BOOK REVIEW: THE CANON: A WHIRLIGIG TOUR OF THE BEAUTIFUL BASICS OF SCIENCE
Sunday, August 9, 2009 at 12:58PM | Cara West 
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
Written By:Natalie Angier
Release Date: May 2007
Quick Review:
The singular world that is math and science is one which deserves much more study that is currently afforded. There are far too many basic concepts that fill our daily lives - How does a table stay together? Why do we become more energetic with sugar? - that we simply do not understand, thus depriving ourselves of experiencing the universe fully. These are the points I gleaned from Angier. The Canon commands the reader's attention not in order to push its own ideas or even agenda, but rather to provide readers with an impetus to think for themselves and create their own desire to discover.
Long Review:
Reflection's on Natalie Angier's The Canon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) in the context of Emerson's "The American Scholar."
Today I re-read an old essay by Emerson on the American scholar, and reflected on its naivety in concern to a book I just purchased, which though published first a couple years ago, has only recently come to the general public's (and this critic's) attention. In his work "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us that our time is of the utmost importance for our own thought development, and that often reading others' writings is time "wasted."(TAS - Emerson) While there exist instances wherein this might be true, and most reading perhaps should often be reserved for "idle times," this is not true in the case of Natalie Angier's The Canon.
Opening up The Canon from its slick bookstore plastic-wrap last week, I was doing exactly what Emerson warns against: reading what others had recommended in the middle of a sun-filled day, reading another person's thoughts in order to not have to come up with any of my own. However, upon diving into Angier's pretense-lacking passages, a realization occurred that The Canon is not just another "backward" (TAS - Emerson) looking book.
The singular world that is math and science is one which deserves much more study that it is currently afforded. There far too many basic concepts that fill our daily lives - How does a table stay together? Why do we become more energetic with sugar? - that we simply do not understand, thus depriving ourselves of experiencing the universe fully. These are the points I gleaned from Angier. The Canon commands the reader's attention not in order to push its own ideas or even agenda, but rather to provide readers with an impetus to think for themselves and create their own desire to discover. Focused on the need for more mathematics and science in everyday life, Angier's The Canon does not seek to influence; it seeks to inspire.
When Emerson wrote "The American Scholar," criticizing books as directing if not preventing creative thought, he seems to have forgotten that tied-up in everyday monotony, whether reading or not, man can do that to himself. Absorbing The Canon did not put blinders on my mind's eye; instead, it took them off and opened my mind to entirely new perspectives, sent me swirling into a curious and creative state. When Emerson eloquently writes "I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system," (TAS - Emerson) he neglects to mention that there are those books which do not displace the reader or transport them to another state-of-mind, that there are books which instead facilitate the expansion of the horizons of one's current mind.
In conclusion, Emerson was right to warn us against soaking in everything we read at the expense of not standing up to live ourselves, but wrong to suggest all books necessarily "pin" (TAS- Emerson) our mind's down. For in the example of Natalie Angier's The Canon, which I recently read, directly contradicted his suggestion: my mind was set free. In other words: you should read it.
SHARP OBJEX Rating: 4 out of 4
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar":http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/transcendentalism/emerson/american_scholar.html
Natalie Angier's The Canon, Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/Canon-Whirligig-Beautiful-Basics-Science/dp/0618242953
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