The Fevers of Reason
New and Selected Essays
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"America's most interesting and important essayist." —Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize–winning author of The Age of Insight
"[Gerald Weissmann] bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom." —Adam Gopnik
In this diverting collection of essays, Gerald Weissmann looks back on decades of a career spent working at the intersection of the arts and sciences. The Fevers of Reason features some of his best and most representative works, alongside eleven new essays never before published in book form. Masterfully drawing from an array of subject areas and time periods, he tackles everything from Ebola to Eisenhower, Zika to Zola, Darwin to Dawkins, showcasing his singular contribution to humanistic science writing.
Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 – July 10, 2019) was a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays; Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter: Pop Culture and Modern Science; Mortal and Immortal DNA: Science and the Lure of Myth; and Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weissmann (Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter), a physician and professor emeritus at New York University School of Medicine, has made his writing career exploring surprising convergence points between medical, scientific, political, and cultural history. In this uneven collection of essays some of them stimulating and others strained the selections are organized into sections that correspond to perennial themes in his writing, such as connections between the history of viruses and cultural phenomena; intellectual partnerships that yielded world-changing scientific innovations (e.g., Pierre and Marie Curie); and immigrants whose arrival in America changed the course of scientific thinking (e.g., Richard Dawkins). Weissmann's project is to show how science and culture aren't as distant as often thought, and the best of the essays are wonderfully stimulating and exciting in how they make this point. Others make flimsier connections for example, "Lupus and the Course of Empire," which makes the counterfactual claim that if the British royal family hadn't suffered from lupus in the 17th century, then the United States would have a national health service. Weissmann's confirmed admirers will be captivated anew, but newcomers may find the coincidences to which Weissmann is drawn more facile than illuminating.
