Word: chapterful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Handlin calls Gore Vidal's Burr and 1876 "inventions that disguised the poisonous portrayal of the early Republic in a fantastic tale of corruption, greed and sex." In a chapter entitled "The Diet of a Ravenous Public," Handlin rips the 'factional' historians to shreds. He assails Ragtime, calling "racial prejudice the crutch on which the book limps along," and renders equal treatment to critics that lapped...
Also entertaining are two short portraits, one of Albert Einstein, the other of Robert Goddard. Broca's Brain was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's birth, and the chapter Sagan devotes to him is reflective of the event, brimming with amusing anecdotes and quotes. The portrait of Goddard glows with Sagan's adulation of the great eccentric and pioneer. If there's any problem with these two portraits, in fact, it's that they're almost oo good--you wish you were reading a book by one of the two, instead of just a chapter about...
...line with this, Sagan's watchword is a citation from Bertrand Russell: "William James used to preach the will to doubt." This is, of course, a sound scientific viewpoint. What's awry in Broca's Brain is that Segan doesn't practice this, save for one chapter. His essay on Emmanuel Velikovsky takes a once popular but porous theory explaining a series of converging mythological catastrophes and subjects it to an exacting analysis. This piece, three times as long as any other, is the most interesting, the most developed, and certainly the most scientifically responsible in the book...
...Cosmic Connection, treats this exclusively. When scientists examining the samples brought back to earth by Apollo found no signs of life, Sagan proclaimed to their collective infuriation that the moon was "dull." This polemic grates in the course of Broca's Brain. It pops up in almost every chapter, tied tortuously to whichever theme is central at the time. Sagan ought to have called his first book "Why I Think There's Life on Other Planets" and been done with it. Instead, he has embellished his thesis a bit, disguised the central theme, and called it Broca's Brain...
...effort to revive interest. But in blundering as he does. Sagan suffocates his own cause. "Science," he writes, "is not a body of knowledge, but a way of looking at the world." Ironically, while Sagan touches dramatically on this body of knowledge, he never approaches, save in the lonely chapter on Velikovsky, that elusive point of view