The Royal Society Science Book Prize-winner will be announced a week today. Robert Matthews introduces the shortlist.
by Robert Matthews
Just how good are the books that win literary awards ? The great and the good who judge such things may roll their eyes at so vulgar an issue as entertainment value, but those of us tired of lobbing "literary triumphs" into the recycling bin can find it hard to avoid thinking that less laudable influences are at work. Such as the author's name, for instance.
One of the books shortlisted for this year's £10,000 Royal Society Science Book Prize, to be announced next Tuesday, considers precisely this issue. In The Drunkard's Walk, a brazenly entertaining study of randomness, Dr Leonard Mlodinow describes an experiment in which leading publishers and agents were sent the texts of award-winning works disguised as the efforts of unknown authors. All but one rejected them – despite the fact that the texts included works by VS Naipaul, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Stanley Middleton, a Booker Prize winner.
Dr Mlodinow argues that this shows how expectations influence experience: people expect unknowns to produce forgettable works, and then set about confirming their belief. Not that he can take much comfort from his theory: like most of the six authors shortlisted for the general prize, he's not exactly a household name.
The two that come closest to achieving that status are Professor Richard Holmes, the award-winning biographer, and Dr Ben Goldacre, who has a regular newspaper column debunking dodgy medical claims. Each in their way has written a worthy winner (see reviews below), but Dr Goldacre may have scuppered his chances by including the ultimate literary vulgarity: humour. In a recent interview, Fay Weldon – who has sat on countless judging panels, including that of the Science Book Prize – declared that if you want to win prizes, "you have to take out all the jokes".
Prof Holmes shouldn't get his hopes up, though. "I've judged enough prizes in my time," added Miss Weldon, "to know the most boring book wins." His own entry on the shortlist, The Age of Wonder, is a huge work in every sense, but never boring. Even the judges have described it as "a truly enthralling read".
If Dr Mlodinow's theory is correct, the judges for the Royal Society prize will be swayed by academic credentials: the more letters after an author's name, the less concern people have about the soundness of the book. Indeed, since its inception in 1988, the prize has been awarded to academics twice as often as to professional science writers.
Yet over recent years, the numbers of academics and scribblers who have won the prize have evened up. So perhaps the judging panel of this prize is different from most, and will go for a book that combines solid science with great entertainment value. If so, Dr Goldacre's searing analysis of medical charlatanry should emerge the winner on Tuesday night.
The Shortlist
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Scientists would have us believe that we're living in the golden age of discovery, yet Richard Holmes makes a case that the true golden age was the 18th century, when scientists were pushing back boundaries in heaven and on earth. His astonishingly wide-ranging narrative focuses on the lives of the naturalist Joseph Banks, the astronomer William Herschel and the chemist Humphrey Davy, each a driving-force of scientific revolutions that reverberate to this day. Holmes conveys the vibrancy of intellectual life during the 18th century, when knowledge was pursued for its own sake, rather than for the next research grant.
Published by Harperpress, £25; T price £23, plus £1.25 p&p
Hailed as one of the great biographers of our age, Professor Richard Holmes has won many awards for his studies of the Romantic era.
Bad science by Ben Goldacre
Don't let the title put you off: this is a hugely entertaining crash course in protecting yourself from potentially life-threatening medical twaddle, from "detox" devices to vaccine scares. A practising doctor, Ben Goldacre shines a light into the darkest reaches of the medical world, where pill-pushing chancers and suspect scientists lurk to relieve us of nothing but our money. This brave and brilliant book should win the prize if only to show solidarity against such bullying shysters.
Published by Fourth Estate, £12.99; T price £11.99 plus £1.25 p&p.
Graduating with a First in medicine from Oxford, Dr Goldacre carried out research in cognitive neuroscience before working full-time in the NHS in London.
The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
Taking its title from the random meanderings of the inebriated, this is a sobering study of the manifestations of probability on our lives. And as Mlodinow makes clear, these extend far beyond card games and lotteries. Living in our uncertain world makes understanding the laws of chance a vital life-skill – and one which most of us lack. Mlodinow puts us straight via a host of fascinating anecdotes and examples, some of which will change the way you see the world forever, and may even explain why some people make it in life, and others don't. A valuable antidote for the nonsense spouted by everyone from financial advisers to wine buffs.
(Penguin, £9.99) Published by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, £9.99; T price £9.99, plus p&p 99p
A theoretical physicist turned author and occasional TV script-writer, Dr Mlodinow now lectures on randomness at the California Institute of Technology.
What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert
We humans can recognise around 10,000 different smells, with the blind being even more sensitive, and smokers substantially less. Or at least, that's what we believe: in reality, those are among the many myths and exploded by Gilbert in this wide-ranging review. But he does more than merely debunk: he shows how, for example, scent has the ability to influence us even when we can't consciously detect it. Oddly, however, there's nothing on one of the great mysteries of scent science: how air fresheners work.
Published by Crown Publishers, £16.99; T price £14.99 plus £1.25 p&p
A psychologist and scent scientist, Dr Gilbert has carried out pioneering research into the sense of smell, and now runs his own scent consultancy.
Your inner fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin
P&P 99pNext time you get a bout of the hiccups, you can blame the fact that you're descended from a tadpole. According to Neil Shubin, hiccups are the result of circuitry in our brains left over from when we needed to switch from gill to lung breathing – like tadpoles. And that's not all: from haemorrhoids to hernias, our bodies suffer from a host of ailments linked to our evolutionary ties to fish. Shubin shows that, contrary to what creationists would have us believe, our bodies aren't miracles of intelligent design, but creaky lash-ups that are just good enough. Though he occasionally gets bogged down in too much detail, Shubin does a grand job of undermining creationism without hectoring his readers.
Published by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, £9.99 T price £9.99 plus 99p P&P
Professor Shubin is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. Among his mentors was the late Stephen Jay Gould, doyen of natural history essayists.
Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant
It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown novel: fragments of what appears to be a 2,000-year-old computer are found in the wreckage of an ancient ship, sparking a race by rival boffins to find out what the computer is for. Yet this is not fiction. Since its discovery off the coast of Crete in 1901, the astonishing Antikythera mechanism, with its intricate array of gears and dials, has mesmerised scientists. What would the Ancient Greeks have done with such a device, whose complexity was not surpassed for another thousand years? Jo Marchant does justice to the complex story, serving up a first-rate detective story.
Published by William Heinemann, £8.99; T price, £8.99 plus 99p p&p.
After earning a PhD in medical microbiology, Jo Marchant became a science journalist, and is currently a consultant to New Scientist.
Robert Matthews is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham
Judging Panel: Chairman: Sir Tim Hunt FRS, Nobel laureate and scientist with Cancer Research UK; Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, space scientist at Astrium Ltd; Dr Phillip Ball, author; Deborah Cohen, editor at BBC Radio Science Unit; Danny Wallace, author, comedian and presenter.
From: the Telegraph
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