SPECIAL HISTORY BOOKSHELF
David Streitfeld
technology reporter for The Los Angeles Times and former book reviewer for The Washington Post
Publishing is all about hitting trends. In the wake of successes like The Madman & the Dictionary and In the Heart of the Sea, the latest fad is microhistory books, which delve into topics once deemed too narrow. David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker (Ecco, $24) focuses on a single meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club in 1946 that included a guest lecture by Karl Popper. What the newly published author of The Open Society and Its Enemies had to say so infuriated British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that he allegedly threatened Popper with a poker. The authors conclude that great thinkers are not necessarily great men.
In Fly: The Unsung Hero of 20th-Century Science (Ecco, $24), evolutionary geneticist Martin Brookes champions drosophila, the common fruit fly. A century ago, researchers realized that the small, fast-reproducing, and infinitely replaceable species was the perfect testing ground for hypotheses about heredity. Like his flighty subject, Brookes doesn't follow a straightforward path but alights on whatever looks appealing, including genetics pioneer Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1970s experiments showing that flies can learn, and recent findings that fly semen acts as a "toxic time bomb" against females.
Doron Swade's The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (Viking, $25) portrays the Victorian inventor as an amiable genius who talked up his "analytical engine" so engagingly that he became a coveted dinner guest. Babbage's imagination outran reality, of course, and he never saw his engine completed. The story is already familiar from William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's novel on the topic, but Swade brings in a new, deep-tech perspective as the director of a recent six-year effort that built a working engine from Babbage's original blueprints.
The 13 dreamers Paul Collins collects in Banvard's Folly (Picador USA, $25) were the Internet entrepreneurs of their day - harebrained zealots who sold outlandish notions, but only for a while. One was French physicist René Blondlot, who astonished colleagues in 1903 by "discovering" magical waves he dubbed N-Rays. The doomed visionaries all went straight from disappointment to obscurity. In Collins' sympathetic but clear-eyed account, they come off as strangely admirable.
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