Some Lives
Experiments for Young Chemists. By E. H.
Coulson and A. E. J. Trinder. (Bell, 15s.) The Science of Life. By Lois and Louis Darling.
(Constable, 18s.)
THERE was a time when authors, publishers and 'Parents in this country seemed as sure as their German opposite numbers that the growing Dung simply could not have too many tales of naked aggression. Conquerors, rather than creators, were the types on whom the younger generation should, it was assumed, model itself. We now ruefully believe that how) sapiens needs no encouragement to bloodshed, yet the lure of destructive heroes remains.
Among the Christmas offerings is a little book containing ten of Plutarch's lives that is almost irresistible. The Dryden translation revised by Arthur Hugh Clough has been again adapted by Professor Robinson and the result is exemplary, forceful, clear, amusing and without pomposity.
Half a dozen of the best current Christmas biographies, though, alas, lacking this one's out- standing technical merits, have civilised subjects. Chatto and Windus's series 'Immortals of Science' at 12s. 6d. (Edward Jenner, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Robert Koch), are short, pleasant lives of the usual scientists, aimed at eleven-year- olds. In these small, tidy, American books, the British child will occasionally be verbally startled by—for instance—references to 'the European mainland.' The best of these four is the one on Boyle. The taste of the modern British child is astringent and some of the other authors will offend it by over-eulogising. But Mr. Sootin has not made this mistake and, moreover, lets the nature of the scientific method emerge satis- factorily from his narrative. Alas, that fine old traditional anti-climax seems to have eluded him —Father of Chemistry and Uncle to the Earl of Cork.' James Wan and Albert Einstein are also biographies to be recommended (slightly more sophisticated than the Chatto and Windus series).
Not sophisticated at all, but compulsive read- ing, is TV Reporter, by Robert Bateman, a career book arranged as fiction and exceedingly exciting. It proves that thunder can be hair- raising even without blood. Another career book and a very different one (non-fictional) is The Musician and His World, by Lionel Salter. An admirably civilised book, clear and informative, it is yet likely to suit the aforementioned cautious and astringent ones—the intelligent boys and girls of over fifteen. As well as information there are several passages of highly perceptive general aesthetic discussion.
Jean Bothwell is a voluminous American writer for the young and her Omen for a Princess is a romantic life of a Mogul Princess who was also a poet. She attributes the design of the Taj Mahal to her heroine. Surely not? Experiments for Young Chemists by E. H. Coulson and A. E. J. Trinder is, unlike the others, directly informative. This detailed account of what can be done with home-made apparatus is more for the school library than the Christmas tree. But you never know. Some young Edison of today may be longing to possess it.
The most ambitious of the books under review has a title with a splendid past, The Science of Life. This is a very different, much shorter, and more elementary book than the Huxley and Wells forerunner but it has admirable features such as clear diagrams, and not too sentimental examples of what a publisher friend of the reviewer un- kindly calls 'emotion pictures,' while the layout is fashionable without sacrifice of sense. The text has the unusual merit (in popular biology books) of being up-to-date, but it suffers from a split personality, so that a passage which will attract a six-year-old, may well be followed by one difficult for a sixth-former. It has another merit : it stresses the fact that our scien- tific information is seldom absolute and never exhaustive, and rightly refuses to define 'Life.' Then, per contra, there is a sentence at the beginning that is a puzzle. Whose 'large arteries' can be seen 'as pale blue pulsating tubes' on the wrists and arms? All the same it is a very attrac- tive book and on the whole satisfied a severe biologist to whom the reviewer submitted it.
AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELLIS
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