thinking of submitting to experimental surgery? This book might give you pause.
“What makes mad scientists mad isn’t their lack of logic or reason or scientific acumen,” observes popular science writer Kean. “It’s that they do science too well, to the exclusion of their humanity.” Cleopatra, the Greco-Egyptian queen with whom the author begins his narrative, wasn’t exactly mad and wasn’t exactly a scientist, though she did experiment on prisoners and handmaids to discover which poisons were most efficacious and investigate when a fetus’s sex could be first determined in the womb. The story comes from Plutarch, who wasn’t a fan, so it may be suspect. Kean is on surer footing with his later, brightly told anecdotes of a host of scientists and para-scientists who merrily crossed the ethical line in the quest for glory and sometimes wealth. One was William Dampier, who had preternatural gifts for navigation and reading the weather and who gave us “the first meteorologically detailed account of a hurricane,” yet he funded his research through buccaneering. Kean then looks into modern “biopiracy,” which implicates the Asian trade in endangered animals for their supposed medical powers, and then the slave trade, with which early scientific research in Africa was thoroughly implicated. The surgery of the title comes with the invention and immediate abuse of the lobotomy, but before we get to that rather gruesome subject, we spend time in the hands of medical murderers, body snatchers, and merchants in the cadaver trade—which is beset by constant shortages that inspire “digging up buried bodies again or swiping them from funeral pyres and selling them on the ‘red market.’ ” Unabomber Ted Kaczynski makes an appearance, having been broken by a sadistic psychological experiment while at Harvard, as does Annie Dookhan, the felonious forensic scientist whose inventions led Massachusetts to overturn more than 21,500 convictions, “the largest such action in U.S. history.”
A mostly entertaining rogues’ gallery of scientists gone bad.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-49650-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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