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| The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson | Book review Robin McKie salutes a masterly biography of Joseph Priestley, the groundbreaking 18th-century chemistOn 17 August 1771, Joseph Priestley started a series of simple experiments that were to have profound scientific consequences for our understanding of life on Earth. He put a sprig of mint in a closed glass container and added a burning candle whose flame petered out in the sealed vessel. Ten days later, he returned and found the container could once again support combustion. Somehow, the mint had reinvigorated its air. Different plants – balm, weeds, even spinach – had the same restorative effect while mice, which should have suffocated, could now breathe happily.Today, we understand what occurred. The flame converted oxygen in the air to carbon dioxide. This was then breathed in by the plant which exhaled oxygen. On a vast scale, this cycle maintains life on Earth, we now know, although Priestley rejected ideas involving the exchange of gases like oxygen or carbon dioxide. As the naturalist Georges Cuvier remarked, Priestley "was the father of modern chemistry who never acknowledged his daughter".In the end, Antoine Lavoisier worked out the existence of "pure air", though he would have been lost without Priestley's experiments. Thus we should venerate the English chemist as a magnificent experimenter whose practical work transformed not just chemistry but electricity and a host of other subjects. Priestley was also a preacher, historian and philosopher as well as a radical politician whose support for the French and American revolutions made him so unpopular that he had to flee Britain for the US. Thus Priestley became the first scientist-exile to seek a new life in America, leading the way for Einstein and other academic refugees, notes Johnson in this splendid account of the great man's life.Priestley's fortunes there were mixed. He fell out with President John Adams but was close to Thomas Jefferson. For both men, science was critical to the running of state, hence their interest in research – and in politics. There was no need for scientific advisers and therefore no need to sack them when their views were deemed inconvenient. Scientific literacy was considered a political necessity. If only that were true today.BiographyRobin McKieguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Digested read podcast: Delia's Happy Christmas by Delia Smith John Crace reheats some leftover recipesJohn Crace feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Wonder Years Marie Ponsot’s sixth poetry collection is propelled by playful lines and mature perspective. feeds.nytimes.com |
Helen Gahagan Douglas, Hollywood Liberal A quick run-through of the life of Helen Gahagan Douglas, actress turned New Deal politician. feeds.nytimes.com |
Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann A gossip-filled account of the presidential campaign is most revealing about Obama and his secretary of state, says Gaby WoodWhile David Plouffe's recent The ÂAudacity to Win (Viking USA) was the "inside story" only in the most Âliteral, Âlimited sense (Plouffe was Barack Obama's campaign manager), John Heilemann and Mark Halperin plunge much further inside every candidate's campaign, Ârelying on hundreds of "deep background" interviews to produce a book the New York Times described as having "much of Washington cringeing and the rest of the country gasping". (The far less controversial Plouffe is portrayed in Race of a Lifetime as "a man who found the kind of beauty and meaning in a spreadsheet that others saw in a Van Gogh", and his book's tone and pace are in keeping with that.)Race of a Lifetime is, indeed, a fantastically detailed and gossipy affair – which is not to diminish its effect. The authors say they hope to occupy the ground that lies "between history and journalism"; their book, researched while events unfolded, written with hindsight and published as its eventual hero wipes the floor with his mandate, shows its very familiar lead characters in often surprising light.Its incendiary topics range from Âprivate linguistic missteps (Senate Âmajority leader Harry Reid encourages Obama to run because he thinks the country is ready for a light-skinned Âcandidate who speaks with "no negro dialect") to minute yet key campaign blunders Â(Hillary could have had Caroline Kennedy's Âendorsement but she chose to ask a staffer to ring instead of doing so herself) to total personality makeovers.The most striking of these is that of Elizabeth Edwards, until now one of America's most popular and bedraggled political wives. Here we are Âenlightened about "the lie of Saint Elizabeth": she is not, we're told, the long-suffering, cancer-stricken, bestselling childhood sweetheart of John Edwards but, rather, "an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, Âcondescending crazy woman" who would refer to her husband as a "hick" in public. And here we have all (or at least many) of the salacious details of John Edwards's affair with his web video producer, Rielle Hunter, a move that led to one of the most colourful falls from grace of this young century.While Edwards's narcissism has long been widely accepted (a $400 haircut became a famous thorn in his campaign), and his admission of infidelity perceived as callous ("I did it while my wife's cancer was in remission!" he told a TV host several months after Hunter bore the child who was revealed last week to be his), his political angling revealed here is stunning. With Âimpeccably bad timing, he makes calls to try and force Obama to make him his running mate. Then he sends word that he'll settle for attorney general. "How desperate is this guy?" Obama's mentor, Tom Daschle, is said to have thought. "This is ridiculous. It's going to be ambassador to Zimbabwe next."More predictable but no less revealing is Heilemann and Halperin's portrait of Bill Clinton, a man so undignified that he complains that the press corps "just want to cream in their jeans over [Obama]". Throughout the campaign, Bill was known to be a liability, but here we see specifics: Clinton offending Ted Kennedy by telling him that "a few years ago, [Obama] would have been getting us coffee", and Clinton's Âongoing Âsexual dalliances. Apparently, these were so familiar to strategists that entire Âconference calls were held over "Bill's bimbo eruptions". He was thought to be having an affair with a Canadian MP, a rich divorcee in upstate New York and the Hollywood actress Gina Gershon, as well as routinely going on trips to Las Vegas with his playboy business partner, Ron Burkle, whose private plane was referred to as "Air Fuck One".More fundamentally, the authors Âsuggest, Bill was one reason why top-Âranking ÂDemocrats sought an alternative to Hillary, even though they so feared the wrath of the Clintons that they couldn't publicly back Obama. One senior party member says of the Bill situation: "It's like some epic Japanese film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel, but no one can figure out what to do about it."We get the McCains fighting Âbitterly, we see Palin being vetted and we learn how rattled the usually composed Obama is by Joe Biden. (Earlier, in the Senate, he had passed a note to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, during one of Biden's endless speeches. It said: "Shoot me now.") As the book unfolds, we watch Obama evolving from a promising young man into a determined politician Âmotivated by specific events: the failure of the government's response to Katrina; his own trip to Africa.He tries things out: tests the waters with conservative evangelicals in ÂCalifornia, structures his book tour as a dress rehearsal for a presidential campaign. His premature celebrity (after his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 he received 300 public speaking requests a week) allows him to foresee, with great, mature clarity that he risks becoming a parody of himself.The most compelling portrait in the book is not the most scandalous but the most nuanced – so nuanced I thought I must have read it wrong when I came to the part about the "love story" between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For all their explosive discoveries, for all the intimacies confessed to them, the authors have actually structured Race of a Lifetime around the intriguing relationship between these two fierce Âantagonists, mutual admirers and Âeventual world-stage colleagues.Hillary backed Obama unstintingly in his early political career; he asked her for advice when he arrived in the Senate; even at the height of their competitiveness, Hillary privately defended Obama against Bill's criticisms; and throughout every fight and debate and day when she called him an "asshole", Hillary kept a photo of the Obama family propped up in her office. When he offered her the position of secretary of state, no one on either team could believe it. Hillary turned it down and had prepared a statement to that effect when she spoke to the president elect at 1am on the morning of the announcement.On a matter close to her heart, she said (according to the authors' Âparaphrase of the conversation): "You know my Âhusband. You've seen what happens. We're going to be explaining something he did every day.""I know," Obama is said to have replied. "But I'm prepared to take that risk. You're worth it. Your country needs you. I need you."And with that personal plea, their fates were once again sealed together.In filling in some of the blanks of the long 2008 campaign, Halperin and Heilemann have raised questions about the current political landscape: how do the main players really feel about each other, and does Obama still have the sense, as the authors say he did just before the Iowa caucuses, that he is merely "the dog that caught the bus: what was he supposed to do now?"?PoliticsBarack ObamaBill ClintonHillary ClintonJohn McCainJohn EdwardsGaby Woodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |