Britain may not be able to lay claim to Gutenberg but we have Caxton and other publishing notables. Myles Coverdale assembled what is thought to be the first complete, unabridged printed translation of the Bible into English.(a) There is the Manchester Bible that splendidly replaced the beeves of Leviticus with bees or would otherwise have afforded a humbling and eye-popping insight into how much we still need to learn about micro-surgery from the ancients.(b) The Oxford English Dictionary is a work of extraordinary scholarship and transatlantic cooperation. Penguin Books was founded with the aim of ‘converting book-borrowers into book-buyers’ and showcasing good contemporary fiction.
The UK used to be known for quality publishing houses. So, what is happening with contemporary popular science books? Has the work of editing and printing popular science books been infiltrated by the humanities graduates that Ben Goldacre of badscience.net caricatures in Bad Science. You may recall that Bad Science does not have an index and neither does Lewis Smith’s Why the Lion Grew Its Mane.
When I was little I met children from Africa and India who had at least a passing familiarity with exotic animals or actually claimed to have had them for pets and they had photographs and stories to prove it: real life versions of Clare Turlay Newberry’s Herbert the Lion. Add Daktari’s Clarence the cross-eyed lion to the mix and it’s understandable that I collected pictures of lions and made up stories about them. For much of my life, I’ve had to fend off bookmarks, fridge magnets and the usual stuff that people give you when they think that ‘having an interest’ in a topic is a euphemism for a deep longing to start a collection of cutesy china figures or toffee tins.
As it is, I receive many books about lions as gifts; understandably, most of the time, people just select these because they have good photographs and they don’t pay attention to the content. So, I’m expecting to receive a copy of Why the Lion Grew Its Mane in the not too distant future and my social dilemma will be whether I might (for the first time ever) ask someone if they still have the receipt so I can exchange it or, yet again, resign myself to looking at the photographs and ignoring the content.
What makes this book particularly irritating is that it has not only been lavishly praised but the Royal Society has lent its imprimatur of respectability to the book by longlisting it for the 2008 Royal Society General Prize for Science Books. Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology has recently posted Why the Lion Grew Its Mane, a book review. Oddly enough, the lavish and spectacular photographs have not so bedazzled him that he is unable to see some critical flaws in the content.
Basically what we have here is a hand-picked selection of newish science stories that are cool, involving charismatic or neat subjects…
Here they are – together – bound up in a glossy, very attractive, large format, ‘coffee table’ book. Excellent photos appear throughout and the book really is a joy to look at. The volume is in fact so attractive that I tried hard not to be nasty about it, but read on…
Why manes are so variable is clearly a complex subject and there are several competing views; you might have recognised that none of this really tells you ‘Why the lion grew its mane’. I recognise that – given the short, snappy text and need to summarise – Smith was not able to indulge in complex, detailed discussions of the subjects he covered. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by the section on lions, I was left throughout the book with the impression that Smith had based his text on recent reports alone, and as a result his text merely presents one, recently mooted opinion on any given subject. Furthermore, his text often seems naïve in that it doesn’t seem informed by the work that has gone before…
Naish goes on to make some cogent points about the taxonomy and phylogeny of gulls as this seems to be rather a sore point concerning Smith’s somewhat slapdash treatment of the topic. Naish points out that Smith seems unaware that the excitment over the Kayan Mentarang animal was embarrassingly premature and it has been said for quite some time that this All New, Previously Unknown viverrid is a plain, ordinary giant flying squirrel (I take it that Smith’s face should be flaming with shame over this blunder; it’s not up there with confusing goats and unicorns but still blushworthy).
Naish is ultimately generous about the book because of the lavish illustrations.
A major gripe I have is that there is no bibliography whatsoever. I’m not entirely stupid: I know full well that publishers often don’t want authors citing references and listing papers and articles at the back of a book. But this book has nothing at all; at the very least it could have included tiny (8-point or something) ’source notes’ or such on each page (there is plenty enough space on the pages for this). A list of journal titles is given in the acknowledgements, but that’s because Smith is acknowledging help, not citing sources. There is also, sin of sins, no index.
Anyway, enough complaining; this is a lavishly illustrated book that, despite my dissatisfaction, does a great job of bringing the wonder of science to the masses. Smith’s discussions of the discoveries he writes about are short, succinct and only really tell the highlights.
However, I am cantakerous and curmudgeonly. Naish has highlighted some inaccuracies that mar the parts of the book that he felt competent to review. It is possible that other reviewers with some expert knowledge might find similar flaws elsewhere in the content. In these days when students at reputable universities cheerfully admit to raiding Google and Wikipedia for their coursework, is it too much to expect some decent fact-checking and referencing? Have we completely lost sight of not only original work but the meaning of scholarship or are scholarship and popular science on separate poles?
Yet again, the popular science book is an awkward hybrid. Do you ‘bring the wonder of science to the masses’ by feeding us inaccuracies and shoddy research? Is there one set of standards for judging yet another lousy research-light diet book but these inaccuracies are somehow OK because of the Amsel Adams-quality eye-candy and because the content is up to the minute and is therefore exonerated from any need to place it in context of related research?
UK publishers seem to have a stable of Boris Gudunovs when it comes to editing popular science books. Are the editors all humanities graduates who are out to undermine science or does some of the responsibility lie with science journalists who compile books from recent news stories rather than writing books that reflect time-consuming research? I’m one of the masses and this just isn’t good enough.
Notes
(a) Coverdale Bible aka “Bug Bible” because Psalms 91:5 read: “Thou shall not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night”. Middle English bugge is (loosely) the source of boogie or bogey man; it originally meant a phantom or ghost.
(b) Pre-eminent among notable printed bibles is the King James Bible that has spawned a mass of errors that are so remarkable that they are used to name particular versions: Vinegar Bible in which the parable of the vineyards turns a little sour; Unrighteous Bible missed the lesson about double negatives and consequently I Corinthians 6:9 admonished “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?…”; Blasphemous Comma Bible is another lesson in the importance of paying attention to grammar and punctuation because Luke 23:32 this version read “And there were also two other malefactors [crucified with Jesus].” It should have read “And there were also two other, malefactors”; most famously, Wicked Bible renders the 7th commandment as “Thou shalt commit adultery”.
Tags: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, Lewis Smith, publishing, Why the Lion Grew Its Mane
