Stealing Plots

I previously wrote about “stealing” characters.  In that essay, I described several characters from popular fiction and how they might be seen as variations on the same character template.  I suggested that a writer can modify and reimagine existing characters to create new ones.  Actually, I think that is probably how most characters are born, even if the authors aren’t consciously aware of it.

Similarly, plots can be “stolen.”  Some have suggested that there are a very limited number of plots, so in a sense all writers are stealing from a small pool.  On the other hand, there is a lot more to a story than just the plot, so it may not matter.  Let me illustrate the idea with some examples.

A Christmas Carol is one of the most popular, and I think one of the best, ghost stories ever written.  Charles Dickens’ novella was first published in 1843.  The story has been adapted to the stage (including opera), many films, radio, television (my wife and I are fond of the 1984 version with George C. Scott as Scrooge), comic books, and numerous pastiches.

The plot is well known.  Ebenezer Scrooge begins as a miser.  On a certain Christmas Eve, he is confronted by the ghost of his former business partner and three spirits who represent Christmases past, present and future.  The visions they show him convince Scrooge that his single-minded pursuit of money has deprived him of life.  He awakes Christmas morning as a new man committed to relating to his fellow man and putting his money to use.

Let’s reverse Scrooge.  Make him an extremely generous person instead of a miser.  In that case, he might be something like George Bailey.  Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, was the generous man at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life.  His dream is to travel the world.  Instead, he delays his dream again and again to help his neighbors, his brother, and eventually his own wife and children.  It comes to a head when a mistake by his uncle brings imminent ruin to the savings and loan George runs. Faced with ruin, George sees himself as an utter failure.  He contemplates suicide in hopes that his insurance policy will rescue his family from financial ruin.

At this point, he receives a spiritual visit like Ebenezer.  In this case it is a single spirit, an angel named Clarence.  Like the Christmas ghosts, Clarence shows George a vision.  This is also an inversion of Dickens’ tale.  Instead of showing him a history of missed opportunities and blindness to the needs of others, Clarence reveals an alternate world in which George and his generous acts did not exist.  His brother is dead.  His wife is a frightened spinster (it’s hard to believe Donna Reed would have been overlooked by the marriageable men of Bedford Falls even holed up in the library with her glasses on).  The people are mired in poverty because he hadn’t been there to fight for access to credit so they could build homes and businesses.  The town is under the thumb of the miserly landlord Mr. Potter, himself a type of unreformed Scrooge.

Like Scrooge, George is changed by his vision.  He sees that his life is worth something and that his sacrifices bought him a lot of love.  In the end, returned from his walk in the dark alternate universe, that love is displayed by a return of generosity from his many friends that saves him.

These beloved stories don’t have the same plot.  However, one is a variation or alteration of the plot of the other.  This plot archetype doesn’t have to be so serious.

Topper, either the book by Thorne Smith or the movie starring Cary Grant, is an example of this plot played for laughs.  Cosmo Topper is a banker.  He is bored with his job.  He is somewhat alienated from his wife who clings to respectability.  He has money and status, even what might have been considered a good marriage in a time when such relationships were as much about business as love, but he has no fun and it is wearing on him.

The ghosts are a piece of work, too.  George and Marion Kerby are a wealthy couple who die in a car accident.  Instead of shuffling off to the afterlife, they find themselves stuck on earth.  They have never done something substantive, either good or bad, in their entirely frivolous lives.  They decide to fix the situation by helping their old friend Topper.

In this case, all the major characters are a type of Scrooge.  Topper has let his job, money, and status keep him from a life of fun and serious connection.  The Kerbys had so little meaningful connection to other people that they neither helped nor harmed another soul.  Even Topper’s wife Clara has sacrificed intimacy in her marriage to focus on social climbing.

So Topper is visited by spirits like Scrooge and Bailey.  Instead of taking a serious look at life, it is presents a screwball comedy.  The Kerbys drag Topper into all kind of risqué situations he would normally not get into.  Misunderstandings abound and Topper is embarrassed repeatedly.  The ghosts are have good intentions, but they are not very competent.  Topper feigns irritation at the hijinks, but in his heart is having a ball and doesn’t want the haunting to end.  Clara feels humiliated by all the trouble Topper is getting into, but fear of losing him to a wild life reminds her of how much she loves him.

Through a series of screwy events, the characters undergo a Scrooge-like change.  The Toppers loosen up and rekindle their love.  They discover that their intimacy as a couple is more important than jobs, wealth or status, though they don’t have to completely give up those things.  The Kerbys take responsibility for themselves and their actions.  They finally put Topper’s needs ahead of their own and do something substantively good, opening the doors of heaven.

You can probably see that these stories are related by more than similarities in plot.  They have a common theme.  All of these stories are about connecting to others in relationships.  Bailey is a little different from the others in that he starts out blind to all the good that has resulted from his seemingly humble touching of the lives of others.  Scrooge, the Toppers and the Kerbys are isolated for various reasons, mostly of their own making, and need to discover that relating to others is the main thing.

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Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

I was going read only fiction over the holidays and give myself a break from writing reviews.  So I picked up Arthur & George by Julian Barnes.  I remembered I reviewed The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and began to feel obligated to review this other novel about Arthur Conan Doyle as well.

The books are very different.  The Sherlockian is a thriller and it is entirely fictional.  Barnes’ book is a more literary, historical novel based on real events.  If he had been writing a thriller, the story would have started when Doyle got involved in overturning the wrongful conviction of solicitor George Adelji for mutilating and killing animals in the rural community where he was raised by a Scottish mother and an Indian father who converted to Anglicanism and served as a vicar.  This doesn’t occur until you’ve already read 70 percent of the book.  Barnes doesn’t indulge the achronologic order a novel permits, but he does take his time, gets into the heads of his protagonists, and takes a long look at side stories.  This is why I refer to it as a literary novel in contrast to a thriller, which is more to-the-point and plot driven.

I wonder why Barnes decided to write a novel instead of a nonfiction account of the events.  I suspect there was plenty of source material.  Doyle was a prolific writer.  Newspapers abounded in England at the time.  Clues to the truth can be found in even the most obfuscatory court and government documents.  The Adelji case led to new laws, including the introduction of appeals courts to the British criminal justice system.  I suspect he wanted to explore themes that interested him without too strictly bound to a factual narrative.

There is the suggestion of a theme in the opening chapters.  Doyle and Adelji are introduced through their childhood exposures to death, something that would have been common in the 1800s.  Doyle famously became a spiritualist.  He was committed to the idea that death was passage into another life and that gifted people could communicate with the departed.  I do not know if Adelji’s views are on the record, but Barnes depicts him as something between neutral and skeptical.  He also seems indifferent and uncurious.  The only fact he is sure of is that everyone dies.  What happens after death, if anything, is unknown, and he finds the evidence of an afterlife to be weak.  These views are not contrasted; they are juxtaposed.

Ethics may be another theme.  Doyle derived his ethical view from his notions of chivalry.  Adelji, who comes across as a high-functioning person with Asperger’s syndrome, found his place in the order and logic of the law.  There was plenty of unethical activity, or at least human venality, presented in the story: racism, eugenic notions, sloppy police work, unjust courts, and heel-dragging bureaucrats.

I might have preferred a straight nonfiction account of the events.  Barnes novelization worked for me, though.  It was certainly more effective than the partial fictionalization attempted by David Gelernter in his history of the 1939 World’s Fair.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Barnes, Julian.  Arthur & George.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

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Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

I usually don’t write reviews of fiction books, but occasionally I find a novel so enjoyable, or its subject so interesting or important that I want to write about it. That is the case with Enchantress of Numbers, a novel by Jennifer Chiaverini.

The subject is Ada Lovelace, who I think is interesting and important. She is credited as the author of the first published computer program in 1843. The only thing resembling a computer at the time was in the drawings and notes of mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, a friend of Lovelace. He called the device, which was never built, an analytical engine.

Lovelace’s contribution has been debated, but it seems likely that she saw more capability in the analytical engine than even its inventor. As she described in her notes on her translation of a scientific paper on Babbage’s invention, originally printed in French and shorter than her notes were, she imagined the device being able to handle all manner of symbolic and logical functions in addition to solving mathematical equations. Even Babbage himself seemed mainly to see it as an improvement on his difference engine, a programmable calculating machine that was partly built, but never finished.

If she had been a man, her accomplishment would very likely have received much more accolades than it did at the time, or even for more than a century afterward. It was unusual for a woman to be even permitted to study math or science in those days. Her mother encouraged her to take on these fields to discourage her from following in the footsteps of her father, the poet Lord Byron.

Lovelace lived in a period of great change in society and science. She was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. She was a friend of Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. When Queen Victoria was coronated, her husband was elevated to an earl and the new monarch called her forward to take her hand as the couple, newly made Count and Countess Lovelace, were took their bows. She attended the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal Palace, where the exhibits included the still relatively new telegraph.

I wasn’t sure I would care for a novelization of Lovelace’s life. I was not especially impressed with Arthur and George, Julian Barnes’ novel based on events from the life of Arthur Conan Doyle; I thought I would have preferred a straight nonfiction book on the subject. I found Chiaverini’s novel more compelling, perhaps because it is written as if by Ada Lovelace herself. As with any such fictionalization, there are parts that Chiaverini made up, though she draws on sources I enjoyed such as Benjamin Woolley’s excellent biography Bride of Science and James Essinger’s defense of the countess, Ada’s Algorithm. I realize that there are people who will pick up a novel who would not be attracted to a biography, and if it takes that to get more people to now about Ada Lovelace an her contributions, then Chiaverini’s effort was worthy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Chiaverini, Jennifer. Enchantress of Numbers. New York: Dutton, 2017.

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

Petroski, Henry. The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Policy makers seem to love science. I can see why. Science provides a sense of specificity, certainty and consensus. It contrasts with the vagueness, variability and competition that policy makers usually have to deal with. That is more like the world engineering.

This interrelation of policy-making, science and engineering, especially the latter two, is the subject of Henry Petroski’s book, The Essential Engineer. In particular, Petroski emphasizes the important, and often overlooked, role of engineering is solving pressing problems.



I doesn’t help that people conflate science and engineering, especially by thinking of engineering as branch or application of science. Petroski is clear about the differences. Science is about increasing knowledge. Engineering is about invention. Sometimes scientists do engineering, especially when they create a devise or process to help them in their work of discovery. Sometimes engineers do science, especially when their engage in research and experimentation to gain a better understanding or problems that are not well understood.

The movement of knowledge from science to engineering practice is well understood. Petroski describes how this became ingrained in American research and development policy. Engineering often precedes science and engineers often must invent solutions in areas that are not well understood by science. Galileo’s improvements to the telescope made possible his advancements in astronomy. The science of thermodynamics grew almost entirely out of the desire to understand steam engines, which engineers had been building and improving in the absence of scientific understanding.

This misunderstanding exacerbated by our culture and education. Policy elites and scientist generally have no education in engineering. As an undergraduate studying engineering, I took science classes with students majoring in the sciences. I took classes in political science, economics and other social science and business-oriented classes with students majoring in those fields. I would have been greatly surprised to find in one of my engineering classes a student who wasn’t majoring in engineering.*

Petroski does not try to bring down science. He’s a civil engineering professor at a sizeable university, so he has probably spent quite a bit of time doing science. He does distinguish how science is helpful, mainly as a warning. Science can help us identify and define problems and assess the risks involve. When we begin to devise solutions to those problems, especially when there is no definitive solution and judgment is needed to way the pros and cons of multiple possible answers, we are moving into engineering.

The Essential Engineer is not a technical book. It for anyone who may have an interest in the role of technology in addressing our problems, especially larger societal problems. Petroski draws illustrations from current events and history (he is a professor of history as well as engineering). The book is enlivened with a storytelling feel.

* There were exceptions. I took a course in food processing that was dual-listed in agricultural engineering and food science. It was a required course for both disciplines. Electrical engineering students almost automatically minored in math, and some clever and ambitious students double-majored in those subjects. With a little better planning, I could have swung a minor in agricultural economics, and I almost wish I had. When I got into wastewater engineering, I wished I had taken more microbiology. My pursuit of additional education lead to a graduate degree in public administration. Government agencies have been employers or clients most of my career. It is common for engineers to get a masters degree in business, especially as they become managers.

Henry Petroski also wrote Paperboy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
The Big Necessity by Rose George
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

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The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of School. 1944. New York: HarperOne, 2000.

I didn’t expect of find apologist C. S. Lewis discussing the Tao. He used it as a term to describe natural law or traditional values, which he defended in the three lectures collected in The Abolition of Man.

This is a hard book for me to write about, though it is short. Lewis wrote as a thoughtful and educated man to an audience he assumed could follow him. I don’t find it easy to summarize his arguments and do them justice, though I will try.

Lewis began by criticizing a trend in education that debunks emotion and sentiment in favor of reason. The particular English composition he used as an example rightly showed students how to see through the shallow sentimentality and factual falseness of bad writing, but failed to show the merits of good writing, worthy sentiments, or deeper truth.

The product of such an education is people without hearts. Instead of mastering reason, students were equipped with shallow reasonableness. By inoculating students against one kind of propaganda, the authors of the text made them more vulnerable to other propaganda.

For fruitful education, Lewis offers the Tao, teaching people to recognize and esteem the inherent value of things. As he puts it, “The right defence against false sentiments is just sentiments.”

Those who reject traditional values, even if not entirely conscious of it as may be the case of the textbook authors, are proposing new values. However, the tools they use to cut down the old work just as well on the new. They must either stick to the idea that values are cultural vestiges or conventions that have roots in unwanted sentiment instead of desirable reason, and lay the groundwork for future reasoners and reformers to overthrow the new values, or appeal to inherent, self-evident values. On this latter basis, the Tao has much history and endurance.


These ideas have real social consequence. This book was first published in 1944, so the Nazi regime in Germany was very much on Lewis’ mind, as well as then-rising Communism. Though the pseudoscience that the Nazis used to justify their racist policies has been debunked, and even the Soviet Union has crumbled, the idea that a more scientific and rational governance and policy will perfect, or at least greatly improve, human society is alive an well.

As we master nature, even human nature, we also give people who acquire and control that knowledge and technology mastery over other people. Successive generations of such people will grow in mastery over others and, raised with no heart or inherently true values, they will have nothing by which to govern themselves except their own appetites and desires. George Orwell’s vision would cease to be merely an imaginative projection of the excesses of socialism and become something close to prophecy.

Lewis doesn’t see reason and sentiment as being natural enemies, only that some have tried to position one against the other. His vision would be people educated to have within them both powerful reason and powerful sentiments, especially ethical sentiments.

My own experience makes this an attractive vision to me. As a child, I had experienced strong emotions, especially anger, that threatened to overwhelm me because I lacked maturity and self-control. As I got a little older, though still a child, I clamped down on my emotions and tried to comport myself according to reason a much as possible; Mr. Spock from Star Trek was my model. This became a problem, too, in that my life and relationships lacked fullness as I deprived myself and others of something important in my connections. Now that I am a man, and I am coming to see what the fullness of that can be, I long to have both a powerful mind and strong heart. To have one without the other sets one up for many falls, but to have them together is a synergistic combination that empowers one to have greater appreciation for and effectiveness in life.

C.S. Lewis also wrote:
The Great Divorce

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

I enjoyed reading comic books as a kid. Sometimes I enjoy reading them as an adult. Comics have always been for adults (and kids, too). While popular superhero comics have told stories of the physical and moral paragons of our fantasies, comics have also been a place accessible to those who didn’t see themselves represented in other media. The combination of words and pictures, sometimes more of a juxtaposition, that are the language of comics can powerfully present a point of view. Hilary Chute considers the power of comics to communicate the experience of individuals and subcultures in Why Comics?

While Chute focuses on comic books, she considers cartooning more broadly, especially the early cartoons that appeared in British magazines (quickly imitated in the U.S.) and the American newspaper comic strip. While some newspaper comics were designed to appeal to kids, many were meant to attract adult readers. They often depicted people from poor and immigrant communities. In addition, cartooning could also be very artistic and even in the early days of comic strips some artists were recognized for the quality of their images and storytelling, such as Winsor McCay and George Herriman.

Because Chute generally focuses on groups that were historically or currently marginalized, much of the book focuses on underground and independent comics. I’ll admit that I’ve not particularly been a fan of underground comics. My earliest introduction to underground comics in the 1980s was mostly to 1960s and 1970s books that featured drug culture and bizarre or pornographic depictions of sex. In the subsequent years, I’ve come across some incredibly good underground, literary or artistic comics. Chute discusses some of them such as Art Spieglman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. I’m a Midwesterner and I was amazed to see Pekar’s depictions of scenes I might see in my own town.

Comics were born as a mass media, which may explain some of the stigma attached to them, and mainstream comics have always been produced in factory-like manor with a division of labor (writer, penciler, inker, etc.). Some creators were uncredited, or one name appeared on the work of many (this practice was common in the newspaper comic strips, too). Undeground and art comics were more often the work of an auteur, who produced the entire work. This opened up comics to more individual perspectives that strayed farther from the mainstream. Comics can powerfully represent personal experience or memories because it is like memory: it mixes words and images, it can readily present comparisons and contrasts, and it can show past, present, future, real and imagined on the same page.

I don’t plan on adding a lot of underground comics to my reading list, but I did enjoy Chute’s book. If someone is looking for an introduction to comics that are outside the mainstream and done well, Why Comics? is a good place to start.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

American Splendor

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Bob Batchelor

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Chute, Hilary. Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere. New York: Harper, 2017.

STEM Books

I’ve reviewed 39 STEM-related books (and counting).  STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  As you may have seen in the news, there is a push to improve STEM education, interest students in STEM fields, and grow the number of workers in these fields.  The idea is that these will be the skills needed by workers of the future.  If you’re a STEM educator or a student considering a career in STEM fields, you might like to take a look at some of these books.

I’ll confess that I’m not an educator, but I think most of these books will be accessible to high school and college students, and a few to middle school students.  The list is also a reflection of my career and interests in engineering, public health, policy, and history.  Even with these biases, I think it is a good list for someone looking for STEM-related books.

How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty

I was fascinated by robots as a kid.  I enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov’s robot stories.  I longed for the Omnibot 2000 in the Sears Wishbook.

Robots have come a long way.  In How to Build an Android, David F. Dufty describes the short strange life of a very complex robot made to look and talk like science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  The robot had a very sophisticated and lifelike head and complex artificial intelligence.  As with most complex things, it was the work of many people who had to solve a lot of problems.

If you’re interested in robotics, this is an interesting nontechnical book.  In addition, you’ll get introduced to some freaky sci-fi.  You may even get as (somewhat) legitimate reason to use the word “Dickhead” (capitalized, it refers to a fan of PKD, so don’t go using it on anyone).

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

The Interstate highway system in the United States is one of the most enormous structures built.  Some of the prospective STEM students who read this may actually be younger than the Intestate system, though in some sense it is never complete because it needs constant repair and maintenance.  The Interstates were completed in the 1990s, but the Federal-Aid Highways go back to 1916.

Earl Swift wrote an accessible history of the Interstates in The Big Roads.  If you interested in automobiles or transportation, it’s a good read.

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Deborah Cadbury describes seven wonders of engineering in Dreams of Iron and Steel.  It covers almost a century of history, but many of the events are concentrated in the Victorian Era.  That was a time of great technological innovation.

Though the book is history, many of the structures still stand.  Railways, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Suez and Panama Canals, and Hoover Dam stand testament to an age of big engineering.

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Though the memory of Professor Wragg’s sneer prompts me to not make this confession, part of my interest in science and technology came from comic books.  Iron Man was cool.  Spider-Man’s web shooters were very cool.  Superhero comics are full of fantasy, admittedly, but the strange, unrealistic science and technology they depict have inspired many to study STEM in reality.

Physicist John Kakalios uses examples from comic books to explore real physics in The Physics of Supeheroes.  Sometimes comics get there science right.  Even when they get it wrong, it can be instructive.  If you know what people are talking about when they refer to the “New 52,” you may find this book to be a great introduction to physics.

1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics by David Acheson

Here is another confession: I’m not especially interested in math.  I endured a lot of math classes to study engineering.  Reading David Acheson’s 1089 and All That did not require such endurance.  For one reason, it is a short book.  For another, Acheson doesn’t expect his readers to be mathematicians; it is enough to follow the outline of the math he discusses.

I recommend this book because so many people have a fear of math.  1089 can be followed by many high school students and older folks with math phobias.  Just take a deep breath, relax, and follow along as well as you can.  You’ll see that math can be interesting, useful, and even beautiful in a way.

The Brooklyn Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t be Built by Judith St. George

Judith St. George’s The Brooklyn Bridge is a short history of and iconic bridge.  Written for the bridge’s 100^th anniversary, it is also the story of the engineers who sacrificed life and health to see it completed: John Roebling and his son Washington.  John Roebling was a German immigrant who built many suspension bridges and owed a wire-making business.  He gave his son and extraordinary education in bridge engineering for the time, and before beginning work on the Brooklyn Bridge he served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Why should a cutting-edge STEM student read about a bridge that is almost 130 years old?  It’s because we still use and rely on very successful, centuries old technologies.  Improving and rebuilding our infrastructure will be an important part of our economy.  As recently as 2010, New York City and the federal government committed $500 million to repair and repaint the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

STEM lumps together science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Is there a difference between science and engineering?  Is it important?

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history and author of The Essential Engineer, believes there is an important difference.  At heart, science is about increasing knowledge.  Engineering is about invention.  Of course, new knowledge makes new invention possible.  Just as often, though, engineering runs ahead of science.  Sometimes science didn’t advance until someone invented the instruments to conduct new observations and experiments.  The invention of the microscope made possible the science of microbiology.  Steam engines were built and greatly improved before we had a modern scientific understanding of thermodynamics.  In fact, thermodynamics was to a large extent born out of desire to understand steam engines. In this sense, it is an engineering science (study of manmade things) as much as a natural science (study of natural things) or branch of physics.

Petroski’s focus in the book is the importance of engineering to policymaking, where it is often overshadowed by science.  Policy, science, and engineering play off of each other a lot.  Most of my career as an engineer has been related to government, policy, and regulatory compliance.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Ghost Map by science writer Steven Johnson is the story of the birth of epidemiology.  Epidemiology is a medical science that uses statistics to help us understand how diseases operate in a population.  Using various statistical and geographic tools, long before we had computers and GIS, physician John Snow demonstrated that cholera, once a recurring plague that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people in some outbreaks, was a waterborne disease.  This understanding, initially met with much skepticism, allowed officials to intervene to prevent the spread of the disease.  For those who say of their math classes, “I’ll never us this,” here is a case where math (and science and policy) were used to make a great difference.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

It is not much publicized today that the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 had a partly scientific mission.  Captains Lewis and Clark were charges with bringing back samples of the flora, fauna, and culture of the western territories.  It was also hoped that they would find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.  In Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose writes about the scientific mission as well as the policy, diplomacy, and commercial hopes the expedition carried.

Of course, what attracts most people to the Lewis and Clark expedition is that it was a great adventure.  There is a place in STEM fields for thoughtful adventurers and explorers. 

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson

A list like this deserves something strange, creepy, and more fun than you care to admit.  Right now, thousands of very young future STEM workers are catching bugs and snakes, breaking their toys to see what is inside, or staring into space with a weird expression of vacancy and concentration.

Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive is not a morbid book.  It is sometimes humorous, especially in consideration of topic.  From a STEM point of view, Bondeson shows how knowledge accumulates over time.  The fears and activities of our forefathers may seem strange to us, but they sometimes made sense in light of what they knew.  Buried Alive doesn’t simply play off our fascination with the grotesque and death, though the book might not have been written if we lacked that fascination, I think it reminds us to approach our ancestors with a touch of grace and humility.  Maybe our progeny will show us the same courtesy.

If you’re looking for something for a younger student, check out this post→ from Joanne Loves Science or these recommendations→ from STEM Friday.  By the way, I also write about engineering, infrastructure and the environment at Infrastructure Watch.

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