Steven Johnson is a delight. He does tend to vest too much importance into his beloved statistics which can be manipulated to say all manner of things, but he is a storyteller of the first class with a mind to match. And he does not let me down in The Invention of Air.
Though he is known to scientists and historians, the name of Joseph Priestly is not widely known in the general public. It certainly hasn't the resonance of Benjamin Franklin, or George Washington. Nonetheless, Mr. Priestly was an intellectual pillar upon which many of the American founders leaned for support and for guidance. A chemist, a philosopher, and an educator, Mr. Priestly believed in such harebrained notions as religious freedom and the free exchange of ideas. Silliness, right? Well, the British government of the 18th century thought so. After a number of transgressions that offended both his neighbors and his government, Mr. Priestly was forced to flee England for America, as many of the American founders before him had done. Mr. Priestly took with him a first-rate mind, a mind which, in the 1770s, had puzzled out the components of the atmosphere, isolating Oxygen as a gas for the first time.
While the heart of Mr. Johnson's book concerns Mr. Priestly's experiments and discoveries, he fills out the story with a tender portrayal of the life of a thinker in the 18th century. The two threads of the narrative combine not only to animate Mr. Priestly, but to make the reader wonder at the absolute idiocy of the British government of the period. America was essentially founded on British-educated dissidents. To cast off such able men because they held inconvenient beliefs re-defines the whole notion of shooting oneself in the foot. They shot themselves in the foot so many times, they no longer had anything left to hit! It's an issue made more stark by hindsight, certainly, but tragic nonetheless. This story of a mighty mind operating in the midst of revolution and the enlightenment is an all-round success. (4/5 Stars)
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