Living Science Books for the 20th Century: Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and an award winning author who has written a number of books based on the case studies of some of his patients. Uncle Tungsten takes a different tack in that it is a memoir of Sacks's boyhood in England: his eccentric, scientific family and Jewish upbringing, experiences of World War II, and his boyhood infatuation with chemistry.

The book is not only a memoir of a life but it interweaves the history of chemistry and pertinent anecdotes in such a seamless narrative that even those with a limited knowledge of chemistry (like me) can follow. Some of the content went above my head in places but I still managed to enjoy and appreciate his writing. In fact about a month ago we had a trip to Questacon, our National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra, and I spent most of the time in the chemistry section. It all had a context for me after reading Uncle Tungsten.

 
Some of the best features of this book:

* The author filled his story with a boyish enthusiasm. He obviously possessed a mania for chemistry for a period of time when he was younger, but I got the impression it never really left him even though his life took a different direction later on.

*  The number of books the author quoted or mentioned he'd read when he was growing up is fascinating, as is the abundance of footnotes scattered throughout. Literature, science fantasy, biography and history books are referred to. I love it when authors do this. It gives me more of a glimpse into the author's personality and supplies me with ideas for my own reading.
One book he read as a ten year old was Eve Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie. I was reading this at the same time as I was reading Uncle Tungsten and thoroughly enjoyed all the connections.

* The historical context. At the outbreak of WWII, when Oliver was six years old, he was evacuated from his home in London to a boarding schooling in the Midlands where he remained for four years. He wrote that it was dehumanising, with beatings, starving and torment and that he was psychologically scarred. He returned to London in 1943 when his parents realised he was 'close to the edge.' How many children during those times suffered in similar ways?

* Uncle Tungsten was the nickname of Sack's Uncle Dave on his mother's side (his factory produced light bulbs using tungsten filament). His whole extended family had scientific inclinations but Uncle Dave was a great encouragement to his nephew in all things regarding metals and provided him with practical opportunities for satisfying his curiosity. My husband had a similar experience with his own uncle who loves gadgets and is always coming up with nifty little inventions. It was his enthusiasm for electronics that inspired my husband to go into electrical engineering.

I'm adding this book to our 20th Century plans for Ambleside Online Year 11. Just so you are a aware, there are a couple of places in the book that contain fairly overt references to adolescent awareness of physical change and maturation (Chapter 22, for instance). Also his family members were interesting and sometimes bordered on the bizarre:

My mother's practice had moved, sometime in the 1930's from general surgery to gynaecology and obstetrics...she would occasionally being back malformed foetuses to the house...
...Some of these had been stillborn, others she and the matron had quietly drowned at birth ("like a kitten," she once said), feeling that if they lived, no conscious or mental life would ever be possible for them. Eager that I should learn about anatomy and medicine, she dissected several of these for me, and then insisted, though I was only eleven, that I dissect them myself. She never perceived, I think, how distressed I became...

Personally, I'd save the book for an older student unless I was reading it aloud. It is a wonderful narrative and fits in well with the time period of AO Year 11 and I'm happy to include it there and discuss these areas as they come up.

Living Science Books for the 20th Century: Madame Curie by Eve Curie

This biography of Marie Curie (1867-1934) published in 1937, was written by her daughter, Eve.
I started reading it about two years ago and found it a little slow going at first, but about a third of the way through the book, Marie (Manya) Sklodovski met Pierre Curie, her future husband, and I really began to enjoy it.





In 1867, Manya Sklodovski was born into a Polish family, in what was then Russian Poland. The Polish people had rebelled against their oppressors in the past and had been severely punished. Now the battleground had changed and it was the intellectuals, the artists and the teachers who carried on the resistance.
Manya spent her early school years in clandestine Polish history lessons, interrupted at times by the despised Russian school inspectors. She was to retain her nationalist fervour all her life.
By the time Manya was 10 years of age, she had lost a sister to typhus and her mother, a devout Catholic, to tuberculosis. Although Manya had been a Christian by upbringing, her mother's death had shaken her faith, and by the time she was seventeen years old it had evaporated completely.

From the devoutness of her childhood there remained only vague aspirations, the unconscious wish to adore something very high and great.

Marie's dream was to study science at the Sorbonne in France but she had to spend six years as a governess before she was financially able to achieve her dream in 1891.

The part of the book I enjoyed most was the account of the dedication shown by the Curies in their search to discover Radium. Throughout years of hardship, four of them spent working in a dilapidated shed, they continued to be fascinated by a material which resisted their efforts to divulge its secrets, until finally they were able to announce the existence of Radium.

What does it matter to Science if her passionate servants are rich or poor, happy or unhappy, healthy or ill? She knows that they have been created to seek and to discover, and that they will seek and find until their strength dries up at its source.

Fame came upon the couple and they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Henri Becquerel, but the attention they received after this 'dispossessed them of the only treasures they wished to preserve: meditation and silence.'
Fame leaps upon the great, hangs its full weight upon them, attempts to arrest their development.

Pierre Curie was killed in a tragic accident in 1906 leaving his devastated wife to continue alone. By this stage they had two young daughters, Irene (later a famous scientist herself) and Eve, the writer of this biography.
In 1911 Marie was awarded her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry (she was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize and the only person to receive it twice). Around this time she was involved in a personal scandal which the French press capitalised on, calling her "the foreign woman."
In her book, Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity, Naomi Pasachoff writes that Marie received a letter from a committee member of the Academy of Sciences advising her to:

...decline the prize until it had been proven that the accusations...were false. In a dignified response she indicated why she would not accept his advice: it was for her science, not her personal conduct, that had been deemed worthy of honor. The value of her discovery should in no way be diminished by rumours about her private life. Therefore she would accept the prize.



In 1914, at the outbreak of WWI, Marie used her scientific knowledge to put the first 'radiological car,' into action. These mobile X-ray stations were later nicknamed 'little Curies.'
As well as the twenty cars she equipped for this purpose, she also installed two hundred radiological rooms which were said to have treated over a million wounded men!

Some thoughts:

* The book was originally written in French and translated into English by Vincent Sheean. In some places it seems to have suffered a little in the translation but otherwise it is beautifully written.

* Eve Curie wrote a very loving and moving account of her mother's life but it did tend to depict her as almost saint-like. She had witnessed the vilification of her mother by French journalists and her rejection by the scientific authorities on the basis of race and gender, and I think it understandable that Eve Curie had no desire to revisit those times.
She summed up her view in these words:

Great men have always been subjected to the attacks of those who long to discover imperfect human creatures beneath the armour of genius. Without the terrible magnet of renown which had drawn sympathies and hatred upon her, Marie Curie would never have been criticised or calumniated. She now had another reason for hating fame.

* The Curies refused to patent their discoveries, which would have benefitted them financially and made their work much easier. They wanted others to be free to use the knowledge they had obtained.

* Both scientists were indifferent to the dangers of radioactivity. Pierre once exposed his arm to the effects of radium in order to describe and report on its actions. Marie died of aplastic anaemia when she was sixty-seven years old.

... the radiation of radium was "contagious" - contagious like a persistent scent or a disease.

This contagion, which interfered with the results of precise experiments, was a daily enemy to Pierre and Marie Curie.

A hundred years later, the Curie's notebooks are still radioactive.

 ...the radio elements formed strange and cruel families in which each member was created by the spontaneous transformation of the mother substance: radium was a "descendant" of uranium, polonium a descendant of radium.

I'll be including this book in our Year 11 Ambleside Online plans but it would be suitable for younger students, around 14 years of age and up (but read Annie Kate's comment below).
(Caveat: Chapter XVII mentions a period when the Curies took a 'strange path' and explored 'this dangerous region.' This referred to their involvement in spiritism which Marie abandoned after a few years but it doesn't go into much detail)
The book has been reprinted but is also available free online.

For younger readers:

The Story of Madame Curie by Alice Thorne is a Signature Biography which has made use of some of the dialogue from Eve Curie's book. It would fit well chronologically in Term 3 of Ambleside Online Year 5.

 

Coming Late to Ambleside Online - some thoughts on the high school years

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
'Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
'Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I wanted to write about our experience in navigating the high school years for those who are late to start Ambleside Online (AO) and who find themselves having to combine or skip years.
By the time we'd made the move to the AO curriculum, we had already graduated three students who have since completed their respective degrees. I was confident enough just looking at the AO curriculum that it would work for us even though we were late starters. I've seen enough plans and curriculum to know that whatever you do, something will get missed. We can't cover everything but if our intent is to have children who know how to educate themselves, ultimately they will fill in any gaps they think they need to. Isn't that what we all do as adults?

Some background:

When we started using AO as our curriculum four years ago, I placed two boys (15 & 17 years) in Year 8 and my 7 year old daughter in Year 1.
For Benj, who was 12 years of age at the time, I did something a little different - a mix of some AO Year 5 books and selections from previous years that he hadn't read but I wanted him to. (eg. Age of Fable, Madame How & Lady Why - he followed the old one year schedule for this.)
This allowed him to carry on independently so I could focus on my main concern at the time, my soon to be 17 year old (I wrote about him here).
When Benj was 13 years old, I started him in Year 6 because I thought he'd enjoy the books, especially some of the science selections (eg. The Sea Around Us) and because he wanted to do some Modern History. I beefed things up a bit in places, added in some extra Modern History at his request, and his Maths kept pace with his age/grade level.
After completing that year, I did think about jumping him ahead to his actual 'school year' which would have been Year 9, but Ambleside's Years 7 & 8 are two of my favourite places in the AO curriculum. I just think they are exceptional and worthy of inclusion whether a student is 12, 14 or 17 and I didn't want him to miss either of those years.

So, here we are coming to the end of AO Year 8 (his 'official' grade 10) with two years of home education to go. We've been thinking and praying about what to do now, looking at our son's inclinations and talking with him about different options.
He definitely wants to go to university and is interested in an engineering or maths related field, which is not surprising as Dad is an electrical engineer.
He is also very people oriented, musical and creative, and I keep thinking that these affinities may lead to a different scenario - what that could be I don't know, but I don't want to close any doors prematurely.
Four of our five children who have graduated so far made their final decision on a vocational pathway close to the end of their last year of home education and one of them completely surprised us with the direction she took.

We teach our children at home all the way through to a Year 12 equivalent. This means we don't go through the normal channels for school leavers entering tertiary study in Australia, which is via the Higher School Certificate. (See here if you're interested in how we've navigated this previously). So we have to factor this into the plans for our children's final years of home education.

The minimal requirements for most of the universities we'd be looking at would be:

SAT 1 plus 2 Open University units
or
4 Open University units (the equivalent of 1 Semester)

We'll start off with one unit, which will probably be related to Physics or Maths, and see what the workload is like before adding any more - while at the same time continuing with AO.
Benj would like to study the time period of the two World Wars in his final years of home education and this coincides with AO Year 11.
Some of the ladies on the AO Forum have mentioned how full that year is and how much they couldn't fit in and had to let go. My thoughts at this stage are to spread Year 11 out because it is such a huge area to cover and there are so many good books and other resources available. I also think this is a good time to study Australian politics in more depth.
Year 12 books focuses more on the thoughts and ideas which have influenced history and made Today what it is. It's an important area to consider before entering the university environment and I'd like to add selected books from that year.

University preparation (ie units via Open University) would be spaced out over two years and would be used for credit towards a degree. SAT preparation is mostly timed essays, wide reading and continuing with Maths.

Our school year starts in January and Benj will be finished Year 8 in August of this year and I'm thinking that the rest of the year will be a continuation of the areas of work unrelated to specific AO years eg. Science, Maths, Shakespeare, Picture Study, Plutarch etc with perhaps a biography or two from Years 9 & 10. Benj really likes Churchill's History of the English Speaking People series and would like to finish 'The Age of Revolution' and 'The Great Democracies' before we start Year 11 next year, which would require him to read about two chapters per week.

Additional thoughts:

I've heard many comments over the years about the American content of AO being a stumbling block to Aussie users, more so in the high school years but the only major challenges for us have been Years 4, 9 and 10 where American History (and Government in the high school years) are a focal point.

The AO Forum receives many questions regarding placement for late comers to the curriculum. While it's an important question, and it is helpful to get advice, I don't think there is a right or wrong answer, unless you totally underestimate or overestimate your child's abilities.
Coming in late can trigger panic and a cramming mentality if we're not careful. This video by Andrew Kern helps address this temptation (it's also very encouraging generally & I highly recommend watching it!)

Starting at a lower year than 'grade level' isn't a second-rate choice you should only consider if your child is struggling. It isn't second-rate to treat a child as a unique individual.

I think the bottom line is that a child is challenged but not overwhelmed. For children in the high school years, my concern is that they keep their love of learning and become self-learners, self-motivated and responsible.
Placing Benj in a year that was 'lower' than his official grade level hasn't mattered in the long run. It had enough challenge with a few additions in place and also the added benefit of allowing him to gain more independence because I knew he could handle the content of his books. He was able to go ahead and order his day around what we did as a group, taking responsibility for managing himself.

I knew he could handle his actual grade level but there were other factors that influenced the decision to start where we did with all four children (one being that I would have had to almost re-write Year 9, which I did later on, and Year 10. I didn't have the time or opportunity to do this properly back then.
Subjects such as Maths, were separate from their AO years, and continued on without being affected.
I have no qualms about skipping years 9 & 10 and giving Benj the opportunity of getting stuck into a time period he's really interested in. He has enjoyed the AO years he has done and while I think I could have chosen a couple of different scenarios which would have worked just as well, the choice was prayerfully done and in the bigger scheme of things it hasn't mattered.

“In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps”

Prov. 16:9

I've been reviewing books on History, Literature and Science related to the 20th Century and will post about them and our two year schedule at a later date.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton's first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, was published in 1904 when he was thirty years old.

It is a futuristic humorous fantasy set in London but it retains the appearance and atmosphere of the London of Chesterton's time. There are no mind boggling inventions or dystopian type scenarios which you'd expect to find in novels of this sort, but nevertheless, it is bizarre.

As I experienced with one of his later novels, The Man Who was Thursday, what was going on or where the story was heading was a mystery to me. Unlike The Man Who was Thursday, this book had an underlying philosophical theme which echoed Chesterton's concern that larger nations were gobbling up smaller nations and that 'Progressives' were intent on destroying independence and patriotism. 

In the introduction to the Dover Edition of this book, there is a quote on how Chesterton came to write this novel after he'd walked down a street in Notting Hill:

In all these world-shaking events this little bit of Notting Hill was of no account. And that seemed idiotic. For to this bit of Notting Hill the bit was of supreme importance.

In the same instant I saw that my Progressive friends were more bent than any on destroying Notting Hill...When they said, 'Every day in every way better and better,' they meant every day bigger and bigger - in every way.

I saw that these Progressives were obsessed with the idea of dilation. There is such a thing as a dilated heart, which I am told is a disease. There is such a thing as a dilated, or swelled, head. But the typical case of a creature who dilated equally all round is that of the imperially-minded frog who wanted to be a bull, and dilated until he burst...

Chesterton's futuristic London was ruled by a despot. The hereditary monarchy had been abandoned and replaced by a system in which the King of England was picked like a juryman from an alphabetical list.

As the story opens, the kingship is bestowed upon Auberon Quinn, a man who cares for nothing but a joke and who brings his sense of the ridiculous into the affairs of government.

One day the King decided to go and mingle with the people, and as he was passing through Notting Hill, a young boy assailed him with a wooden sword and declared, "I'm the King of the Castle."

The King, who was fond of children, praised the boy's patriotism and presented him with half a crown 'for the war-chest of Notting Hill.'

Inspired by his meeting with the boy, he hurried home to revive the mediaeval Charter of the Cities and issued a proclamation for the restoration of the ancient fortified cities (boroughs). He supplied each of them with a banner, a coat of arms and appointed a rotation system to select a Provost to preside over each area.

Ten years later, as the King continued to enjoy his joke, some of the Provosts appeared before him with a complaint regarding the Provost of Notting Hill, Adam Wayne, who refused to let a road be built through his borough. In the middle of their audience with the King, Adam Wayne dramatically entered and proved to be none other than the boy who had assailed the King years before, now a young man of nineteen. Unbeknown to the King, Wayne had taken the 'joke' seriously and was ready to defend Notting Hill to the death.

What follows are a series of battles, bizarre scenes, heroics, humour and mad antics.

One part I really enjoyed was when the King decided to become a war correspondent:

The argent exterior...(I am losing the style. I should have said 'Curving with a whisk' instead of merely 'Curving.' ...I cannot keep this up. War is too rapid for this style of writing. Please ask office-boy to insert mots justes.) 

The last chapter uncovers a different philosophical aspect of the book from the obvious 'big nation eats little nation' theme: the concept that the love of a fanatic and the laughter of a satirist are but two lobes of a healthy brain. Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne were two lobes of the same brain cloven in two, which in their separate states produced antagonism and madness.

My teenaged children have enjoyed G.K. Chesterton's novels from around the age of 15 years and up. The combination of bizarre fantasy, heroic action and humour appeals to them and although his writing can be a challenge to get through, it is unique and his absurd humour and sharp wit are compelling draw cards.

The book is listed in Ambleside Online's Year 11 History (20th Century) as an optional supplement as it looks at the clash between imperialism and nationalism and is available free online here.