In this Part Two of Two Parts, (Part One pertaining to fiction), my nonfiction choices for 2009 may promise to be largely some reads less traveled, most mere blips on the GPS and the New York Times Bestseller list...
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
In an impressive synthesis of history, art, science, philosophy, and biography, Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science helps elucidate the low-profile fact that, while Romanticism in Great Britain is known chiefly as an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, swift and innovative scientific discoveries were also a major impulse of the era. It was a period when prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries made major contributions to knowledge, as Holmes chronicles such wonders, choosing to focus on a few of the pertinent lives inspired and careers encouraged. Holmes uses as illustrations such figures as botanist Joseph Banks, with his romantic notion to find Paradise, and his life-changing experiences in Tahiti in 1769, and astronomer William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 after having started his career as a musician. With two contradictory forces coexisting and flourishing within, Humphry Davy determined, among other discoveries, that chlorine and iodine were elements, but while possessing a brilliant scientific brain, he had the heart and soul of a poet, too. Early on he wrote poetry, one of his poems celebrating "science, whose delicious water flows / From Nature's bosom." Davy's enthusiasm led to some self-destructive behavior when he often inhaled strange chemical gases as experiments, a custom that nearly killed him. While partaking of nitrous oxide with acquaintances, he praised the splendors of science in florid verse. If that isn’t Romance applied to Science, together in an Age of Wonder, I don’t know what is.
Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
by Alva Noe
“As a neurologist, confronted every day by questions of mind, self, consciousness, and their basis, I find Alva Noë’s concepts — that consciousness is an organismic and not just a cerebral quality, that it is embodied in actions and not just isolated bits of brain — both astounding and convincing. Out of Our Heads is a book that should be read by everyone who thinks about thinking.” — Oliver Sacks, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center
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