- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Counterpoint Press; New edition edition (Sep 27 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1582431019
- ISBN-13: 978-1582431017
- Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 12.8 x 1.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 254 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#891,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Books > History > Ancient > Prehistory
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Edmund Blair Bolles is investigating a mystery: human creativity. Garbage in, garbage out is the rule for even the most intelligent machines; but with human minds, the rules change. Sometimes the rule is as true for us as for any computer, but every once in a while it's Ignorance in, insight out.
The example Bolles looks at is the Ice Age. Nowadays it's familiar to every schoolchild, but this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of just how wild an idea it once was. Earth-girdling floods seemed both reasonable and biblical, volcanoes unusual but not unknown. But a mile-thick sheet of ice covering much of the North Temperate Zone only 20,000 years ago was beyond anyone's experience or imagination.
The professor and the politician of Bolles's title are Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell, two of the most famous geologists of the 19th century. The unusual character in Bolles's story is the poet: Elisha Kent Kane. To call Kane a poet is both over- and understatement: he was a celebrity, a romantic, a self-promoter, a mediocre explorer, and a particularly poor leader of men. He was also a dreamer who tried to find the lost Franklin expedition, and found the far north very different from his (or anyone else's) expectations: "dreams in, nightmares out." Yet it was Kane's bestselling book about his travels that brought the reality of great ice into the minds of laypeople and scientists alike: writes Bolles, "He is the one who made the Ice Age imaginable." --Mary Ellen Curtin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This is an entertaining, often irreverent, history of the scientific discovery of the Ice Age. Bolles is fascinated by the way in which scientific knowledge advances. He challenges the notion that it proceeds in a rational and orderly manner, always building on previous knowledge. People, he claims, "learn unsuspected things, pulling knowledge, like rabbits, from empty hats," and often, convincing scientists of a new idea is more a matter of politics than of science. As an example of this theory, he weaves together the biographies of three important players in the great Ice Age debate. Bolles focuses on Louis Agassiz, the naturalist who first theorized the Ice Age in 1837, but was unable to persuade the scientific community to accept his findings for almost 20 years. Second is Elisha Kent Kane, an adventurer and poet whose report on his journey to the north of Greenland in the 1850s provided the popular imagination with the vision of immense seas of ice at the Pole pouring great rivers of ice into the Atlantic and Greenland seas. Finally, Bolles writes of Charles Lyell, the great Scottish geologist whose book The Principles of Geology ignored the possibility that glaciers were capable of changing the earth's surface, and who resisted the notion of the Ice Age for many years after Agassiz had theorized about it. A master politician among his colleagues, once he was convinced of the theory, it became more widely accepted. Bolles claims that it was only the interaction among these three individuals, and many others who are mentioned in passing, that led to a lasting new understanding of the world in which we live. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ice Finders has merit, with some reservations,
By Paul Grindrod (Salt Lake City, UT USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Paperback)
The history of science and the origins of our contemporary biases are so rarely explored that it was a pleasure to discover Bolles' The Ice Finders. It is quite entertaining in its exposition of the lives of three individuals and their separate, but intertwined, paths to the "discovery" of the Ice Age theory. It is a highly readable, non-technical book, with enough information to nudge someone with a greater interest towards more detailed, sophisticated reading, much like a good magazine article might do. There is at least one startling factual error that should be addressed, however. In a brief passage, the author introduces a supporting figure, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, patron of Louis Agassiz and a well-known naturalist in his own right. Bonaparte is erroneously identified as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's brother. Charles-Lucien was Napoleon's nephew. Although seemingly a minor point, Charles-Lucien is well-known enough that basic research and fact-checking should have caught the error (for further reference see Patricia T. Stroud's excellent and thorough The Emperor of Nature). It made me wonder whether any of the other facts Bolles musters, and with which I am not as familiar, are also wrong. With that in mind, I would still recommend the book for a novel perspective on how scientific minds work, and for a glimpse into the lives of three fascinating individuals.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great reading.,
By
This review is from: The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Paperback)
A very good read but suffers - in my opinion - from a lack of more detailed maps. A few plates would have livened it up somewhat as well. It parallels the "discovery" of continental drift a hundred years later.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Ice Finders,
By Wildness (Colorado Plateau) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Paperback)
This is a wonderful little book about three individuals deeply involved in the exploration and discovery of the earth and it's origins during the 19th century - Louis Agassiz a Swiss Professor and politician; Elsisha Kent Kane, who spent two years trapped in the ice of Greenland and published "Arctic Exporations," his account of the ordeal; and Charles Lyell, a Scottish Geologist.Bolles interweaves each figure's story and experiences as they work their way toward the discovery and acceptance of the previous Ice Ages and how they explain many argued about features of earth, such as erractic boulders and glacial moraines - many of which were accepted as the outcome of biblical events. And these primary explainations were a major hurdle to our ever-expanding understand of the earth, it's origins as ours. The names of these three individuals will probably be familar to any reader of Arctic Exploration, Discovery and History.
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